What the GOP doesn’t get about Latino voters

What doesn’t Bush get about the Latino electorate? Basically, he seems to believe that to win Latinos the most important things Republicans can do is embrace the idea of substantially increasing immigration levels. Once they do that, Latinos will naturally flock to a conservative message built around promoting upward mobility through tax cuts, deregulation, and entitlement reform. To be clear, this isn’t just Bush’s view. It is shared by most of the GOP establishment that is lining up behind Bush, as evidenced by the Republican National Committee’s official autopsy of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat.It just so happens that this view is wildly off base.

Let’s set aside the inconvenient fact that as many as 84 percent of Republicans want lower immigration levels, not higher levels, and that you’d have to win over many new pro-immigration voters to replace the old anti-immigration voters you might lose by embracing open borders. Let’s also ignore the fact that not all Latinos favor Bush’s vision for immigration reform—42 percent of U.S.-born Latinos, for example, opposed President Obama’s decision to grant millions of unauthorized immigrants a temporary reprieve from deportation, a decent proxy for more conservative views on immigration policy in general. (This is important because while Latinos represent a rapidly growing share of the U.S. population, only about half of them are eligible to vote, because Latinos are relatively young and a disproportionately large percent of them are not U.S. citizens, as Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has observed.) The truth is that most Latinos, like most other Americans, vote on the basis of class interest. So far, it doesn’t seem as though Bush will offer working- and lower-middle-class Latino voters much more than bromides about free enterprise and about how cutting Social Security and Medicare will somehow guarantee all Americans a brighter future. And I say this as someone who is generally very sympathetic to these bromides.

To win Latinos, GOP candidates can’t just get behind immigration reform and hope for the best.