Why immigration is key to White House race

For the past four decades, immigration has been a political football, the subject of liberal pandering and conservative demagoguery in the culture wars. But now the calculus has changed, courtesy of the fact that 16 per cent of Americans are of Hispanic descent, making them the largest minority community in the country.

Politicians in both parties understand that there are pragmatic as well as principled reasons to deal with immigration, legal or otherwise. Attention must be paid.

That's why President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both made pilgrimages to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials in Orlando, Florida, this week. The Sunshine State is just one of a handful of key swing states with especially high Latino populations, the others being Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

Republicans have some serious catching up to do with the Hispanic community, but the fact that 87% of party members are white does not help their ability to reach out.

Furthermore, an Arizona state law, championed by conservatives, was depicted by opponents as a measure that would cause police officers to demand the papers of any person arrested whom they suspected of being in the country illegally.

Since many Mexican-American families have lived and worked north of the border for more than a century, the result was widespread protest and a Supreme Court challenge likely to be determined in the next few days.

George W Bush - the former governor of the border state of Texas - was proud to have won 40 per cent of the Hispanic vote in his narrow victory over John Kerry in 2004. He championed comprehensive immigration reform in his second term as president, but the bipartisan bill he backed died an ignominious death under attack from conservatives, who derided the measure as an amnesty.

The Republican Party was stained by association and, in the 2008 election, Obama won the Hispanic vote by a 40 per cent margin.

Now polls show that Mr Romney faces a similar deficit with Hispanic voters. It is partly a problem of his own making. In the Republican primaries, he rarely lost an opportunity to tack Right on illegal immigration. He criticised the Texas governor, Rick Perry, for supporting the Dream Act - intended to provide a pathway to citizenship for the offspring of illegal immigrants brought to the US as children who graduate from school.

 Romney promised to veto this if it were brought to his desk as president.

All of which set the stage for President Obama's audacious move earlier this month, announcing an executive order that would implement aspects of the Dream Act without the need to consult Congress. The order will stop the deportation of illegal immigrants under 30 who have graduated from high school and have no criminal record, or who have served in the military.

 Obama's policy shift followed a recommendation by the Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio, a rising star in the Republican Party often mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee.

Romney, caught off-guard, failed to say whether he would overturn the measure if elected.

The problem is that  Romney now needs to appeal to a wider election audience and cannot afford to alienate the Hispanic community entirely.

The ads he has run in the past, railing against illegal immigration, are already coming back to haunt him.

At the very least, he needs to establish a more inclusive tone, which is what he attempted to do in his speech to Latino officials.
Obama's record on illegal immigration is more complex than the conventional political narratives. He has dramatically increased border security and the deportation of illegal immigrants, drawing the ire of some Latino activists. In saner political times, this bit of triangulation could be considered a political strength, a bit of Nixon-in-China - but not in this polarised year.

Both parties will need to find a path toward increasing legal immigration and decreasing illegal immigration, while dealing with the illegals who have been hard at work here for decades.

Common sense and compassion may be aided by this inviolate principle: demographics are destiny.

John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast