By Lisa Caruso
Republican strategist and message man Ed Gillespie, now principal at Ed Gillespie Strategies and founder of the nonprofit Resurgent Republic, has served his party in many capacities. But the outreach to Hispanic voters he oversaw in his role as chairman of the Republican National Committee during President George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign is considered one of his signal achievements. He recently spoke with NationalJournal.com about how the Republican Party can win over more Hispanic voters -- they favored Barack Obama last year more than 2-1 over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- and the outlook for enacting comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2010.
NJ: It looks like immigration reform could be on the agenda next year. How would you advise Republicans to approach the issue?
Gillespie: It is very important that Republicans be seen as being not only concerned about illegal immigrants but welcoming to legal immigrants. I believe the Republican Party was harmed with Hispanic voters in the course of the debate over immigration reform in 2007. What a lot of Hispanics saw and heard on their radios and television sets gave them the perception that the Republican Party was not [welcoming to them]. We need to talk as often and as convincingly about legal immigrants and the contributions that people who come to our country legally make to our society as much as we do about keeping out those who break our laws and enter the country illegally.
NJ: If Obama fails to deliver on his promise to enact comprehensive immigration reform, do you think Hispanic voters will desert him and can Republicans then pick up those votes?
Gillespie: That may create an opening for us with Hispanic voters, but the fact is that it's hard enough to get immigration done in a growing economy. I think it's daunting to get it done in a slow economy and even tougher to get it done in an election year. They would have to get it done by April.
NJ: Will there be enough Republican votes to pass a comprehensive reform bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for the country's roughly 12 million illegal immigrants?
Gillespie: It depends what's in it. By the way, I was not one who [supported citizenship for illegal immigrants]. One of the greatest things on the face of the Earth is U.S. citizenship, and granting that to somebody who is here by virtue of breaking our laws gives me pause.
Really it's the debate, and the nature of the debate has to change. It's got to be Republicans talking about how do we best implement and enforce a system of legal immigration and not only how do we stop illegal immigration. It's different sides of the same coin. You've got to talk about both sides. You've got to talk about heads and tails. We have tended to focus on only one side of the coin.
NJ: Who in the Republican Party is going to emerge as a leader on immigration reform, particularly with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who previously carried the banner, busy at home in Arizona with reelection?
Gillespie: Good question. I don't know. One of the problems we had last time is that [former Colorado Republican Rep.] Tom Tancredo emerged as the leader on immigration reform. I think it would have to be a border state senator. John Cornyn [R-Texas] is on the Judiciary Committee, and he's a thoughtful guy.
NJ: How was your former boss, President Bush, able to capture 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004? What did he do?
Gillespie: Forty-four percent, actually. He made a very concentrated effort to go after the Hispanic vote. It was part of our strategy. And he talked in terms that resonate with Hispanic voters, who tend to be entrepreneurial and family-centered and patriotic.
NJ: He also talked about comprehensive immigration, which he supported, didn't he?
Gillespie: And he talked about comprehensive immigration reform, yes.
NJ: Conservative Republicans have made illegal immigration a major flashpoint in the health care debate. Has that been a smart strategy?
Gillespie: I think that's fine. I think most Americans agree. I don't think we should be paying for free health care for people who are in the country illegally.
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Responded on October 13, 2009 4:25 PM
Malcolm Whatley
All developed societies exhibit income disparity. Generally such disparity is great enough to entail what we refer to as “conspicuous consumption:” somehow some people get so much of the world’s resources that they have to contrive ostentatious ways to waste it while others can’t even afford, for instance, prescription eyeglasses. All modern societies try to mitigate it, but nobody has found a way stably to moderate the problem without tending to squelch mechanisms that appropriately reward responsibility, effort, diligence, and productivity. It’s a real problem. For centuries, Europe exported the worst of the problem to its colonies. America kept putting it off with economic pseudo-colonialism and immigrants who passed through the low-pay underclass on their way to being full-status citizens. (Think of Andrew Carnegie.) We’ve run out of those options—the “developing nations” are beginning to get the picture, and we’re about as densely populated as we want to be. Europeans have never welcomed immigrants, and their noti...
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All developed societies exhibit income disparity. Generally such disparity is great enough to entail what we refer to as “conspicuous consumption:” somehow some people get so much of the world’s resources that they have to contrive ostentatious ways to waste it while others can’t even afford, for instance, prescription eyeglasses. All modern societies try to mitigate it, but nobody has found a way stably to moderate the problem without tending to squelch mechanisms that appropriately reward responsibility, effort, diligence, and productivity. It’s a real problem.
For centuries, Europe exported the worst of the problem to its colonies. America kept putting it off with economic pseudo-colonialism and immigrants who passed through the low-pay underclass on their way to being full-status citizens. (Think of Andrew Carnegie.) We’ve run out of those options—the “developing nations” are beginning to get the picture, and we’re about as densely populated as we want to be.
Europeans have never welcomed immigrants, and their notions of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” have always been more superficial and disingenuous than their counterparts in America, so they can smoothly accommodate the institution of the “guest worker” as a post-colonial resolution of the income-disparity embarrassment. In America, there has always been—probably always will be—a strain between egalitarian ideals and the realities on the ground, but America’s accommodation to that strain has never allowed us institutionally to admit of classism—apart from race. (But if you believed that racial disparity was real and significant, then you believed that the economic disparity wasn’t based on your institutions, it was based in that reality.) By now, we’ve determined to put not only slavery, but Jim Crow behind us. So here we are. With no transitioning immigrants and no inferior, low-performance race, there’s not supposed to be a low-pay underclass.
If there are to be no low-pay workers, then there can be no low-pay jobs—but of course there are things we really do want done that we really don’t want to pay middle-class compensation for. In other words, we want somebody to do stuff that we don’t expect self-respecting Americans to do for what we’re willing to pay. Enter the “guest workers”: the guys we can keep cycling in that low-pay underclass because, c’mon, they will never really be Americans.
From the Latin American Herald Tribune, April 21, 2009 (laht.com):
Guatemala City – U.S. President Barack Obama offered to his Central American counterparts to expedite the “temporary worker” policy to benefit thousands of peasants from the region, . . .
Having no peasants of our own, we must resort to renting a few thousand of them at a time.
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Responded on October 14, 2009 2:34 AM
ShaneT.
Regarding the tone of the 2007 amnesty debate, Mr. Gillespse he is misreading the reaction of the American people. Most of those such as myself who opposed amnesty, Z-visas and the like were and are more angry at the decades-long refusal of our political leaders to enforce our immigration laws than at illegal aliens themselves. See the Rasmussen Reports poll from June 2008 that showed "83% of those angry at immigration direct their anger at the federal government while only 12% points towards the immigrants." Sure, there are shrill voices on BOTH sides of this debate, but on the whole those of us who support the rule of law and oppose another mass amnesty are able to separate failed immigration policies from those here illegally. The U-6 effective unemploment rate is 17%. There are about 12-20 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., including 8 million illegal workers, which President Obama wants to amnesty. In addition we are very generously still admitting over 1 million LEGAL immigrants annually. Sure, we can t...
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Regarding the tone of the 2007 amnesty debate, Mr. Gillespse he is misreading the reaction of the American people. Most of those such as myself who opposed amnesty, Z-visas and the like were and are more angry at the decades-long refusal of our political leaders to enforce our immigration laws than at illegal aliens themselves.
See the Rasmussen Reports poll from June 2008 that showed "83% of those angry at immigration direct their anger at the federal government while only 12% points towards the immigrants." Sure, there are shrill voices on BOTH sides of this debate, but on the whole those of us who support the rule of law and oppose another mass amnesty are able to separate failed immigration policies from those here illegally.
The U-6 effective unemploment rate is 17%. There are about 12-20 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., including 8 million illegal workers, which President Obama wants to amnesty. In addition we are very generously still admitting over 1 million LEGAL immigrants annually.
Sure, we can talk more about the contribution of legal immigrants, but in light of the above, is it any wonder why Americans were and are upset at the crass indifference of Washington D.C. to our plight?
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Responded on August 31, 2010 6:53 AM
Winfred Voci
I found a link to your web site on another web site, and I should say... Your website is a lot better. You make the subject easier to understand, thanks
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