Propaganda Against GOP Immigration Control

By James R. Edwards, Jr. on December 19, 2011

The tell-tale signs of a propaganda campaign are popping up, with pro-amnesty hacks browbeating and trying to intimidate Republican candidates. Saturday's Washington Post front-page story slammed Mitt Romney for his opposition to amnesty. He's a top-tier candidate and consistently taking a principled, control-oriented position on immigration. And Friday's National Journal Daily pursued the same general theme, but without singling out Romney from the GOP field.

The goal: Instigators hope to turn whoever the Republican nominee is into a George W. Bush redux. If successful, the open-borders lobby (including Big Business, Big Labor, Big Religion, and ethnic identity political groups) wins, no matter which party prevails in November.

Those groups have preset their story lines: If Obama wins, the GOP ran an anti-Hispanic campaign. If the GOP candidate wins, Obama lost the Latino vote because he was so "aggressive" on deportation and failed to deliver mass amnesty. Their conclusion either way is that amnesty and Latino pandering must prevail.

You read it here first.

Of course, both of those are pure spin. The facts would not support either, once all factors were taken into account, such as what the most salient issue is at the time. (It's likely to be jobs and the economy.)

I'm not going to regurgitate the biased bluster from the spin cycle here, so as not to give any hint of validity or free publicity to an obvious propaganda effort for the opposition. The National Journal piece, titled "The GOP's Immigration Problem," would require an (expensive) subscription to get access, but the Post article, "GOP wary of Romney's rhetoric," is here.

The premises of the spinmeisters is wrong. First, looking at the American electorate generally, the pro-American, pro-control position on immigration is not only the most prudent policywise, it's also politically strongest.

The National Journal Daily cites a new poll by Transatlantic Trends in which most voters in the general public side with the majority position of the GOP presidential field on immigration. According to this survey:


  • A plurality of 47 percent of respondents believes the country has "too many immigrants."

  • 53 percent of the general public considers immigration more problem than prospect for America.

  • 57 percent say legal and illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans.

  • 53 percent say immigrants drive wages down.

  • 63 percent agree that immigration places a heavy drain on social services.


Further evidence counters the spin of the propagandists. A Rasmussen poll just out finds 73 percent of likely voters don't think the federal government is doing enough to cut off illegal immigration. Some 52 percent would back a law in their state like Arizona's immigration enforcement law, S.B. 1070.

A month ago, Rasmussen reported that 60 percent of likely voters believe immigration control is more important than legalizing illegal aliens.

Second, the prevailing Republican position on immigration has little practical effect on the Latino vote. University of Maryland Professor James Gimpel's recent Backgrounder demonstrates this point from voter data from the 2010 elections.

Gimpel finds the Latino vote "stable and predictable, guided mainly by party loyalty [with a majority identifying as Democrat], shaped by the variable level of turnout from contest-to-contest, but mostly unmoved by issue appeals and campaign themes."

This paper demonstrates that Latino voters aren't fixated on immigration as their main issue in any given election.

Gimpel mentions, but doesn't expand upon, an important point related to how a Republican does with this voting bloc. Political hacks and liberal journalists get fixated on immigration for Hispanics. They miss a very simple mathematical point: The percentage of the Latino voting bloc going to any given candidate varies oftentimes merely in relation to voter turnout.

For instance, the Post article cites John McCain's 31 percent share of the Latino vote in his 2008 presidential bid, compared with George W. Bush's 2004 election winning about 40 percent of Hispanic votes. Yet, McCain got a larger number of votes from Hispanics than did Bush four years earlier, though as a percentage of overall turnout (more voters typically show up in tighter electoral contests) the figure fell.

You need to be a heck of a lot more cautious with and sure of your statistics instead of going with what's apparent at first glance. That would be the responsible thing, and many journalists shirk their responsibility when it comes to ferreting out facts. The propagandist wolves in GOP sheep's clothing commit the same fraud on timid Republican elites. Thus, the present spin job.