Pundits Say Immigration Reform ‘Critical’ for GOP
Republicans won’t gain a large part of the Hispanic vote anytime soon, but they can chip away at the bloc by wooing elderly Catholic Hispanics, and that’s likely to be their strategy. Since the GOP has only one worn playbook leftover from the ‘80’s there will soon be Pro GOP but Hispanic versions of Tony Perkins, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh hitting the Latino airwaves if they aren’t there already. The only hard part will be orchestrating the dance at the national level so that the newly minted conservative Latino stars don’t bump shoulders with the Paleo Libertarian/ Nationalist stripe anti immigrant types that the SW GOP is rife with.
Republicans keen on winning back the surging Latino vote will need to get behind the far-reaching immigration reform set out by a group of bipartisan senators yesterday — or risk being pummeled again at the national polls, political observers said.
“We have this demographics time bomb ticking, and we have to stop being the party of the angry white guy,” Alex Patton, a GOP consultant in Florida, told the Herald yesterday, adding that a Republican shift on the issue is “critical” if the GOP is going to compete in the 2016 White House race. “Any bipartisan approach is welcome at this point,” Patton added.
The landmark proposal was trotted out by U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle, led by Democrats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida. It was short on details, but sketched out a plan to give more than 11 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship while stepping up border security