Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [56]
“Those field hearings” were the brainchild of Dennis Hastert, Roy Blunt, James Sensenbrenner, and other Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, who in the spring of 2006 were desperate for a GOP campaign issue as the November elections approached. The situation in Iraq was worsening, as reflected in the president’s low approval ratings. Social Security reform had gotten no traction. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was mired in a high-profile scandal that would ultimately run him out of office. And economic conservatives at outfits like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, National Review, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page were dogging congressional Republicans about their fiscal incontinence. As Club for Growth chairman Pat Toomey wrote, presciently, in the New York Post that summer, “Like a drug addict who focuses all his energy on scoring his next fix with no regard for the long-term consequences, the GOP majority in Congress is on a spending bender that may ultimately lead it to hit rock bottom as the minority party.”
The GOP wanted desperately to change the subject, and they decided that the illegal alien “crisis” was just the ticket. In fact, there was no crisis, other than the one manufactured by opponents of immigration. Illegal entries peaked in 2000, under President Clinton, and are down by a third since then. But the Republican leadership wasn’t about to let such minor details stand in the way of playing up an issue that is perennially ripe for demagoguery. Earlier in the spring the Senate had passed an immigration bill along the lines of what the White House wanted. The legislation included more enforcement measures but also a guest-worker program with an eye to the future labor needs of the U.S. economy. In addition, the Senate bill allowed the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the United States to earn legal status if they met certain requirements.
But rather than conferencing with the Senate to hash out a compromise, the House decided to spend the spring and summer of 2006 sabotaging the bill by denouncing it as “amnesty.” Republicans held a series of town hall-type meetings around the country. In theory, the purpose was to discuss immigration reform. In practice, however, the purpose of the hearings was to rally the conservative base. GOP congressmen, particularly those in closely contested races, would use immigration to distance themselves from an unpopular president.
In other words, Republicans didn’t want to solve a problem so much as exploit an issue in hopes of turning out the despondent GOP faithful. Republicans believed, with reason, that heavy turnout facilitated GOP gains in 2002 and 2004, and they were terrified that their base would stay home in November. Politicians are famous for their inability to see past the next election, and congressional Republicans in 2006 were no different. They covered their ears to warnings from Bush, Mehlman, and Rove that the strategy could backfire and spent the months leading up to the midterms desperately trying to demonize illegal aliens. Up to this point, Mexican immigration was such a nonissue in American politics that it never even came up in the 2004 presidential debates. But by November 2006, Republicans and their conservative allies in talk radio and cable news would turn it into a raucous national theme.
The GOP spent tens of millions of dollars on television ads that portrayed Latino immigrants as dangerous criminals and in some cases even compared them to Islamic terrorists. The spots didn’t only run in border states, either. They could be seen in places like Pennsylvania, where the Latino population is relatively small and consists mainly of Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens. One Republican ad, which suggested that supporters of the president’s approach to immigration reform were soft on terrorism, ran in southwestern