Just in time for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the Texas Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and us here at the Washington Examiner all have stories up about the growing numbers of Hispanic voters abandoning the Democratic Party and casting their ballots for Republicans.
While there are many reasons Hispanics better align with Republicans than Democrats (inflation, crime, public school curricula), a threshold issue for many Hispanics continues to be immigration. Just not in the way some thought.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “The surprise to some in the Republican Party has been that it hasn’t had to embrace liberalized immigration laws to draw more Latino voters. In interviews, many Latino voters said they support the party’s call for tougher border security, which they said would reduce human trafficking and the movement of drugs and unaccompanied minors across the border.”
The “some” here is the elite D.C. Republican consultant class — the kind of people who wrote the 2012 Republican National Committee autopsy. That document did actually have useful things to say about modernizing how Republicans used data, but in its one foray into policy, the document recommended, “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”
Many Republicans took this advice to heart, including 14 Republican senators who voted with Democrats to give amnesty to over 10 million illegal immigrants. Fox News host Sean Hannity and former House Speaker John Boehner jumped on the amnesty bandwagon as well.
Luckily, then-Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) led the opposition to the Senate’s amnesty bill in the House, which eventually died without a vote. Cotton went on to defeat Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), who had voted for the Senate’s amnesty plan.
President Donald Trump would later pick up where Cotton left off, running hard against the elite D.C. consultant consensus that Republicans must embrace “comprehensive immigration reform” in order to win national elections. Trump wasn’t perfect on immigration issues — consider his needlessly punitive child separation policy. But his “Remain in Mexico” policy did solve the 2019 border surge that had been caused by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
President Joe Biden, of course, reversed Trump’s immigration policies. The results have been a total disaster. According to NPR, a majority of Americans now believe our country is being invaded and want Trump’s border security policies back.
And Texas Hispanics in particular disapprove of Biden’s immigration policies and want more border security to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border.
If the GOP had gone soft on illegal immigration like the RNC autopsy recommended, they would be no different from Democrats on the issue today. Fortunately, Cotton and Trump ignored the D.C. consultant class, and now, Republicans are poised to make historic inroads with Hispanic voters.
Republicans would do well to ignore their D.C. consultants more often.
