Immigration stance doomed GOP

Orlando Sentinel ^ | November 10, 2006 | Andres Oppenheimer

[Dane]

ATLANTA -- Hispanics said adios to President Bush's Republican Party in Tuesday's elections, voting in much greater numbers than expected for Democratic candidates in an apparent rejection of the ruling party's efforts to blame much of the nation's problems on undocumented migrants.

Contrary to experts' predictions that Hispanics would not turn out massively on Tuesday, exit polls show that Hispanics accounted for 8 percent of the total vote. That is about equal to the Hispanic vote's record turnout in the 2004 presidential election, and much more than its turnout in previous midterm elections.

Click here to find out more! What's more, 73 percent of Hispanics voted for the Democratic Party on Tuesday, while only 26 percent voted for Republican candidates, a CNN exit poll shows. In the 2004 presidential elections, 55 percent of Hispanics voted Democrat and about 42 percent voted Republican.

Many experts had predicted that Hispanics would not turn out in big numbers, in part because most of the hottest races took place in states with no major Hispanic presence. Also, experts said that it would take until the 2008 elections for the largely Hispanic "today we march, tomorrow we vote" protests of earlier this year to translate into the naturalization and registration of large numbers of foreign-born Latino voters.

But the anti-immigration hysteria spearheaded by Republicans in the House -- and by cable-television fear mongers such as Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs -- irked many U.S.-born Hispanics who normally don't care much about immigration.

[Dane]

BTW, anyone notice that Louie Dobbs is cooing over nancy pelosi.

[umgud]

Lou Dobbs has to be conflicted. He pushed the party that is now gonna give him the immigration package that he railed against.

[jamesrichards]

Voters actually think dems are tough on border security.

We have some of the dumbest voters in the world.

They vote out republicans for better border security and no amnesty.

[Mo1]

Lou Dobbs has always been a liberal and he played on peoples fears

[KoRn]

"He pushed the party that is now gonna give him the immigration package that he railed against."

Why do I get the feeling he isn't going to be saying much about it now that the dems are in control?

[doc30]

It seems that the U.S. has passed the tipping point. There are now enough hispanics in the country who have failed to assimilate that any party that opposes amnesty or who supports tougher immigration enforcement will never be able to gain political power. Only if BOTH parties oppose amnesty can illegal immigration be stopped.

[Dane]

Lou Dobbs has to be conflicted.

He's not conflicted at all. He got what he wanted all along, a nancy pelosi speakership, by ginning up malcontentism within the opposition.

[avile]

It didn't help that the fags of the MSM kept on calling these criminal aliens as "immigrants".
never did they use the term illegal

its kinda like how the MSM always calls pro-lifers as "anti-abortion"

Boycott the MSM.

[reelfoot]

So the way we buy off the relatively small block of Hispanic voters in this country is to allow mass illegal immigration?

No thanks. I'll stick with the anti-immigration candidates, all of whom won in my area.

According to all opinion polls I see, which includes cross sections of every ethnic group among respondents, Americans overwhelmingly want to end illegal immigration and curtail legal immigration.

[taxed2death]

All the more proof of how wrong Rove was to kiss LaRaza's A__.

Republicans have never won anything without their conservative base. You piss off the base, you get squat.

Trying to shove 20 million future Dum-o-crats down the throats of conservatives will lose seats every time.

Now we get to watch GWB dismantle what is left of the Republican party piece by piece.

[yldstrk]

Bravo sierra is what I say to that.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

You're absolutely correct. He doesn't know what he wants. I'm also amazed that we have another person who claims to know what went wrong.

This guy thinks Rs were too tough on immigrants and there are others who claim Rs aren't tough enough on illegal immigration and that's why they lost.

[Dane]

According to all opinion polls I see, which includes cross sections of every ethnic group among respondents, Americans overwhelmingly want to end illegal immigration and curtail legal immigration.

They do want to curtail illegal immigration, what they don't want is the incindiary rhetoric of the tancredo's and buchanan's, and the GOP paid the price.

[DugwayDuke]

"Lou Dobbs has to be conflicted. He pushed the party that is now gonna give him the immigration package that he railed against."

He'll get the 'fair trade' legislation he wanted more.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

How many of the immigrant votes were illegal?

[raybbr]

What's more, 73 percent of Hispanics voted for the Democratic Party on Tuesday, while only 26 percent voted for Republican candidates, a CNN exit poll shows. In the 2004 presidential elections, 55 percent of Hispanics voted Democrat and about 42 percent voted Republican.

That's only because Bush wasn't there to promise them they'd be the "new Americans".

What will the next GOP hopefuls have to promise hispanics in order to be considered?

THE "NEW AMERICAN"..........<

We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change -- some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

As I speak, we are celebrating the success of democracy in Mexico.

George Bush from a campaign speech in Miami, August 2000.

You can read the speech here.

Here is an excerpt of a good critique of that speech:

In equating our intimate historic bonds to our mother country and to Canada with our ties to Mexico, W. shows a staggering ignorance of the civilizational facts of life. The reason we are so close to Britain and Canada is that we share with them a common historical culture, language, literature, and legal system, as well as similar standards of behavior, expectations of public officials, and so on. My Bush Epiphany By Lawrence Auster

The Path to National Suicide by Lawrence Auster (1990)

An essay on multi-culturalism and immigration.

Click the Pic!!!!

How can we account for this remarkable silence? The answer, as I will try to show, is that when the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was being considered in Congress, the demographic impact of the bill was misunderstood and downplayed by its sponsors. As a result, the subject of population change was never seriously examined. The lawmakers’ stated intention was that the Act should not radically transform America’s ethnic character; indeed, it was taken for granted by liberals such as Robert Kennedy that it was in the nation’s interest to avoid such a change. But the dramatic ethnic transformation that has actually occurred as a result of the 1965 Act has insensibly led to acceptance of that transformation in the form of a new, multicultural vision of American society. Dominating the media and the schools, ritualistically echoed by every politician, enforced in every public institution, this orthodoxy now forbids public criticism of the new path the country has taken. “We are a nation of immigrants,” we tell ourselves— and the subject is closed. The consequences of this code of silence are bizarre. One can listen to statesmen and philosophers agonize over the multitudinous causes of our decline, and not hear a single word about the massive immigration from the Third World and the resulting social divisions. Opponents of population growth, whose crusade began in the 1960s out of a concern about the growth rate among resident Americans and its effects on the environment and the quality of life, now studiously ignore the question of immigration, which accounts for fully half of our population growth.

This curious inhibition stems, of course, from a paralyzing fear of the charge of “racism.” The very manner in which the issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces. But the tyranny of silence has prevented the American people from freely making that choice.

[taxed2death]

"They do want to curtail illegal immigration, what they don't want is the incindiary rhetoric of the tancredo's and buchanan's, and the GOP paid the price."

Your assessment couldn't possibly be more incorrect, as usual.

[johnny7]

Dobbs' anti-illegal rant was a ratings-grabber... and nothing more. As far as the headline goes... it's dead-on-balls accurate.

[raybbr]

Of 15 races where immigration was the center of the debate, tracked by immigration2006.org, 12 were won by immigration moderates and only two by hard-line anti-immigration activists.

Of course, that doesn't add up to the 30 seats they lost but don't ever let an MSM untruth stop you, Dane.

[Rippin]

This issue might just be big enough to finally create a third party