Another GOP Crack Shows on Immigrants

From the Washington Post today comes an excellent report on a developing split in the Republican party over the issue of illegal immigration. While the xenophobic wing of the GOP seek to crack down on all immigrants, legally in the US or otherwise, Bush and free market conservatives seeks to bring illegal immigration out of the shadows and acknowledge it's importance to the US economy.

Simply, by 2008 the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2008, the United States will have 154 million workers for 161 million jobs. Much of the shortfall will be in the very low paid job sectors that the countries 10 million plus undocumented immigrants usually enter. These jobs need to be done by someone.

However, the xenophobes aren't playing fair - turning dirty tricks campaigns against members of their own party and against Congress as a whole. At least one prominent Republican has already been on the receiving end of "throw bullshit and some of the stink will stick" tactics by members of his own party that are usually reserved for attacks on Democrats.

House Rules Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) got a jolt during his 2004 reelection campaign, when radio hosts in his outer Los Angeles district decided to make him a "political human sacrifice" for his immigration views, Dreier said, accusing him, among other things, of advocating Social Security benefits for illegal immigrants.

"I said to myself, nobody's going to believe I want to give Social Security checks to people who are here illegally," Dreier recalls. Then he polled voters and found that people not only believed the allegation but had resolved "to never vote for David Dreier again." He won with 54 percent of the vote, a lower proportion than previous years, and has since taken a prominent role in advocating the measures, although he also supports guest-worker programs.

Meanwhile, in a cynical move of the first water, House xenophobes by Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), tacked tough immigration restrictions onto an emergency spending bill to fund the Iraq war, in full knowledge that any politician voting against the funding bill will be a "traitor who does not support the troops" and committing political suicide.

However one stands on this issue, such dirty tricks leave a bad taste. The radically right xenophobes of the Republican party are trying to make their views mainstream by bullying, grandstanding, outright lies and crass manipulation of the process of government. As more moderate Republicans get a taste of the tactics their "colleagues" have habitually used on others, the split between the democratic right and those who cover authoritarianism and dictatorship by a thin veneer of pretense at democracy will only grow.

My advice to the GOP is expel the radical right, both religious authoritarian and dirty-trick totalitarian, from your party - let them go form their own politically extremist fringe group . If you do so, you may well find you lose an election or two but if you do not you face the very real danger of a backlash from true freedom-loving Americans which will consign your party to the backwaters and footnotes of history.