Yanqui stay home!

Somewhere in Helen & [REDACTED]'s whirlwind tour of the DC blogosphere's best liquor cabinets (I'd like to thank all our sponsors), I managed to slip off to yesterday's Grand New Party publicity event at AEI.* I walked away with several questions, the most pressing of which revolves around immigration, more specifically whether there's a way for the GOP to capture the Latino vote without adopting some kind of pre-cadidacy-McCain amnesty plan.

For Reihan as for many conservatives, the heart of the crisis is not that the current wave of immigrants are a foreign influence that threatens American culture but that they do so with disregard for the law. More importantly, he was careful to make clear that this isn't just his take on immigration as a question of political philosophy, but as a question of electoral politics. He believes that the Right's message-makers are in a position to decide whether they are going to defeat comprehensive immigration reform by frightening white people or by appealing to the rule of law.

That the latter line will make a better and more lasting conservative coalition than the former (the difference between making the twenty-first century Republican Party a working-class right instead of a nationalist one) sounds basically true, but I'm not as sure as Reihan is that, having made opposition to immigration a big issue, we will be in a position to choose between the two. Any given legislator's opposition to immigration reform may be perfectly well-reasoned, but when he gets votes by trumpeting his opposition, it's because voters are apprehensive about a rapidly growing Latino population. To use an analogy, opposition to racial quotas is not necessarily motivated by white resentment (mine's not, for instance), but the emotional response that makes an ad like White Hands effective necessarily is.

Reihan brought up an analogy of his own: welfare reformers in the nineties, who were accused of taking advantage of white contempt for urban blacks. I agree with his claim that welfare reformers did manage to control their message such that welfare reform was about sound economics, the moral importance of getting a job, and avoiding a European-style dole class, and not about the laziness imputed to African-Americans by white prejudice. On the other hand, when a strategist tells me he can get voters worked up about the moral value of work I believe him, but if he tells me he can get them worked up about the fact that the rule of law is being violated I don't. This is not to say that racism played no role in making welfare reform politically popular, nor that racism is the only thing at play in opposition to illegal immigration, but simply to say that the importance of hard work is an emotionally powerful middle-class value in a way that attachment to the letter of the law has never been. (I suspect that the proof here lies in the fact that middle-class conservatives get exercised about many different permutations of "no such thing as a free lunch," whereas they would pitch a fit if anyone cracked down on pot smokers, underage drinkers, and bicyclists who don't wear their helmets.)

Reihan thinks that the Republicans can avoid alienating Latinos by making their opposition to amnesty a matter of The Law rather than fear of change; I think that popular support for anti-amnesty candidates will center on the fact that Latino immigrants are uncomfortably foreign no matter what talking points the party platform uses. The question "What's a principled opponent of illegal immigration to do?" is a tough one, and it's certainly unfair that other people's prejudices get to determine what I can and can't make a campaign issue. The answer, as far as I can tell, is to oppose comprehensive immigration reform but refrain from making political hay out of it (analogous to "Racial quotas are bad, but White Hands is also bad, so I will stay quiet"). That, or bite the bullet and throw your lot in with xenophobes (both subtle and not-so), acknowledging that to do so will necessarily (and justifiably) alienate many on the amnesty side who are offended that you are taking advantage of one of America's immoral prejudices.

Before the F.L.'s cry foul: what about the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater's non-racist opposition to sections thereof? Should he have sat down and let LBJ run roughshod over federalism simply because racists agreed with him? My take on states' rights is complicated, but for now let it suffice to say that there were ways for non-racist advocates of states' rights to compensate for their unfortunate bedfellows by condemning--loudly--people like Ross Barnett (which is not to say that Goldwater always did...), whereas there are very few ways for politicians to come down hard on middle-class fear of a brown planet. It's a national politician's place to offer leadership to state-level politicians, especially those in his own coalition; it isn't a politician's place to be anyone's therapist. As fine a line as it was for Goldwater to walk, the line Reihan wants to find is even narrower.

*David Frum was moderating; I thought about slapping him up one side of his face and down the other (one slap for each time he stood up the Yale Political Union during my years there), but my momma taught me better.