Bush Is Smart on the Border -- and the G.O.P. Isn't

By JOE KLEIN

In an outdoor press conference held across the street from the Capitol last week, Representative Tom Tancredo--the Colorado Republican who has made a name for himself, momentarily, by bashing illegal immigrants--pretended to be mystified by his more moderate Senate colleagues. "Who are you responding to?" he asked of them. "Nobody," he answered for them. None of the gazillions of citizen-patriots calling his office had expressed anything but dismay over the illegal aliens--a term that makes it sound as if the country were being invaded by Martians.

That was, of course, disingenuous. As Tancredo spoke, Capitol Hill was buzzing with busloads of people who had come to Washington to protest the punitive House legislation that Tancredo and his nativist Republican colleagues support. In fact, I had just spent some time with half a dozen Latino kids who had come from the suburbs of Chicago. "This issue has changed us," said Duoce Pani, a student at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Ill., who wants to be a nurse. "We were not very political before. Most of us are citizens. We were born here. But now we know we have to fight for others--for our grandparents, for some of our parents. They would be criminals if this law passed."

Pani and her busload of friends from St. Isidore's Catholic Church in Bloomingdale, Ill., may represent a significant moment in the history of American politics--another sign that the pendulum swing toward the right that began with the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights movement in the 1960s is ending. Lyndon Johnson famously predicted, after he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that the South would be lost to his party for a generation. It was an underestimation. Not only did the Republicans gain hegemony over the South, they also took most of the white, working-class voters in the North. Social issues--the three A's in the 1970s (acid, amnesty and abortion) and, later, the three G's (God, guns and gays)--cemented the shift.

There was some hope among Republican strategists, especially Karl Rove, that this formula might also work with the rapidly growing Latino vote and guarantee a G.O.P. majority in perpetuity. "Rove had a point. My people are very conservative on social values," says Congressman Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat. "We're family oriented, a lot of small-business owners. But the Republicans have blown that opportunity now. Even the Pentecostals are sending busloads to the protests. Spanish-language radio is announcing the vote on every amendment to the Senate immigration bill. You've got a generation of young Latino citizens whose first political impression is that Republicans are people who want to deport their parents."

Not all Republicans, of course. George W. Bush's position on immigration has been consistent and honorable, even when he was clawing his way toward the Republican nomination in 2000, facing conservative audiences who inevitably asked hostile questions about the Mexicans coming across the border. "They just want the same thing for their families as you want for yours," Bush would say--and his empathy paid off in the general elections, in which he won 35% of the Latino vote in 2000 and 40% in 2004. He stood by his principles again last week in his prime-time speech, promising to make a greater effort to protect the border while refusing to cave to conservative pressure against a pathway toward citizenship for the 12 million illegals already here. It can be argued that the position Bush took wasn't very courageous: vast majorities of Americans support it. About 65% favor either a guest-worker program or simple legalization of current illegals, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. But it is never easy going against your party's base. For a Democrat, the equivalent would be opposition to affirmative action.

There is a transcendent bit of karma here. The people in the Republican Party who are most vehemently opposed to accommodating illegal immigrants tend to be the very same sort of people who left the Democratic Party over civil rights and social issues. They are white, Southern and Western, suburban and rural, working class. Part of their concern, according to Pew director Andrew Kohut, is economic and legitimate--although only 30% of even the poorest voters believe their jobs are threatened by immigrants. But sheer know-nothing nativism, a traditional Republican tendency, has been bolstered by the new arrivals into the party. Indeed, the strongest feelings against immigrants tend to come from the places--red-state rural counties--where immigrants don't exist: 59% of voters in counties where immigrants make up less than 5% of the population believe that all illegals should be deported. That constituency is as ancient as the Republic, perennially exploited by unscrupulous politicians who are willing to play to their racial fears--the Democrats for a century after the Civil War, the Republicans ever since. Happily, the busload of politically committed kids from St. Isidore's, and thousands of others like them, may signal the end of all that. Even Tom Tancredo may soon figure out that the Senate majority and the moderates in the House are "responding to" the future.