The Democrats and the Rule of Law for immigrants

David Paul Kuhn:

Last week there was a feverish debate following Hillary Clinton’s rhetorical acrobatics over proposals to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Yet it’s the uniform backing of this policy by the leading Democratic presidential candidates that may prove more foreboding for liberals in the general election.

The rising American discontent with illegal immigration has the potential to sever Democrats from the majority of voters — especially those in the working and middle class — like no issue has in four decades.

During the mid-1900s, Hubert Humphrey was one of the toughest anti-crime mayors in America. But by the 1968 presidential campaign both Republican Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace were viewed as more capable than the Democratic nominee of doing the “best job in handling law and order,” according to a poll that year.

Another survey found that urban upheaval was considered a top concern by nearly as many Americans as the war in Vietnam.

Now some Democrats are accusing Republicans of demagogy over illegal immigration. Liberals tried a similar strategy in 1968 over riots, crime and racial unrest. While there may have been merit to some of these charges, it was Democrats who ended up paying a political price.

Democrats in 1968 focused heavily on courting the black vote, then roughly one in 10 voters. There was a sense that Democrats could not emphasize curtailing riots and rising crime without devaluing hard-won gains in civil rights.

Liberals rightly emphasized the problem of rampant police abuse. But they glossed over the fact that lawlessness was increasingly defining American life — between 1960 and 1972, the violent crime and robbery rate tripled and the aggravated assault, rape and murder rates all doubled.

Republicans focused on urban upheaval as a campaign issue when Democrats would not, and they found a way to reach white working- and middle-class voters.

Today Democrats are focused on courting Hispanics, who made up an estimated 8 percent of the presidential vote in 2004.

Conventional wisdom has it that Republicans will slip into permanent minority party status if they fail to woo Hispanics, which critics suggest means softening the party’s traditional hard-line stance on immigration.

That could very well happen in three decades, as demographic trends continue to slip away from the GOP.

But Democrats have more to lose in the short term over the immigration issue. After all, the vast majority of blacks (76 percent) and whites (86 percent) oppose issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, an October CNN/Opinion Research poll found.

And when a recent Gallup Poll asked Americans what the “top priorities” of the president and Congress should be, combating illegal immigration was topped only by dealing with the war in Iraq.

The real problem for Democrats, however, is that the very voters they need to win back are most concerned over immigration.

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Blacks are still the primary victims of the reluctance of Democrats to be tough on black on black crime. Young black men are killing each other at an extraordinary rate that should be a bigger issue in the black community than events in Jena, Louisiana. But like the destruction of the black family that was an outgrowth of Democrat programs in the 60s, it is an issue without a caucus in the Democrat party.

The issue of driver's license goes to the essence of the problem with illegal immigration. First, it shows the lack of seriousness that some have when it comes to the enforcement of immigration laws. It is an accommodation to those who came here illegally rather than giving them an incentive to leave. The courts have ruled that we cannot turn away the children of illegals from schools or the illegals themselves from the emergency rooms, but there should be no impediment to turning them over to the immigration authorities when they seek services or seek jobs. This should not be deemed an anti immigrant policy but an anti illegal policy. We have to regularize the immigration process if we are ever going to get control of the situation.