Immigration Politics in a New Century

Abstract

The electoral success of Proposition 187 in 1994 and Governor Wilson’s astute use of it for his own political ends indicated powerfully the benefits of using immigration and ethnicity to drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition—just as the GOP had used race to help wrench control of the south from the Democrats during the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, it was the Republican Party’s own anti-minority and anti-immigrant machinations in the mid 1990s that helped engender change by the decade’s end. Faced with a significant growth in an increasingly Democratic Latino population, and an immigrant population pushing for citizenship and voting rights as its benefits were squeezed and blame for America’s ills were heaped upon it, some in the GOP thought they had positioned themselves on the wrong side of history, epitomized by Bob Dole’s devastating defeat to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election. As the previous chapters highlighted, the Republican Congress passed two significant laws in the form of the welfare reform and immigration acts only months before Dole’s defeat, but less than one year later on August 5, 1997, many Republicans joined with the Democrats to reinstate most legal immigrants’ SSI and Medicaid benefits from which they had only just been excluded. The primary reason was a fear of a further political backlash among the fast-growing and increasingly vocal, well-organized, and confident Latino community1 KeywordsHomeland SecurityIllegal ImmigrantWorld Trade CenterRepublican PartyComprehensive ReformThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.