Source: The Nation
For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate. Yet unable even to leverage environmental catastrophe, drastic economic inequality and near global financial collapse to their advantage, Democrats have instead mastered trimming and triangulating, accepting much of the conservative agenda while promising to implement it more effectively. But if Democrats could overcome their shortsightedness and embrace immigrants’ rights—as passionately as Republicans mobilize around tax cuts, fetuses and war—they may find the holy grail they’ve been looking for, one with the power to transform domestic and foreign policy. Here are nine reasons immigration reform, especially legislation that will grant citizenship to the millions of undocumented Latinos, is a progressive game changer:
1. Immigration reform ends the Southern strategy. For more than four decades, the conservative movement’s base has been the segregationist South, subsidized by an archaic Electoral College system that grants disproportionate power to majority white voters in Southern states. The enfranchisement of millions of undocumented Latino workers, combined with the votes of Latino citizens, would change that, turning red states purple and purple states blue. Almost 10 million Latinos voted in 2008, 7.4 percent of the total, and a large majority voted for Barack Obama. Analysts believe Latinos were responsible for giving the president larger than expected victories in key swing states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. They helped him squeak out a win in North Carolina and forced John McCain to defend Republican strongholds like Georgia. Then there are Texas’s thirty-four electoral votes, without which the GOP’s chances of winning national office collapse. Latinos make up more than 20 percent of registered voters there, with their turnout increasing 30 percent between 2000 and 2008. Even direr for Republicans, in ten years Latinos are expected to be the state’s largest ethnic group, surpassing whites. By 2040 they will be an absolute majority.
Every election cycle, the number of registered Latinos, as well as actual voters, increases. They are trending Democratic—67 percent voted for Obama, up from 59 percent for Kerry in 2004. Democratic support for reform would ensure that this trend continues. Seventy-eight percent of Latino voters identified immigration as important to them and their families; 62 percent say they know someone who is undocumented. Forget futile efforts to abolish the Electoral College; the best way to wrench the dead hand of the Confederacy off the throat of the political system is to enfranchise Latinos.
2. It wins back the Catholic Church to social justice. Catholics, mostly white ethnic working-class migrants, were stalwarts of the New Deal coalition. But they began to peel away in 1980, with the backlash to Roe v. Wade. In 2004 the future pope Benedict XVI, then the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, helped Karl Rove execute his “Catholic strategy,” urging priests to deny communion to politicians who support abortion (i.e., Kerry). The combined Catholic vote roughly split that year, with white Catholics breaking for Bush and Latinos for Kerry.