From Politic365 on August 28, 2012:
The Republican party is in a bit of a bind: its base cries out loudly for an enforcement immigration policy while its pathway to growth — Latino voters — practically demand an immigration reform policy. What’s a Grand Ol’ Party to do? The adopted Republican Party platform called for more border enforcement, the opposition of any kind of amnesty, requires all businesses to verify workers’ legal status through E-Verify, and halt federal funds to colleges and universities that allow undocumented students to enroll at lower in-state tuition rates.
Recently, Florida Senator Marco Rubio proposed his own version of the DREAM Act, but Michael Olivas, a professor who teaches immigration law at the University of Houston Law Center, called this proposed legislation, “a nightmare act.” The proposal wouldn’t have given students work permits, thus, it would have frozen them in place until something more substantive came along. And, based on the fact that just three Republicans in the Senate voted for the DREAM Act at the end of 2010, that policy would have been a long way off.
What’s happening instead is that the Republican party is falling into what Stephen A. Nuño, assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, calls “the California model.” To stay in power, Republicans are increasingly depending on whites to be elected to office, and in order to satiate that constituency’s desires, they have to move further and further to the right on issues like immigration.
Read more here.
