Bipartisan immigration hypocrisy

The ugly street fight over immigration brewing in our already polarized country will surely continue beyond Election Day.

The leading Republican candidates for President, without exception, vow they would use the office to crack down on undocumented immigrants. Their Democratic counterparts, in sharp contrast, have gone so far as to hire undocumented immigrants to draft their proposed policies — which, unsurprisingly, would make life much easier for those who might otherwise face deportation.

Instead of waging a bitter partisan fight over immigration, the leading candidates of both parties should try to understand where their opponents are coming from and explicitly ask their followers to do likewise. We need to move beyond name-calling to consensus-building.

Far too much of the rough talk on the subject of immigration coming from the Republican candidates for President — and the emphatic “Amen” it draws from core GOP voters — sounds like raw bigotry.

Donald Trump’s now-notorious barbs aimed at Mexican “rapists” and his call to ban Muslims from entering the country were needlessly divisive. But so was the response from City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who said of Trump: “He needs to become a pariah. People should not want to socialize with him. People should not want to do business with him.”

Attempting to ostracize Trump, it should be clear by now, won’t eliminate him, his followers or the issue. Behind the ugly words lies an entirely rational political calculus by many Republicans that new immigrants are likely to vote Democratic — and the statistics suggest that an unchecked flow of immigrants, most of them Latino, spells political disaster for the GOP in the long run.

“The number of Hispanic immigrant eligible voters is projected to double, from 3.3 million in 2000 to a projected 6.6 million in 2016,” reports the Pew Research Center. In the last four years alone, 1.2 million Latino immigrants gained voting eligibility — and they overwhelmingly lean Democratic.

Some GOP strategists continue to gaze wistfully in the rearview mirror at the 2004 campaign, in which then-President George W. Bush carried 44% of the Latino vote in the course of being reelected. But that’s ancient history: More recently, in the 2010 midterm congressional elections — the same cycle that saw the rise of the Tea Party — 60% of Latinos voted for Democrats, and the percentage increased to 62% in 2014.

For a decade now, Latino immigrants voting for the first time have become Democratic base voters, many of them clustered in important swing states like Florida, Colorado and Nevada. To influential conservatives like author Ann Coulter, those numbers mean that Republicans who don’t fight tooth and nail against a path to legalization are ensuring Democratic control of the White House and Congress.

“There is simply no reason for Republicans to legalize 30 million people who will vote 8-2 against them,” she writes in her latest book, “¡Adios, America!” Coulter also warns Republicans: “There’s no sense in arguing about any other political issue. If we lose immigration, we lose everything.”

That may be overstating the case, but imagine the reaction among Republicans who see those numbers and then read about how Democratic presidential candidates formed their immigration policies.

“At every stage of the process, undocumented voices have literally written our platform,” is what Gabriela Domenzain, an adviser to ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, told the Los Angeles Times. “O’Malley’s team consulted with day laborers, farmworkers and other immigrants in the country illegally while drafting his immigration plan,” the paper reports.

Ditto for the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, which hired undocumented immigrants thanks to President Obama’s executive order deferring deportation actions. The Times cites one of them who helped shape the candidate’s position on borders: “I never thought that basically a wish list that was everything we would want from a President would be approved.”

Hillary Clinton’s Latino outreach is being handled by Lorella Praeli, an activist among undocumented immigrants who only recently became a citizen through marriage, according to the Times.

Republicans battling for the White House should recognize that the road to the Oval Office can’t pass through a low swamp of hate speech. And Democrats should rethink the wisdom of letting noncitizens who have violated our laws — even convoluted laws in need of a rewrite — set policy for the United States.

In other words, we need a solid dose of the elusive, old-fashioned virtues of political maturity and self-restraint.

We’re talking past each other