A Tale of Two Censuses

[Sorry for the length of this post, but it's good stuff. I promise.]

Michael Gerson and Paul Krugman [sub. req.] each take on the recent immigration bill this morning and they unsurprisingly reach opposing conclusions.

Writing in The Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter Gerson ends on an inspiring note regarding the religious aspect of Latino immigration:

...[R]eligion adds an element beyond politics and culture to the immigration debate. The Christian faith teaches that our common humanity is more important than our nationality. That all of us, ultimately, are strangers in this world and brothers to the bone; and all in need of amnesty....

But that expansive conclusion rests on concrete political and cultural calculations that carry the real weight of Gerson's argument. Basically, he argues that "Republicans cannot rely on their white base alone." They need to carry at least 40% of the Latino vote to prevail in national elections, and "[a] nativist party will cease to be a national party." Then the hard math, followed by an appeal:

Breaking 40 percent is possible for Republicans. President Bush did it in 2004. Republican momentum among Hispanic voters has been strong in the past decade -- until Rep. Tom Tancredo and his allies began their conflict with the fastest-growing segment of the electorate.

Conceding Latinos to the Democrats in perpetuity is a stunning failure of political confidence. If the Republican Party cannot find ways to appeal to natural entrepreneurs, with strong family values, who are focused on education and social mobility, then the GOP is already dead.

[snip]

Conservatives need to be reminded that Latinos -- Protestant and Catholic -- are, in some ways, different from the mainstream culture. Higher percentages attend church regularly. Higher percentages of Latino immigrants are married; lower percentages are divorced. "The elephant in the room," says Rodriguez, "is the Latinoization of America. What are the results? America will be a more religious nation. America will continue to be a nation that promotes family values. Wow, that really turns American culture upside down."

But however he dresses up the pragmatic GOP argument against bigotry, Gerson is running against the tide of the longstanding appeals his party has made to nativism. GOP insider Robert D. Novak admitted as much in yesterday's column:

Why are the party faithful throughout the country so incensed by immigration? When I asked [South Carolina Republican Senator Huckleberry] Graham, he quoted from a federal government report on the new arrivals to this country, "largely unskilled laborers" and heavily illiterate: "The new immigration has provoked a widespread feeling of apprehension as to its effect on the economic and social welfare of the country." The report, by the U.S. Immigration Commission, was dated 1911.

The federal government in 1911 was in the midst of a long period of Republican dominance. The GOP has lived by bigotry, and now faces death by bigotry.

Writing in The NY Times, Paul Krugman also hearkens back to the early twentieth century, a time when his own ancestors (like Novak's, oddly) emigrated from Russia. Also like Novak, Krugman reviews the bigotry typical of that age. But then he develops from the data a striking, counterintuitive argument.

Krugman argues that immigration can lead to "diluted democracy" in America. He believes earlier mass immigration here probably depressed wages for low-skilled workers by about 10%, which by increasing the numbers of the poor decreased the nation's overall economic equality. But more significantly, he argues that this rise in economic inequality was accompanied by a reduction in the percentage of Americans who were politically enfranchised:

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population — in general, the poorest and most in need of help — denied any political voice.

That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn’t have the right to vote. Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully enfranchised working class.

But now we’re living in the second Gilded Age. And as before, one of the things making antiworker, unequalizing policies politically possible is the fact that millions of the worst-paid workers in this country can’t vote. What progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.

Krugman believes that the onerous path to citizenship and the guest-worker provisions of the current immigration proposal are designed to alleviate the corporate Republican demand for low-wage labor while denying political voice to these same low-wage earners. This would effectively skew the U.S. political environment back towards the "minor-key apartheid" of the early twentieth century.

Krugman concludes with, rather than Gerson's rhetorical flourish, a practical judgment:

Progressive supporters of the proposed bill defend the guest worker program as a necessary evil, the price that must be paid for business support. Right now, however, the price looks too high and the reward too small: this bill could all too easily end up actually expanding the class of disenfranchised workers.

This immigration bill seems like something that Jesus would definitely oppose.