From Japan, to Germany, to France, to Britain, the sentiment is going in the exact opposite way. In Japan, there's been a lot of debate about why the country has had 2 lost decades. Others have argued they haven't done so bad on a per capita basis. What has really hurt them is that their population is declining.
Miles Kimball offered these arguments for more legal immigration-he wrote this the day after Obama's re-election and at the time thought that the question of citizenship for the 10 million current illegal immigrants would be a "bridge too far" for the politics; however, since then the politics have opened up considerably on this front too:
"Let me be concrete by suggesting an increase of 1 million legal immigrants per year for the next 30 years. If the immigration reform is designed specifically to help the economy, here is what it can do.
"First, it can work wonders for the long-run solvency of Social Security and Medicare by increasing the number of young people paying relative to older people receiving benefits."
"Second, it can bring in large numbers of highly educated and highly skilled immigrants who can keep the United States at the cutting edge of technical progress."
"Third, it keeps America a melting pot while giving it a competitive advantage in the global economy."
"Fourth, in general, a group’s wages are raised by increasing the number of workers who are different from that group.
Ezra Klein argued yesterday that not only is immigration reform an economic winner, it's a political winner. This he argued, is unusual. For the most part "bipartisanship" happens so rarely because it's not really in both parties interests to have an agreement. There's some truth in this. The New Deal was not passed through bipartisanship but because Democrats totally dominated both Houses of Congress.
In this case, however, Klein argues that it is in the interests of both parties to compromise:
"Elections really are zero-sum affairs. For one party to win, the other has to lose. The incentives this creates are stunningly dysfunctional. Imagine a workplace where the only way to win a promotion was for the boss to fire your colleague. Even worse, if he likes your colleague’s work, you get a pay cut. Now imagine that your colleague needs your help to finish a big, difficult project. Think you’re going to help him?"
"This is why Washington is bitterly polarized place. The rules of politics are designed such that it’s not in the interest of the minority party to work with the majority party. There are moments when countervailing forces — be they public opinion or policy desires — can overcome the basic zero-sum nature of politics. But they’re increasingly rare."
"Immigration reform, however, sits at the center of an unusual convergence of forces that have made it positive-sum politics. Democrats believe in the policy, but they also believe that it’s good — even essential — politics to deliver on the number-one priority of the growing Hispanic electorate. Many Republicans also believe in the policy, and almost all Republicans believe that if their party is to prosper, they need to agree to immigration reform to show Hispanic voters that the GOP isn’t hostile to their interests."
"Moreover, the policy process is centered in the Senate and led, in part, by Sen. Marco Rubio, who is likely running for president in 2016. That means that the effect on the next election is scrambled: Much of the credit, unusually, will accrue to a Republican. As for the credit Obama will get, well, Obama’s a lame duck, so it’s less politically salient than it might otherwise be."
"The AFL-CIO/Chamber of Commerce deal is hardly the end of this process. It clears the way for the Gang of Eight to release a bill. It’s anyone’s guess whether that bill will clear the Senate, much less the House. But if it does, the reason will be simple: because both parties, for once, think they can win. Republicans and Democrats actually want a compromise, and so we might actually get one."
However, Brian Beutler of at Talking Points Memo, argues that someones math is off. Both parties are not going to benefit equally:
What we’re seeing here isn’t actually positive sum politics, but instead a situation in which both parties have examined the same issue and reached antithetical conclusions about its political consequences.
"Fortunately for proponents of CIR, these mutually incompatible calculations have led both parties to support the same policy. But nothing about the policy itself has altered the physics of two-party politics. Someone’s math is wrong."
"My hunch is that Republicans are wrong. That they think appealing to growing Democratic constituencies with policies the business community already supports will be an easier way to remain electorally viable than rethinking their broader economic agenda, and thus have a blinkered view of what CIR will mean for American politics in the future."
"But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Democrats are just being hubristic. It’s hard to say with certainty, because it’s a genuinely complicated calculation. Ezra alludes to this in his post, but gaming out the political consequences of immigration reform isn’t straightforward. The politics look different in the near term than in the long term. They’ll impact national politicians in different ways than they’ll impact candidates for state-wide or local offices."
"But over a long enough time horizon, there will be one winner. A majority of new citizens will either be Democrats or Republicans. To the extent that the new GOP position on immigration reform changes existing voters’ minds about politics, only one of two parties will be on the winning side of that realignment."
"Some important Republican strategists and opinion makers recognize this, and worry the GOP has picked a loser. And one of the things that’s helped CIR maintain its pulse on Capitol Hill is that these voices haven’t persuaded party leaders. At least not yet."
As to who should benefit in the long term I agree it will be the Democrats. This is something they've believed in for a long time. How could they maintain any credibility if they torpedoed their own project just because they feared the Republicans might see their image with Latinos improve?
To consider a historical example that is similar in many of the essentials, the Voting Rights Act was clearly a big winner for the Democrats. Yet there were Republicans that voted for it-most that voted against were actually old, reconstructed Southern Democrats. Part of what happened here was that Republicans starting with Nixon in the next election rather self consciously chose to play the "Southern Strategy" which basically by design didn't care about Black votes reasoning that the party could get so many Southern White votes it wouldn't matter.
In that case, the Black vote which had been divided between the parties with the GOP still getting a sizable portion-close to 40% for Eisenhower-basically conceding the Black vote in exchange for the Southern White vote. Basically it was more a trade than a total dead loss. The Dems got the Black vote but lost another demographic that had been theirs since the earliest days in the Republic-the Southern White vote.
It's important to realize that the electorate isn't a zero sum game. When Bush II was running in 2000, Republicans were reasoning that if only they could make inroads in the Black vote-if they could even get 30%, the Democrats would never win another election. The faulty reasoning here was they didn't consider that they would have to walk back much of their racist rhetoric in that case that had attracted racist Whites. What they gained in Black votes they'd start to lose in racist White votes.
I agree that the GOP has more problems besides just immigration. However, even in acknowledging this, trying to game it out you would have to ask this. Would they be better off in the future if they
A) Refuse to support immigration reform
B) Support it but don't change any of their other policies, particularly economic?
You could argue that even here they might be better at the margins with B. At least they'd be seen as less viscerally the anti Latino party. While neither choice is optimum B may be somewhat better.
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