Enforcement First (let’s call it E1 for short) is another “comprehensive” enforcement-for-amnesty trade–as was Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform, as is the current Senate “Gang of 8″ bill. But by putting the amnesty half second it promises to guarantee that (unlike what happened with the 1986 law) the enforcement part of the deal actually gets carried out.
Until then, illegals would stay basically where they are (in “the shadows”). Yet an E1 Republican candidate could assure Latino voters that there is an amnesty at the end of the plan. Just not at the beginning. If all goes well it would happen by the end of his or her presidency.
Would that win a majority of Latinos for a Republicans? Almost certainly not. But the Republican strategic goal, when it comes to Latinos, has never been to use immigration reform to win an outright majority of Latinos, at least not anytime soon. The goal is to narrow the loss in presidential years–from Romney’s 70-30 to, say, 60-40–and open up the possibility of narrowing it further in the future. E1 could do that — maybe not as effectively as a total embrace of the Democrats’ plans, which legalize first and promise enforcement down the road. But the embrace of those plans threatens Republicans with alienation of an even more important demographic group, the white working class.
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