As times change, some in GOP cling to old, wishful thinking
Arizona’s anti-reform Republicans are caught in a time warp. Their national brethren have moved on to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. But here in the Grand Canyon State, there’s a dreary familiarity to the old arguments.
Republican former state Senate President Russell Pearce is the still-proud father of SB 1070. GOP Rep. John Kavanagh is still a cheerleader for attrition-through-enforcement.
Or as Kavanagh put it recently: “When the jobs went away, a lot of the illegals went away.”
In Arizona, a powerful Republican still thinks it’s OK to refer to human beings as “illegals.” What century is this? Kavanagh told a group of journalists at a conference at the University of California-Berkeley last weekend that Republicans need to stick to their principles on immigration.
If they don’t, he says, they lose
their base. Besides, he says, the GOP has little to gain from legalizing 11 million people because “most” of them have a low level of education and a high dependence on government services. That means they’ll prefer big-spending Democrats.
Kavanagh did say that the GOP needs to restrain “some of our people who use harsh rhetoric.” He also said he has “always” supported the Dream Act as a “matter of law and justice.”
That puts him somewhere back before November 2012 in terms of the GOP’s evolution on this issue. Supporting the Dream Act is not exactly a wildly progressive notion these days.
But I give Kavanagh credit for saying that — and for participating in the panel, which was part of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s seminar on the “Changing Face of America: Inside the Latino Vote and Immigration Reform.”
He provided a stark contrast to other Republicans who joined him to discuss the politics of immigration reform.
The self-deportation model embodied in Senate Bill 1070 and trumpeted by Mitt Romney “is akin to starving people out of the country,” said fellow panel member Robert Gittelson, president of Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. It’s not OK.
What’s more, Gittelson rejected the notion that lowskilled workers cost society.
“Every single worker contributes to the business, and every business contributes to the economy,” he said. “Every worker has value.”
That’s not the sort of thing you expect from the right. But this isn’t Russell Pearce’s right. Like those Hebrew National hot dogs, Gittelson answers to a higher authority.
He is a founding member of the Evangelical Immigration Table and vice president for government affairs for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
He says biblical principles support comprehensive immigration reform: “We have a moral imperative to fix this.”
He also says the United States is partly responsible for the undocumented population because there has long been a “help wanted” sign at the border.
“As a conservative, I believe in personal responsibility,” Gittelson says. “We have some responsibility for a solution.”
Also on the panel was California state Sen. Anthony Cannella. He’s a Republican, and he took his chance to jab at President Barack Obama with the gusto of any other conservative.
But he says current immigration policies lead to “exploiting people.” When he served as mayor of Ceres, Calif., from 2005 to 2010, he saw the problems for law enforcement when undocumented immigrants are afraid to report domestic violence or other crimes.
Cannella is supporting an effort in the California Legislature to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. He supports comprehensive immigration reform in Congress that includes a path to citizenship.
Meanwhile, Kavanagh said he opposes the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration plan because “this bill pretty much gives amnesty.”
Kavanagh was the voice of yesterday’s GOP, riding hellbent for leather on the same old mastodon.
The others were new-age Republicans, desperately seeking relevance among the largest minority group in a nation that is expected to be majority minority by 2050.
Nationally, the GOP climbed aboard the “We Love Latinos” train right after the election. Both of Arizona’s Republican senators flipflopped themselves back to the comprehensive side of the issue. It’s a political reality that even Republicans in Arizona’s staunchest conservative districts will eventually have to face.
But for now, Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and leaders in the Legislature — plus one recalled Senate president — remain stuck somewhere in 2010 as their party leaves for the fiesta.