by Frank James
If a candidate wants to potentially lose a lot of Hispanic votes, then he or she should focus on cracking down on illegal immigrants.
That’s one important take-away message from a new Pew Hispanic Center poll released today. The survey suggests that when politicians, particularly Republicans, try to outcompete each other on immigration enforcement, many Hispanics take such talk personally.
This is from the center’s summary of the poll’s results:
…Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported, a new nationwide survey of Latinos by the Pew Hispanic Center has found. Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos. Smaller numbers (ranging from about one-in-eight to one-in-four) say the heightened attention to immigration issues has had a specific negative effect on them personally. These effects include more difficulty finding work or housing; less likelihood of using government services or traveling abroad; and more likelihood of being asked to produce documents to prove their immigration status…
This poll shows the problems that both Republicans and Democrats are facing on the immigration issue.
Politico.com today reported that Republicans see tough-talk on immigration as the only issue that works for them. Immigration hawkishness played a key role in the House Republicans holding on to two seats by wide margins during special elections in Ohio and Virginia.
But it’s apparent from this poll that such positions run the risk of angering many Latino voters. This same Pew center recently released a poll on the party preferences of Hispanics which indicated that Latinos are moving to the Democratic party and away from Republican affiliation.
Meanwhile, if Democrats propose ideas that sound like amnesty for illegal immigrants, they run the risk of a backlash and not just from independents, but even many Democratic voters who want to put a stop to illegal immigration.
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Pew goes on:
Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority group, numbering 47 million (about 15.5% of the total U.S. population). About a quarter of Hispanic adults are unauthorized immigrants, most of them arriving as part of a heavy wave of immigration that began gathering force in the 1970s. Twice in the past two years, the U.S. Congress tried but failed to pass comprehensive legislation to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. However, federal, state and local governments have pressed forward with hundreds of new enforcement bills, regulations and procedures–including stepped up deportations, more workplace raids, and restrictions on access to driver’s licenses and other government services and benefits.
The survey finds that Hispanics oppose these enforcement measures, often by lopsided margins. Three quarters (75%) disapprove of workplace raids; some 79% prefer that local police not take an active role in identifying illegal immigrants; and some 55% disapprove of states checking for immigration status before issuing driver’s licenses. By contrast, non-Hispanics are much more supportive of all these policies, with a slight majority favoring workplace raids and a heavy majority favoring driver’s license checks.
In addition to this wide variance in views between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, the survey finds less pronounced–but still significant–gaps within the Hispanic community on a range of matters, from perceptions about discrimination to attitudes about illegal immigration to support for tougher enforcement measures. For example, on questions about enforcement policies, native-born Hispanics take positions that are closer to those of the rest of the U.S. population than do foreign-born Hispanics. Also, the native born are less likely than the foreign born to report a negative personal impact from the heightened attention to immigration issues.
Likewise, Hispanics who are not citizens feel much more vulnerable in the current environment than do Hispanics who are citizens. They are about twice as likely as Hispanic citizens to worry about deportation and to feel a specific negative personal impact from the heightened attention to illegal immigration. (Non-citizens account for 44% of the total adult Hispanic population. Of these non-citizen Latino adults, an estimated 55% are undocumented immigrants and the other 45% are legal aliens).
Hispanics also have widely varying assessments about the amount of attention that local officials and political leaders in their communities are paying to the issue of illegal immigration. A third say a lot, but four-in-ten say not too much, and one-in-five say none at all. These variances likely reflect the reality that the issue has become politically heated in some parts of the country but not in others.
Whatever new vulnerability Hispanics feel in the present political and policy environment, the survey finds little evidence of a backlash against illegal immigration by Hispanics themselves. To the contrary, Hispanics generally see illegal immigrants as a plus – both for the Latino community itself and for the U.S. economy in general. Here, too, there are differences by nativity – with the foreign born significantly more positive than the native born in their views about the effects of illegal immigration. But even the native born are more positive than negative. And, as they assess the impact of illegal immigrants on the economy, native-born Latinos are more inclined to see a positive impact now (64%) than they were five years ago, when just 54% said the impact was positive.
The last paragraph shouldn’t be glossed over. Hispanics see illegal immigration as a net positive for the U.S.. That view extends even to native-born Hispanics.
Again, the political implications of this seem obvious. Tough talk on illegal immigration isn’t likely to win over this growing voting bloc.