Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [58]
Bush clearly thinks it’s unwise to alienate this growing group of voters, partly because he personally believes in racial and ethnic outreach and partly because he wants to avoid the Californianization of the Republican Party. In 1990, four years before Bush was elected governor of Texas, Pete Wilson, another Republican with presidential ambitions, was elected governor of California. In his first year in office, Wilson signed off on a huge tax increase to help close a budget gap. It didn’t work. The tax hike produced less than half of the revenue that had been projected. And having upset his conservative base and damaged his approval rating, Wilson needed to change the subject as he began running for a second term.
And so he did. Wilson started harping on illegal immigration as the source of the state’s fiscal woes. And he threw his support behind Proposition 187, a referendum that denied illegal immigrants and their children access to education and health care and required public employees to report illegals to immigration authorities. Wilson ran ads that showed people scurrying across the freeway while a voice-over boomed, “They just keep coming!” Proposition 187 passed easily, Wilson was reelected, and Republican restrictionists today point to the episode as proof that anti-immigration can work successfully as a wedge issue.
But the Wilson experience lends itself to other interpretations as well, and one is that opposition to immigration can lead to shallow, fleeting victories that cause deep, long-term political damage. The real story of Proposition 187, which ultimately was gutted by the courts, is the decline of GOP strength in California. Wilson won re-election in 1994, but he also managed to drive Latino voters into the arms of Democrats. Not only did his support in the Hispanic electorate fall from 47 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 1994, but the ethnic voting patterns ran against the GOP for another decade. For three successive elections Republicans lost state assembly seats, a number of which were in districts where Hispanics were the critical voting bloc. Galvanized Latinos also registered to vote en masse—spiking their numbers from about 10 percent of the electorate in 1994 to about 15 percent in 1998—and many more were pulling the lever for Dems.
Wilson’s perceived animosity toward Latinos even spilled over into other nonwhite voting blocs. For example, there was a drop in GOP support among Chinese and Korean voters, many of whom are small business owners in the state and who have a history of voting Republican. Given that Asians have surpassed blacks and are now the third-largest racial/ethnic voting bloc in California (after Latinos and whites) such secondary damage is not insignificant.
Wilson’s would-be Republican successor, Dan Lungren, managed just 17 percent of the Latino vote in 1998 and was trounced by Gray Davis, who was supported by a whopping 78 percent of Latino voters. These days, Republican U.S. Senate candidates regularly lose there. The state has been blue in presidential contests for twenty years, and it took a unique politician like Arnold Schwarzenegger for the GOP to win back the governor’s mansion in 2003. Oh, and you might have noticed that Woodrow remains the only Wilson to have occupied the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, down in Texas, another border state with a large share of illegal immigrants, George W. Bush took a different tack. Bush was the un-Wilson. He publicly denounced Prop 187, embraced newcomers, and earned the trust and support of Latinos, even increasing his share of the Hispanic vote