by Daniel T. Griswold

Daniel Griswold is associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He is author of the new Cato study, "Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States."

November 20, 2002

A common argument against immigration, and certainly the one that gives me the most pause, is that immigrants end up voting for liberal politicians and big government. The implication is that, if immigration continues unabated, the Republican party will be relegated to permanent minority status.

The argument sounds plausible. The largest single immigrant group is from Mexico, and Hispanics already vote about 2-1 for the Democratic party. If Mexican immigration is not restricted, today's Mexican workers could become tomorrow's Mexican-American voters, providing the margin of victory for liberal Democrats in future elections.

But the GOP's surprising gains in the November 5 election should give pause to immigration opponents. Following decades of "mass immigration" --to use their favorite buzz phrase -- the Republican party has seldom had it so good. Republicans today have gained political parity at every level. The party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of state legislative chambers and governors' mansions. If immigration is poison for the GOP, let's have another round on the house!

In his latest apocalyptic tome, The Death of the West, former Republican Pat Buchanan claimed that rising levels of immigration have killed the Reagan coalition. According to Buchanan, the Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed greater non-European immigration, "broke the GOP lock on the presidency." I wonder what country Buchanan has been living in. Of the nine presidential elections leading up to 1965, Republicans won only two; of the nine elections since, Republicans have won six. Buchanan himself spent $12 million in taxpayer funds as a presidential candidate in 2000 to spread his anti-immigration message and won less than 0.5 percent of the vote -- hardly a blueprint for political success.

In fact, 1965 was the nadir of Republican fortunes, not the heyday. Back then, Democrats not only owned the White House but commanded huge majorities in the House, Senate, and most state capitals. Not a single member of the Texas House delegation in 1965 was a Republican. And that was at a time when immigrant influence in American life was at low tide, when both the rate of immigration and the percentage of Americans who were foreign-born were far lower than today.

And speaking of Texas, for much of this year, otherwise politically conservative restrictionists seemed to almost relish the prospect that Republicans might actually lose a Senate seat that had been held by the party since John Tower first won in the 1960s. Even Republican Texas could be turning Democratic again, they warned, and all because of immigration. But when the dust settled on election night, Republican John Cornyn had won the Senate seat by a comfortable 55-43 margin, and Republican Rick Perry won the governor's race by an even wider 58-40 margin, defeating a Hispanic businessman who had outspent him almost 3 to 1. Texas Republicans scored a clean sweep of all statewide offices and won a majority in the state House for the first time since Reconstruction. As former Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson summed up after the election: "Texas is simply a Republican state." Texas is also a Hispanic immigrant state, with a higher percentage of Hispanic voters than even California.

So why have the restrictionists' warnings of political doom for the GOP proven so wrong?

First, the road from immigrant worker to citizen voter is long and uncertain, especially for Mexican migrants. Mexican immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate of any major immigrant group. With home so close, many of them plan to return eventually, and traditionally many of them have done just that. They see America as a land of opportunity that allows them and their families back home to solve temporary economic problems. They come here for a paycheck, not a voting card. While Hispanics made up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population in the 2000 Census, they were only about 7 percent of voters nationwide in the 2000 election. So the nominally large number of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. workforce has not translated into a large number of new voters, and probably won't for the foreseeable future.

Second, Hispanics are "up for grabs" politically. Despite their Democratic leanings, they are not monolithic the way black voters unfortunately are. At the presidential level, for example, the share of Hispanics voting Republican swelled from 21 percent for Bob Dole in 1996 to 35 percent for George Bush in 2000. And a recent poll showed that Hispanics would vote 50-35 for Bush over Democrat Al Gore if an election were held today. Many Hispanics are socially conservative with a strong work ethic -- Hispanic men have a high labor-force participation rate -- and propensity for home ownership. A sympathetic Republican candidate who respects immigrants can woo a sizeable chunk of Hispanics along with other swing voters.

Third, Republicans have far more to gain from winning a bigger share of the current Hispanic vote than they do from slowing its growth in the future. Let's say the normal Hispanic split in presidential and congressional voting is 30 percent for GOP candidates, 70 percent for Democratic candidates. Assume that the GOP, through a "pro-Hispanic" message that includes a more friendly approach to immigration, could increase its share to 40 percent. That would be a swing of 20 percentage points among the seven million Hispanic voters (a ten-point GOP gain and a ten-point Democratic loss), or an improvement of 1.4 million votes.

The potential downside for the GOP would be more Mexican immigration. Let's say the more friendly approach to immigration resulted in an additional 100,000 Mexicans immigrating permanently each year, and that those extra immigrants eventually voted like other Hispanics. The Democrats would carry the new voters by a 60-40 margin, or an extra 20,000 votes every year for their candidates (60,000 new votes for the Democrats vs. 40,000 more for the GOP).

Under those assumptions, the tradeoff for the GOP in adopting a more-friendly stance on Mexican immigration would be an immediate windfall of 1.4 million votes for their candidates, at the expense of an extra 20,000 votes for the Democrats each year because of higher immigration. In other words, it would take 70 years for the faster growth of the Hispanic electorate to cancel out the immediate gains for the GOP -- an eternity in politics.

Conservatives who advocate drastic cuts in immigration for the sake of the Republican party are courting a California-style disaster. A Republican platform of scapegoating Mexican immigrants will alienate droves of potential Hispanic voters from the party, just as Pete Wilson's gambit did in California in 1994. Moreover, it will probably not succeed in actually stemming the flow of Mexican immigrants into the United States. The U.S. government has tried since the mid 1980s to restrict Mexican migration, but has failed because of our long land border and because of the continuing American demand for Mexican workers.

If Republican party leaders were to launch an all-out political campaign against Mexican immigration -- as advocated by Pat Buchanan, Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and the authors at the Center for Immigration Studies -- Hispanic support for the GOP would shrivel, and the immigrants would probably come anyway. Meanwhile, because of higher birthrates, Hispanics already living legally in the United States would continue to grow as a proportion of the population. Thus the political question facing conservatives may be no more complicated than this: Will promoting free markets and limited government be easier if Republicans are winning 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote, or 20 percent?

Conservative Republicans face a clear choice when it comes to immigration politics. They can follow the lead of President Bush, who has sung the praises of immigrants and sought to create a more welcoming legal path to the United States for those seeking a better life through peaceful work. Or they can follow the likes of Pat Buchanan, Pete Wilson, and Tom Tancredo back into the political wilderness.

This piece appeared on National Review Online .