GOP’s hopelessly complicated immigration politics

From This Week:

While Hillary Clinton was shattering one more glass ceiling on her way to the Democratic presidential nomination last week, no Republican senatorial candidate even managed to advance to the general election in California’s nonpartisan “jungle primary.”

In November, the state that gave America Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan will not have a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate on the ballot. Instead, two Democrats will face off in the general election, since they were the top two vote-getters in California’s primary. (Distant Democratic runner-up Loretta Sanchez ran more than half a million votes ahead of the top Republican vote-getter, who received just 8 percent of the statewide vote.)

This is the first time this has happened in California since the direct election of senators began. And it raises an important question: Is the GOP’s tough-on-immigration stance to blame for turning the nation’s biggest state so clearly and reliably blue? After all, Latinos now outnumber whites in the Golden State.

Donald Trump’s supporters often urge critics to look at California. If you don’t reduce immigration, they contend, a flood of liberal Latinos will enter the country and turn the entire U.S. as Democratic as the Golden State. It’s the destiny of demographics, and the conservative agenda will be sunk.

Nonsense, counter Trump’s detractors. It was precisely the kind of anti-immigrant politics that Trump is peddling that led to Proposition 187, a 1994 California ballot initiative backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) that prevented illegal immigrants from utilizing government services. This alienated a generation of Latino voters and turned California into a one-party Democratic state. Trying to control the influx of Latino immigrants, Trump’s critics say, will only alienate the tens of millions of Latinos who are already here. Read more….

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