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In his Chicago Tribune op-ed today, Joshua Hoyt, Blue America ally and Executive Director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, runs the numbers on immigrant-bashing in the Iowa GOP caucuses, and finds that the haters lost.  Big. 

On the Republican side, Romney, despite his overwhelming funding advantage, came up short. University of Iowa polls showed that 57 percent of Iowa voters favored earned citizenship for the undocumented and only 23 percent favored deportation. 

Despite the bad advice the GOP got in 2006 and 2007, candidates are still taking that advice in 2008. It's not working.

Immigrant bashing just does not move votes. The 2006 elections were a disaster for anti-immigrant demagoguery. Not only did the issue fail to stave off the Republican loss of the House and Senate, but leading Republican anti-immigrant campaigners such as Reps. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona and John Hostettler of Indiana and Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania all lost their races. And in a telling portent of the future, Latino support for the GOP dropped to 26 percent from 44 percent.

Last November, Republicans trotted out their anti-immigrant dog again, trying to gain ground in Virginia and take advantage of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's botched attempt to grant driver's licenses to the undocumented in New York. The results: Democrats took the House of Delegates in Virginia and the Republican assault in New York was negligible.

And in 2008, the GOP rejected the one-issue candidate whose issue was immigrant-bashing.

Tom Tancredo, a backbench congressman who appears to live only to bully immigrants, ran a commercial that claimed, "Islamic terrorists now freely roam U.S. soil," and ended with a backpack exploding in a shopping mall. The Colorado Republican congressman's "Before-it's-too-late" campaign to terrorize us into electing him president was thankfully interrupted by his withdrawal from the race, but Tancredo endorsed Mitt Romney on the way out.

Romney was a worthy recipient of the Tancredo mantle because Romney ran commercials that aired more than 12,000 times, mostly in Iowa and New Hampshire, promising to be rough and tough when it comes to illegal immigration. Romney used the debates and his commercials to blast his challengers, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Huckabee, for being soft on illegal immigrants. (All the while, Romney suffered from that peculiar hypocritical blindness that this issue seems to engender. Romney, it turns out, once employed a landscaper who used undocumented workers to landscape Romney's stately Massachusetts home. Romney continued to use the landscaping firm after that was reported, but dismissed the company when it was caught a second time using undocumented gardeners.)

Giuliani and Huckabee quickly turned themselves into political pretzels, trying to be what they had never been in real life: tough, enforcement-first upholders of our broken immigration "rule of law." Only McCain tried to maintain his self-respect on the issue.

The results are in. In a state where voters had a clear choice to vote for Romney's tough stance on illegal immigration in the Republican caucuses, they instead turned out in historic numbers to vote Democratic. There they picked Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who has unabashedly advocated an earned path to citizenship for the undocumented.

Watching the men who make up the GOP field last night, I realized they know this issue won't win for them. How many times did Mitt Romney sing out the praises of legal immigrants, speaking very clearly so no one would hear him wrong? The GOP knows they can't continue on this path, but they can't stop themselves either: they saw how right-wing radio and the bigotsphere excoriated their colleagues on Capitol Hill last summer on the issue.  Each and every one is terrified he will be next.

Is there a take-home lesson that Republican leaders and politicians should learn from Iowa? Yes. Voters are concerned about our broken immigration system, but they want sensible solutions, not just loud barks from a toothless hunting dog.

Predictably, there's lots of ALL CAPS commentary denouncing this sensible analysis in the Trib's comments section, so if you can take an opportunity, please lend a good word to our ally Josh Hoyt in his attempt to bring rationality to the discussion. 

 And -- let's remind Speaker Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, and Chris Van Hollen at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that this issue must not be demagogued, plain and simple.  And that Americans don't vote for candidates who bash immigrants.  

Here's my email to Nancy, Rahm, and Chris, which you are welcome to crib if you like:

Please stop telling Democratic Congresspersons (and Congressional candidates) to demagogue on immigration. The Iowa caucuses prove that immigrant-bashing doesn't play with the voters. Americans want a clear path to citizenship for immigrants, not deportation.

For more information, I recommend Joshua Hoyt's excellent opinion piece in today's Chicago Tribune, which can be found here: 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-080105immigration-oped-story,0,1664188,print.story

Thank you for your service to the Democratic party and to the United States of America.

Sincerely,
TeddySanFran

Really -- let's be sure Democrats don't co-opt an issue for which even Republican voters reject their own  candidates.

That dog won't hunt for us, either.

(h/t Pachacutec)