Bush’s Latino Gambit

You could call it the Snoopy strategy. Since President Bush’s Texas gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1998, Republicans have been courting Latino voters with feel-good messages of inclusion, cultural sensitivity and shared values. Claiming that Mexican Americans, in particular, are Republican in their heart of hearts, GOP strategists have believed they would flock to their party if it put out the welcome mat and highlighted its best qualities. If Latinos knew Republicans, they couldn’t help but love them.

In the past few months, the Bush White House has begun to flirt with a more substantive strategy reminiscent of Democratic-style ethnic coalition politics. First, the administration leaked the possibility of appointing White House legal counsel and Bush confidant Alberto R. Gonzales to the U.S. Supreme Court. Then last month, the possibility of an amnesty for undocumented immigrants from Mexico surfaced.

Reports of a possible shift in U.S. immigration policy have infuriated some on the Republican right and elicited unexpected praise from some on the Latino activist left. Press analysis has widely assumed that a “regularization” of the status of undocumented Mexicans would be hugely popular among Latino voters. One can almost imagine Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist, chuckling over the response to his trial balloon.

So far, however, analysts have overestimated the political impact that amnesty would have on the Latino electorate, as well as underestimated the public-relations damage the GOP could incur if the new strategy amounts to no more than a big tease.

While certainly more substantive than this year’s first-ever Cinco de Mayo festival at the White House, the political rationale for the immigration proposal is still largely symbolic. Bush strategists know that the millions of undocumented Mexicans who could normalize their status under a limited amnesty would not be eligible to naturalize and vote until well after Bush has campaigned for a second term. As Texans, they also know that many later-generation Mexican American voters are as concerned about illegal immigration as are Anglo Americans. Indeed, the current chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), made his professional reputation as a U.S. Border Patrol official who helped design Operation Hold-the-Line, a labor-intensive strategy to deter undocumented immigration along the West Texas border.

Polls indicate that Mexican Americans have a complex view of undocumented immigration. For example, in 1994, 78% of El Paso Latino voters told pollsters they were generally in favor of Operation Hold-the-Line; in a poll four years later, they opposed, by a margin of 2-1, denying public schooling to undocumented children. As the late columnist Richard Estrada once pointed out, Mexican Americans can object to undocumented immigration while harboring no antipathy toward immigrants themselves.

In 1994, U.S.-born Mexican American voters in California overwhelmingly opposed Proposition 187, not because they implicitly supported illegal immigration, but because they were turned off by its punitive proposals. More significantly, however, they were offended by the nasty racial overtones of the pro-187 campaign. While early polls indicated that the state’s predominantly U.S.-born Latino electorate was split on the issue, the ensuing campaign led Latinos to believe that 187’s supporters were not distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants or, for that matter, foreign-and U.S.-born Latinos. As a result, the vast majority of Latino voters came to see the GOP’s support of Proposition 187 as having to do with race.

Politically speaking, the Bush administration’s public musings about regularizing the status of millions of undocumented Mexicans are also about race. “I think the White House wants to wipe away the blemish of racism off the party,” says California Republican consultant Mike Madrid, “and it’s using immigration because it’s the issue that got them into trouble with Latinos in the first place.”

Before the anti-illegal-immigrant campaign, which was followed by a congressional effort, led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to deny benefits to legal immigrants, the GOP was making steady gains with Mexican American voters, particularly among those who had achieved middle-class status. Just as urban immigrants have long been mainstays of the Democratic Party coalition, Republicans have traditionally benefited from the suburbanization and dispersal of latter-generation ethnic Americans. With the exception of Jews, who have remained mostly Democratic as they have moved up the income ladder, most other immigrant groups have tended to lose their ethnic mooring in politics and vote more on the basis of economic self-interest. But by endorsing the 1990s anti-immigrant movements, California’s and the national GOP retarded the political assimilation from which they had begun to benefit.

While an amnesty for undocumented Mexicans is unlikely to turn its beneficiaries into Bush supporters, or incite a stampede to the GOP among U.S.-born Latinos, it could serve to erase Latinos’ memories of the Republican embrace of a racial wedge issue. A positive ethnic gesture that included an acknowledgement of the contributions of Mexican immigration could eclipse the negative ads of 1994 that proclaimed “They just keep coming.” This could make it easier for middle-class Latinos to vote their pocketbooks. In other words, amnesty could reawaken Latinos’ presumed “natural” affection for the Republican Party.

Despite the Republicans’ tireless insistence that “Latino values are Republican values,” economic class may be a more significant determinant of Latino voting preferences than culture. The Times exit poll from last November’s elections also supports the conclusion that middle-class voters are more receptive to Republican advances. Nationally, among Latino voters annually earning $60,000 and more, former Vice President Al Gore beat Bush by only three points. Among Latino voters making $40,000 to $59,000 annually, Gore had a four-point advantage. But the idea that the Republican Party can harvest working-class Latino votes by stressing cultural and ethnic themes is wishful thinking. In the 2000 presidential election, Latino voters earning under $40,000 a year, a group that makes up almost half of the national Latino electorate, supported Gore by a whopping 70% to 29%.

Still, the White House’s incipient Latino strategy has another potential advantage. Amnesty talk helps wipe away the GOP’s anti-immigrant stain, thereby taking away the issue that Democrats have capitalized on to drive Latinos to the polls. However, because its regularization rhetoric has already raised expectations among Latinos, the Bush administration cannot back off from it too far, lest it hand Democrats another opportunity to expose the cynicism of the GOP’s much-vaunted Hispanic strategy.

So far, most mainstream media, English and Spanish, have given the Bush strategy the benefit of the doubt. Yet, an about-face on its most substantive outreach to date could ruin the GOP’s elaborate efforts to remake itself. As the White House considers whether it can politically afford to normalize the status of millions of undocumented immigrants, the administration should also ask itself whether it can really afford not to.