Amnesty’s Bad Math
No good for the GOP.

By Steve Sailer, president of the Human Biodiversity Institute & adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute
August 20, 2001 12:40 p.m.

aul A. Gigot will soon take over running the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Because he will then be the most powerful man in my line of work — opinionating — it's probably not a wise career move for me to point out the flaws in his "Alien Notion: The Right Case for 'Amnesty'" column (WSJ, 8-17). In it, he tried to reassure worried Republicans that Vincente Fox and George W. Bush's still ill-defined amnesty plan for Mexican illegal immigrants is smart politics. The issue, however, is simply too crucial to the future of the Republican party for me to maintain a prudent silence.

Gigot begins by listing those who favors amnesty: "Business, labor, Catholic bishops and even the media all like the idea." Yet, he leaves out one other special interest that all for it: the Democratic party. Congressional Democrats have already met the president's bid, and raised it by offering to extend amnesty to non-Mexicans as well.

In the Uncle Remus version of the story, Br'er Fox and Br'er Bush would be implored by poor old Br'er Daschle and Br'er Gephardt to "Please don't throw us in the amnesty patch! No, not the amnesty patch!" Why has Bush's amnesty proposal been so much more enthusiastically greeted by Democrats than by Republicans?

What Gigot doesn't grasp is the difference between amnesty's short term and long term impact on the Republican party. The upside for Republicans in 2004 is negligible. The downside in a few decades is devastating.

In 2004, the Hispanic vote will be much smaller than Gigot imagines. He claimed, "Hispanics are gaining in overall voter share, from 5% in 1996 to 7% last year and an expected 9% in 2004." According to a biennial Census Bureau survey of 50,000 households reported by UPI on 7/24, however, Hispanics cast 4.7% of the total vote in 1996 and 5.4% in 2000. That projects to right around 6% in 2004.

Further, Bush's original amnesty plan ethnically discriminated against all non-Mexicans (at least until the Democrats trumped him on that issue, at which point he started making me-too noises). The Mexican-American vote will be almost totally irrelevant to Bush's reelection bid. Mexican Americans accounted for merely 3.0% of the vote in 2000. Worse for Bush, 72% of them resided in two states whose Electoral Votes almost certainly won't be in play in 2004: California and Texas. In the other 48 states, Mexican Americans accounted for the grand total of 1.1% of the vote.

In the long run, however, the impact on the GOP of adding more Hispanic voters will be dire. No Republican presidential candidate in four decades has won more than 40% of the Hispanic vote. The Republican-backed amnesty of 1986 did nothing to change that rule. In 2000, Bush spent a small fortune on Hispanic advertising, but picked up only 35%. If that's the natural long-run GOP share of the Latino vote, then every 100 new Hispanic voters Bush creates means that the Democrats gain 30 votes over the Republicans. This Bush/Gigot strategy resembles that of the proverbial business that loses 30 cents on every item it sells, but makes up for it on volume.

Gigot hopes that Bush's plan "could shake up those allegiances." But realignments only occur when the parties are in disagreement. Why should a Hispanic Democrat abandon his lifelong loyalty just because Bush wants to convert the Republicans into the redundant party on immigration?

Moreover, the classic question special interests ask politicians is, "What have you done for me lately?" When Hispanics finally become a sizable voting bloc in a few decades, they won't remember Bush's amnesty any more than they remember Reagan's amnesty.

Finally, Bush will simply alienate many Hispanics who vote Republican now because they don't like illegal immigration. In a Gallup poll in June, only one-third of Hispanics favored increased immigration. A full one-quarter wanted to cut immigration.

Hispanic voters have perfectly rational self-interested reasons to endorse raising immigration (to import more cheap labor for their businesses, to lessen the need to assimilate, to allow their siblings to come live with them, and to increase the size of Hispanic quotas and voting power). Yet, they also have perfectly rational reasons to want to keep their countrymen out (to prevent their wages from being undercut, to stop their second cousins from coming to live with them, and to make it easier for their children to assimilate). A third of Hispanics appear to find the first set of reasons compelling, but a quarter are more persuaded by the second. Why cast adrift the second group to try to outcompete the Democrats in pandering to the first group?

No, once you understand the difference between short term and long term, a more rational plan suggests itself. The time to act to cut immigration back to a more moderate level is now, before Hispanic voting power becomes important.

In the long term, fortunately, an immigration restriction would incline more Hispanics toward the Republican party. Gigot himself argues that Hispanics are like Italian Americans, who "become much more Republican as they rise in income and assimilate." What Gigot doesn't mention is the huge role that the 1924-1965 immigration timeout played in helping Italian Americans become wealthier and more assimilated.

An immigration cutback would do the same for Hispanics as it did for Italians. With a smaller annual influx of Spanish-speakers from the south of the border, current Hispanic Americans would assimilate faster into speaking English. Further, once they no longer had their wages pounded down so dramatically by the huge "reserve army of the unemployed" that now arrives each year, Hispanic Americans would more quickly climb the social ladder into prosperity and Republicanhood.

In the meantime, the GOP could concentrate on raising its share of the vote among the 94% that isn't Hispanic. In 2000, Bush won only 48.6% of that huge bloc. He certainly has lots of room for improvement.