The Vex of Mex - Why Bush's amnesty proposal will backfire.

President Bush's proposal to grant an amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants-that is to say, Mexican president Vicente Fox's proposal that Bush should grant such an amnesty-is, to date, almost the only policy embraced by the Bush administration that has won enthusiastic bipartisan support. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, the AFL- CIO, the Business Roundtable, maverick Catholic columnist Andrew Sullivan, the (only slightly less maverick) Catholic bishops, and the pipes and drums of the Texaco oil company all sing the wisdom and generosity of the still-developing policy. It is rare for any proposal, let alone one advanced by a Republican, to be greeted with such general applause. This arouses the inevitable suspicion that somebody is being fooled. Instead of the audience, however, it may be the man who has just pulled the fox out of the hat.

Examine the Bush proposal, as it seems to be emerging in discussions with the Mexican government and Capitol Hill. It would legalize the status of an estimated 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants, allowing them to remain in the U.S. for several years as temporary guest- workers. A few high-skilled workers would be able to gain permanent residency and, thereafter, citizenship. (There is a sizeable backlog of applications.) The rest would return to Mexico.

Merely to describe this program is to reveal that it is fantasy. Even if it were to become law in this exact form, it provides no reason to think that a single one of these guest-workers would ever return to Mexico. Some would marry Americans; some would have American children; both groups would then be able to stay indefinitely. And those who lacked the enterprise to manage either would quietly fade back into the illegal population from which the amnesty had briefly rescued them. They would then wait patiently for the next "last" amnesty-which they could confidently expect on the basis both of their own experience and of the arguments of those who favor an amnesty because the alternative of a "Gestapo-like" mass deportation is unthinkable.

Unfortunately, the amnesty is unlikely to pass in this modest form. Its support is concentrated in two main groups: economic conservatives, such as the Wall Street Journal editorialists, and Big Business. WSJ conservatives support it because they believe that guest-workers will significantly benefit the U.S. economy. A mountain of data, however, suggests otherwise: As Steven Camarota has demonstrated in his recent analysis for the Center for Immigration Studies, "Immigration from Mexico: Assessing the Impact on the United States," unskilled immigration does not generate significant economic benefits for Americans as a whole, but it does impose heavy costs on some. In particular, it creates large fiscal costs (an estimated $55,200 per adult immigrant over his lifetime) for taxpayers, and makes the poor poorer. Thus, Mexican immigration in the 1990s, by increasing the supply of unskilled labor, lowered the wages of American workers without a high-school education by something like 5 percent.

Hence, of course, the support of Big Business. A guest-worker program, like the H-1B visa program, would give it a relatively tame workforce with a short time horizon, few other options of employment, and little incentive to unionize.

For exactly the same reasons, this restricted amnesty is firmly opposed by unions, Democrats, the Catholic Church, and the Mexican government. While such groups might accept the limited transformation of illegals into guest-workers as a first step, they all insist that these guest- workers should be eligible in a relatively short time for such rights as job mobility, U.S. residency, citizenship, and the vote. Nor do they accept that these benefits should be confined to the 3 million Mexican illegals. With the notable exceptions of the Mexican government and the New York Times (which argued with an almost nativist robustness that discrimination in favor of Mexicans was perfectly acceptable, since earlier immigration policies had also been discriminatory), these groups demand that the amnesty be extended to all the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. or arriving shortly. "All legal rights for all illegals" is the cry, as La Raza, MALDEF, the National Asian Pacific Legal Consortium, etc., rally to the cause.

These pressures are likely to prevail-thereby expanding the amnesty to bestow more rights on more people. It is a simple matter of incentives. If President Bush is to gain the credit he originally sought with his amnesty proposal, he must yield to those who have an interest in making it more generous. Big Business will not resist, because the taxpayer will pick up the tab for the larger social costs of its cheap labor. And everyone else has a self-interested motive in greater generosity: Unions see these millions of illegal immigrants as new members, the Catholic Church as new parishioners, the Mexican government as new dual citizens (and thus a source of pressure on Washington), MALDEF and La Raza as new captive constituents, and the Democrats as new Democratic voters.

That last point may surprise those who have read that Bush initiated the guest-worker proposal in order to win a larger share of the Hispanic vote. GOP strategists have apparently concluded that a 40 percent share would put their party ahead among the overall public. But on this occasion, it is the Democrats who have calculated more accurately. As UPI national correspondent Steve Sailer has pointed out, both the Mexican and larger Hispanic votes are very small as percentages of the total popular vote-3 and 5.4 percent respectively. And very few Mexican-Americans live in the twelve highly marginal states that decided the close 2000 election; they accounted for only 0.8 percent of the votes in those states. From a cold-blooded electoral standpoint, it would make more sense to seek more votes from non- Hispanic whites, who made up 80.7 percent of the electorate in 2000. The Republican share of the white vote is far below the Democratic share of almost every minority vote-and going down. Yet a small percentage rise in the GOP share of non-Hispanic whites would harvest many more votes across the entire country than a (highly unlikely) doubling of Hispanic Republican votes. So the concentration on the Hispanic vote is disproportionate to its size.

Even if that were not so, this GOP strategy would still be misdirected. The Bush argument is that crafting a looser and more generous immigration policy will win more votes for Republicans from Mexicans and Hispanics. That is questionable on two counts. The Hispanic vote is largely Democratic: According to a very recent poll conducted for the Hispanic Business Roundtable and the Latino Coalition, 51 percent of Hispanics support the Democrats, and 17 percent the GOP. This division is caused by economics. Hispanic immigrants, in particular Mexicans, tend to be poor and ill-educated-almost two-thirds of Mexican immigrants have not completed high school (compared to 10 percent of Americans). Such voters tend to see their interests as protected by labor unions, the welfare state, and the Democrats. They are unlikely to vote Republican because of an immigration policy that, as we have seen, the Democrats can easily trump (unless, of course, the GOP intends to move leftward on every other policy as well as on immigration).

Suppose, however, that there were a modest increase in the GOP share of the Hispanic vote. This, too, would be canceled out by the other result of the policy-an increase in the total Hispanic vote as a result of higher immigration. To gain a growing share of a growing vote may sound wonderful; but it can-and here certainly would-result in a net loss of votes. Consider: If the GOP raises its 35 percent of 2 million Hispanic votes to 40 percent of 3 million, then its net vote loss remains stable at 600,000. If the Hispanic vote rises to 4 million, however, the GOP loses a net 800,000 votes. The higher immigration rises thereafter, the worse for the GOP-unless it can win an actual majority of Hispanic votes, and of that there is no sign. This hypothetical calculation, moreover, seriously understates the real position, since recent Hispanic arrivals tend to be poorer, and therefore disproportionately more Democratic than either Hispanic-Americans or immigrants of long standing.

Some conservatives-even the hard-headed Thomas Wood of Americans Against Discrimination and Preferences-comfort themselves with the thought that Hispanics are "conservative" on values and will therefore swing to the GOP over time. And as the poll quoted above shows, Hispanic voters do express socially and morally conservative opinions on vouchers and similar issues. But so do black Americans, even as they vote 92-8 percent for the Democrats. The awkward fact is that, in a racialized political atmosphere, ethnic loyalty counts for more than moral or ideological sympathy. And high levels of immigration-along with such policies as bilingual education and multicultural history teaching-promote such an atmosphere.

In short, any version of an amnesty for illegal immigrants will be politically damaging to the GOP. Yet Republicans will embrace it like a drowning man clutching an anvil. Nor is there any point in remonstrating. As Whittaker Chambers wrote to Ralph de Toledano about an earlier symptom of the same pathology: "You cannot save something that cannot save itself."