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With the House of Representatives voting last week in the House of Representatives on GOP immigration legislation Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, about three-quarters of Republicans in the House and Senate voted this year to cut back on 39, legal immigration of about 40%. This would represent, by far, the largest reduction in legal immigration since Congress voted in 1924 to virtually close immigration for the next four decades.
"That tells me that the party is more interested in reducing the number of foreigners in the United States than in reducing illegal immigration," says David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the United States. the Cato Libertarian Institute. "One of the reasons for allowing people to legally immigrate is to reduce incentives to come illegally, and so this whole part of this immigration law goes against the goal of Securing the border and reducing illegal immigration.
But, in fact, the vast majority of congressional Republicans this year voted for Trump-backed legislation that not only crack down on undocumented immigration, but also seriously impede the legal entry into the country, including understood for millions of It has been "online for years" to enter legally.
"It seems that the debate on illegality is no longer the main topic of Republicans in both houses of Congress," notes Bier. "The main objective seems to be to reduce as much as possible the number of foreigners in the United States".
Nativiste rhetoric
The result is that Republicans are now engaged in a two-front war against legal and undocumented immigration. Trump made it clear that he intended to focus on illegal immigration as a priority issue for the November elections: even in the chaos of separations at the border, he turned to a more openly racist and nativist language. "The United States and urging to end the protection of the procedure for them.
Congressional Republicans, in turn, gave up previous promises to legally protect the so-called "Dreamers", the young people illegally brought into the country as children. After Trump overturned former President Obama's policy protecting these young people from deportation, House Speaker Paul Ryan, among leading Republicans, promised that Congress would bring a lasting solution. But all the Senate's proposals to protect them have failed, the vast majority of Republicans voting no.
In the House, moderate Republicans have given up on their plans to force an upward or downward vote on protecting young people through a discharge petition when Ryan promised them that he would develop a comprehensive plan. But in the midst of Conservative resistance, Ryan's immigration bill also risks failing this week – if there is a vote after Trump has publicly questioned his value .
Challenge a story of bipartisan efforts
If Ryan's measure fails, as this seems almost certain, this will mark the third time in the last 12 years that Republicans in the House have refused to legalize any contingent of undocumented immigrants. In 2006 and 2013, the leadership of the Republican House refused to schedule even a vote after bipartite Senate majorities passed legislation combining a stricter application of immigration with a path to citizenship for several million dollars. Immigrants undocumented.
The Republican House vote for the Goodlatte bill came after the GOP caucus voted even more heavily last year for legislation to punish cities "sanctuaries" that do not fully cooperate with the law Federal Immigration Law. In this vote in June 2017, House Republicans voted 225-7 to cut a wide range of federal grants to states or cities that restrict immigration cooperation and allow citizens to bring lawsuits against these jurisdictions if they claim to have been harmed by them. undocumented immigrants released through their policies. (Ryan's immigration bill restores this provision.)
The GOP's power center
In part, the Republican hard turn against not only illegal but also legal immigration can be explained by the changing geographical center of the party. In the House, in both the Senate and the Electoral College, Republicans now depend primarily on areas of America that have been least affected by the steady growth of the immigrant population over the last 50 years.
In both the House and the Senate, several Republicans in high-immigration jurisdictions have opposed legislation restricting legal migration. Those who opposed the Goodlatte bill last week included Steve Knight, California's Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Dana Rohrabacher, Florida's Carlos Curbelo, New Jersey's Leonard Lance and Virginia's Barbara Comstock. All occupy swing seats where immigrants make up at least a fifth of the population. Republican opponents in the Grassley bill Senate included Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Flake of Arizona, two states with high immigration.
And of course, all the Republican senators and virtually every member of the GOP House, no matter how big the presence of immigrants in their constituencies, voted to punish the "sanctuary" cities.
These votes remind us that in all regions of the country, the Republican coalition revolves around the elements of American society most worried about immigration in particular and demographic changes in general: seniors, blue-collar workers, evangelicals and the non-urban. In a recent poll conducted by the non-partisan Pew Research Center, Republicans in urban, suburban and rural communities, for example, were much less likely than Democrats in the same places to say that immigrants had improved the quality of life of their neighborhoods.
Americans have always indicated that they want immigration laws to be respected and to oppose policies that denote open borders or seem to tolerate lawlessness; this can be a risk for Democrats who criticize the application of immigration too drastically. But the public has also shown a lasting pragmatic trend that rejects the basic ideas that the Conservatives are pushing to dramatically reduce the presence of immigrants in American life.
The disapproving majority against the committed minority
But even if congressional Republicans seek a legislative solution to end family separations, the vast majority of them seem comfortable joining the president in rejecting the unbalanced public consensus embodied in these results. Other polls. This is one of the main issues of the party at the time of Trump: the minority of Americans deeply worried about immigration is more likely to vote – and more likely to vote on this question – that the majority who supports it.
This bet may prove to be good in the districts of the Non-Urban Chamber and in the low immigration states, at the heart of the current majorities of the Congress of the Republican Party. But this could further erode the party's position in more cosmopolitan states and districts, with large populations of immigrants and white-trained university-educated people generally welcoming. Many of the most vulnerable Republican members are white-collar suburban neighborhoods with a substantial immigrant population.
The two most threatened Republican Senate seats this year – in Arizona and Nevada – are among the nine seats they occupy in the top 20 most immigrant-focused states; by 2020, the GOP is likely to face tough fighting in the Senate in Colorado and Georgia, two more on this list. Texas could become competitive, even if it's still difficult, for Democrats too – perhaps as soon as Cruz's reelection against Beto O 'Rourke this fall.
The likely outcome is that the geographic center of the GOP in the next election will incline even more towards the least affected places by immigration. This would strengthen the party's nativist elements at a time when Trump is already defending them. And that means that even as America becomes inexorably more diverse, the party risks moving further away from support for legal immigration advocated by Ronald Reagan's Republican Presidents to George W. Bush.
"I see no way back now that Republicans know where their base is on their problem," Bier says. "I would be surprised if you did not see a more restrictive legal immigration plan than you already have in the GOP platform in 2020".
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