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Sidewalks by Tom Deignan

Give Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich credit on immigration views

Posted on Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 08:43 AM

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- December 2009 (3 entries)

Newt Gringrich

Imagine you are political advisor to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

For months, your campaign has floundered. Your guy was once one of the most powerful men in Washington, the speaker of the House and a man famous for his intellectual power.

But then he fell from power and more or less vanished from the Washington scene. So much so that when Gingrich announced he was running for president, one was tempted to say, “1996 called, they want Newt Gingrich back.”

But the only thing weaker than Gingrich seemed to be, well, every other GOP candidate.

Herman Cain has his woman problems and Michele Bachmann’s kook factor is just a bit too high and, finally, Mitt Romney has, well, a Mitt Romney problem. In that, he can’t convince anyone that he is anybody other than Mitt Romney and, thus, simply a lackluster political candidate.

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And lo and behold, in recent weeks, Gingrich has surged. And so, you can imagine how his political advisors must have felt when Gingrich, finally in the lead, went ahead and made some crazy comments

about immigration last week.

"If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully, and kick you out."

Huh? What was Gingrich, Mr. Conservative, actually saying? Was he suggesting that not all immigrants are filthy freeloaders?

He continued, "I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter-century. And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, ‘Let's be humane.’"

Humane?

That’s not a word that has been associated with Republican immigration policy since, well, since Rick Perry suggested it was heartless for candidates to bash immigrants.

Then again, we see how well Rick Perry’s candidacy is going these days. And that’s why you must feel bad for Gingrich’s advisors. But it’s also why Gingrich deserves credit for reframing the Republican debate over this contentious issue.

Needless to say, Gingrich’s opponents pounced on him, bashing his ideas as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

They did this, in large part, because they believe that Republican primary voters in general – and Tea

Party backers in particular – are hungry for a hard-liner when it comes to immigration.

And they may be right. After all, Perry’s thinking-outside-the-box did not exactly help him.

Furthermore, as John Heilemann noted in this week’s New York magazine, there is disturbing evidence that elements in the Republican Party have anti-immigrant tendencies on their GOP wish list.

“In a landmark book-length study being published this month, the Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol… -- on the basis of copious, careful, and not unsympathetic field reporting” found that an “animus against ‘freeloaders’…unifies the tea-partiers across the nation, with illegal immigrants preeminent in that category.”

That a group of people accused of working so hard that they steal American jobs can also be seen as

freeloaders is another question for another time.

As for Gingrich, perhaps he is simply hoping to make it through the Republican primaries and win some Hispanic votes in the November 2012.

If so, maybe he has looked at past immigration voting patterns. The Irish, for example, voted

Democratic for over 100 years not only because local ward bosses, though often corrupt, were also responsive to their needs.

It did not hurt that Republicans harbored some strong anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant candidates. Then again, so did certain elements of the Democratic party in the south and Mid-West.

And even then the Republicans could not sway significant numbers of white ethnic Catholics until the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s much talk among conservatives about the 11 million illegal immigrants in America. They focus on the term “illegal” in that sentence.

Perhaps Gingrich has realized that someone should focus on “11 million” and try and win some of those or their children’s’ votes.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or Facebook.com/tomdeignan)
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allentown | Dec 09, 2011, 11:43 PM EST

CNN Poll has Republicans by 71% to 27% want illegal aliens to go home. The illegal alien who has been here 25 years had many years he could have made it right, but chose not to do so. Gingrich wants to reward this illegal alien with amnesty.

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seanomelbourne | Dec 09, 2011, 06:06 PM EST

I did mean Illegal immigrants.They pay state and local government taxes ,also purchase vehicles,rent houses,buy electronics and they even have to spend money on food.Of course theres' the cheap labour working in industries Americans find beneath them and this makes the rich richer and suffice to say their silence on "illegal Immigrtaion".

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joycean | Dec 09, 2011, 11:53 AM EST

There is distinct difference between legal and illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants strain our social services - medical facilities, public schools, welfare to the tune of $26 billion per year. They contribute very little. Most are migrant farm workers, day laborers, household help.If they are here illegally, they are committing crimes by being here.Most are Hispanic who cross our borders at night. There are also Irish illegals. During the Troubles, IRA men on the run were sheltered here by family members. Nowadays, Irish like to blame Irish Americans for the Troubles because of them even though most Irish Americans had nothing to do with them. If Irish come into this country intending to stay illegally, they should go home.

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seanomelbourne | Dec 08, 2011, 05:33 PM EST

Tell me George how much do immigrants contribute to the American economy? Some sources put it in the Hundreds of millions.

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GeorgeDillon | Dec 08, 2011, 02:05 PM EST

The amount that illegal immigrants pay in tax is infinitesmally low. What, does Gingrich (and Deignan) think there are lots of people on 100k a year who are illegals? Don't be such fools. It's the same in Ireland. Most immigrants in Ireland are takers, not givers. They contribute nothing--get them out.

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joycean | Dec 08, 2011, 10:47 AM EST

Gingrich says these hypothetical illegals would have been paying taxes. I wonder if they would, or if that could blow their cover and they'd keep transactions to cash.That young man who was killed in Boston a few weeks ago was trying to keep to the down low.

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