Barrio blues: Republicans will never win Hispanic votes by pandering.

Mr. McConnell is a member of the board of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Last November ''Hablador'' Newt Gingrich (as the Speaker sometimes refers to himself before Latino audiences) told a group of Cubans and Nicaraguans in Miami that America needed to extend a ''gran abrazo'' to everyone in the American family. Several weeks ago in Dallas, before a gathering of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Hablador Gingrich promised enigmatically to ''rethink the entire structure of how we deal with the [Mexican] border.'' Texas governor and presidential hopeful George W. Bush was also courting LULAC, praising education in ''English Plus'' -- a program hardly different from bilingual education.

Such rhetoric might have been lifted directly from the Democratic Party's multiculturalism repertoire. For the past year, the Republican Congress has refused to address the problems caused by large scale immigration; indeed, it has been in full flight from the very limited immigration reform measures proposed in 1996. The GOP's new strategy of open pandering to the various Latino ethnic lobbies seems to indicate a further shift in the political winds.

It's not a mystery why some Republicans are tempted by this strategy. Bob Dole won only 22 per cent of California's Latino vote in 1996, a dismal performance in a crucial state. Hispanics now account for 12 per cent of California's electorate (double the figure of six years ago), and Mexican-Americans are the fastest growing demographic group in the state and in the country at large. Republicans' new pro-Hispanic tilt conforms to recommendations of prominent consultants and pollsters: last November Stuart Spencer, an aide to Presidents Ford and Reagan, warned in a widely circulated memo that the party would be committing ''political suicide'' if it did not mend fences with Hispanics, while pollster Frank Luntz and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed urged congressional Republicans to back Puerto Rican statehood in order to demonstrate the party's Latino-friendliness.

The conventional wisdom is that California's Proposition 187 (the 1994 initiative to deny state benefits and services to illegal aliens) was responsible for the Hispanic drift away from the Republican Party -- although, for example, the GOP's share of the Hispanic vote nationally was a desultory 23 per cent in the 1988 presidential election, long before Proposition 187. Also blamed was Proposition 209, which called for the end of racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and university admissions. According to Spencer and his allies, if Republicans only avoided such divisive issues, they would do well with these new voters, who ''should be with us on issues of jobs, taxes, government regulation, education, public safety, and importance of family.''

An important early test for the notion that a change of tone would begin to solve the party's Latino problem was this year's campaign for California's Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual-education initiative organized by software entrepreneur Ron Unz. On June 2, the measure passed statewide with 61 per cent of the vote. But the political implications transcended bilingual education. Unz, who has been a vociferous opponent of Proposition 187, had been careful to craft his initiative as a pro-Hispanic measure: the ads for 227 were bilingual, Unz's co-chair was a Mexican-American woman, and the first signatures to put the initiative on the ballot were gathered in Mexican-American neighborhoods.

The implicit message was that if the liberal establishment would get out of the way and let Mexican immigrants learn English, California's (and the nation's) concerns about Americanizing the new immigrants would turn out to be groundless. Unfortunately, despite Unz's courting of the Latino vote, on Election Day the state's Hispanics rejected Proposition 227 by a landslide -- 63 to 37 per cent, according to L.A. Times/CNN exit polls. While Unz questions the accuracy of the exit polls [see ''Letters,'' NR, Aug. 3], apparently most Hispanic voters followed their ethnic leaders, who stridently opposed the Unz initiative. The vote against Proposition 227 was heavier in poorer communities with a higher percentage of new immigrants, lighter in more settled second- and third-generation Mexican-American neighborhoods.

Meanwhile on an array of other issues, Hispanic voters have confounded the theory that only ''immigrant bashing'' stands in the way of better results for the GOP. Proposition 226, a measure designed to restrict the spending of union dues on political campaigns, went down 54 to 46 per cent statewide. But Hispanics opposed it by a 3 to 1 margin -- a higher ratio than among black voters. The Latino vote was also to the left of the black vote on Proposition BB, an L.A. County school-construction measure, as it had been on a 1996 proposition raising the minimum wage. These votes seemed to vindicate the assessment of the left-liberal L.A. Weekly, which concluded that California's Latinos have ''clearly become the left-most group in the body politic on questions affecting working-class upward mobility.''

The unpalatable fact is the Republican Party does face a crisis over Latino immigration. The GOP is more or less the party of settled Middle America, and it is not likely to do well with Hispanics until they become more economically and culturally integrated. Indeed, without cultural and economic assimilation, current trends have the Hispanic vote pushing the GOP toward minority status sometime early in the next century.

There are some signs of common sense seeping into the discussion. In the June issue of Commentary, Linda Chavez raised the eyebrows of those who follow the immigration debate by acknowledging that the capacity of the United States to absorb new immigrants seems to have declined. In the case of Mexicans (the largest immigrant group) Miss Chavez concluded that recent immigrants and America itself would have much to gain if ''fewer Latinos were admitted, allowing time for those here to learn English, improve their skills, and become Americanized.'' For Miss Chavez, long an influential observer of the Latino scene, this was a first: in previous writings she had always backed away from acknowledging that the sheer number of new immigrants exacerbated assimilation problems. (Although this last is a simple enough point: the steady influx of generally poor newcomers into the existing Latino communities solidifies their status as ethnic barrios, reinforces Spanish as the dominant public language, and reaffirms the cultural and political pull of Mexico.)

Fred Siegel, in his important book The Future Once Happened Here, describes what is taking place in Los Angeles's Latino neighborhoods as ''re-Mexicanization'' -- a reversal of the historic assimilation process. Not least, the unrelenting influx of newcomers keeps wages low, thus ensuring that working-class Mexican neighborhoods remain relatively poor and a more natural constituency for left-liberal appeals.

In the past, the GOP has done poorly with new immigrant groups (the exception being where foreign policy, particularly anti-Communism, was of transcendent importance) but has done better as these populations have moved out of ethnic enclaves and poverty and into the mainstream. In the 1920s, Italian Americans voted overwhelmingly Democratic; by the 1970s they were voting Republican. It is no coincidence that this transition took place during a half-century of rising wages and low immigration. The GOP's focus, then, should be on the economic advance and cultural assimilation of California's and the country's existing Latino population -- particularly on policies that enable Latinos to improve their economic position, which has worsened considerably in recent years. As virtually every recent study of the economic impact of immigration indicates, the continued flooding of the labor market by low-skilled workers pushes down wages -- especially those of the poorest and least skilled. Republican candidates need to speak knowledgeably and bluntly about the impact on wages of high immigration flows.

Such a strategy will force party leaders to make some distinctions: between actual immigrants living here now and the idea that all immigration is necessarily good -- as well as between Latinos themselves and the ethnic lobbies which claim to speak for them. The clout of the latter depends in great measure on sheer numbers: a steady stream of poor immigrants, unable to vote or speak English, magnifies the power of groups like La Raza and LULAC while reinforcing the notion that it is the United States' destiny to become more like Latin America. That may be La Raza's hope, but the GOP needn't cater to it.

By contrast, the existing communities of Hispanic Americans would benefit from higher wages, from learning English, and from the kind of assimilation that would render their aggressive ethnic spokesmen irrelevant. To no small degree Latino immigrants and the Latino ethnic lobbies have conflicting interests. Republicans must learn to appeal to the interests of the immigrants rather than the ethnic activist leaders.