Don't count out the anti-illegal crowd
Hey Dan, Jon Musgrave here from IllinoisHistory.com.
Don't get your hopes up about the Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights doing away with Oberweis (see the previous post). Don't forget, they don't vote in the GOP primary.
Secondly, the pro-immigration side is a minority position in this country, even when we're talking about much-needed legal immigration (hey, I mean, someone needs to be around to pay for my social security).
Oberweis may have come on too strong on illegal immigration in 2004, but his problem may not have been the issue, but the timing.
This past February I was out in L.A. at a seminar. While there I took the opportunity to eat with some of my distant relatives, one of whom is a moderate Republican who strongly dislikes W, and the other a Hollywood character actor you might recognize from a couple of early West Wing episodes. Needless to say he's a left-leaning Democrat.
What shocked me as we ate Italian at a nice restaurant just down the street from Paramount Studios is that I was the most liberal person at the table when it came to immigration and illegals.
This wasn't a Fox News thing or talk radio driven at least in terms of coming from Rush or Hannity, this was grass-roots middle-class anger coming from the Left Coast. Since then I've seen it spread to Fox and Hannity in particular.
It's an issue that resonates with a lot of people and can easily be demegogued by a populist on either side of the aisle.
Kirk's statement was impolite, but I feel it's closer to what is felt by most Americans than the ICIRR.
5 comments:
Jon: " ... the pro-immigration side is a minority position in this country ... "
Not true, I believe. The anti-immigration crowd is just a very loud and minority. I strongly suspect that the average American just doesn't think all that much about it, and when they do, they remember that their grandparents or great-grandparent or some ancestor came over on a boat, rather than walked across the land-bridge.
I'm a tenth generation American on the Musgrave side. My most recent immigrant ancestor came over before the Civil War.
There's a big segment of the population that don't have any immigration memories.
This is the class of fully-assimilated un-hyphenated Americans that have serious trouble with the ethnicity questions on the census long-form.
As I was told more than once as an enumerator in 2000, they're in the Heinz 57 category if you have to pin them down.
Also, remember there's a difference between support for legal immigration and opposition to rewarding illegal immigration.
It's tough to change people's minds in politics, and those who are hoping to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment are kidding themselves.
Yes, there are a few people who hate illegal immigrants, and think that they are dragging America down. Make no mistake, they are a racist minority: their image of the illegal worker is a brown face from Mexico, not the asian faces that fill our restaurants nor the white faces from Eastern Europe that fill our bars.
The majority is not buying the argument that illegal immigrants are coming to America and stealing our jobs. That's because they watch the news and read the papers and understand the problem is companies leaving our borders for cheap labor, not cheap labor coming here.
America may be gullible, but we're not stupid.
Besides, although it was impolitic for President Fox to say so, when most Americans see Latinos doing backbreaking, labor-intensive, low-wage work, they don't say to themselves "Damn, I really wanted that job!" Most Americans have a stereotype of illegal immigrants working in kitchens, picking fruit, cleaning hotels, mowing lawns, laying brick and digging ditches, all under a hot summer sun. And Republicans just aren't going to convince the majority of Americans that illegal immigrants are the reason our economy is so screwed up.
The majority of Americans give Bush credit for screwing up the economy.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for reacting to my post, but I think the passionate anti-illegal immigration crowd is a minority in the GOP primary electorate, not much of a general election force. So for a statewide Republican candidate looking to break out of the pack (at least in Illinois), I can see the logic where adopting anti-immigrant policies would make some sense to try to get some traction. I think that's what Oberweis did in '04, with disastrous results. I think the pro-immigration policy is the right one for candidates in Illinois.
Don't underestimate Illinoisans. We are basically an open minded people. Several Jews, Christians and Moslems joined together to protest Kirk's comments at his office last week. Kirk makes these comments because he thinks they do well with his Jewish base up in the Illinois Tenth's North Shore, but he's been proven wrong. Jews suffered under discrimination for hundreds of years and know that if discrimination against any group is considered ok, it is bad for them and for everyone. Another problem Kirk has with this is the group of Tenth District Corporations that have invited Moslem workers to be systems analysts and other skilled workers. These folks did not just show up, they were invited in by major corporations. These are corporations that have supported Kirk in the past and their workers deserve housing, respect and a place to call home. No, Kirk won't sell discrimination in the Illinois Tenth any better than Oberweis did during his last campaign. Illinoisans just are not that way for the mostpart which is why I am proud to be one.
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