How GOP mega-donors burned the conservative base on immigration

Republicans are angry about immigration.

A Gallup poll last year found that a small plurality of GOP voters ranked it their top issue. A more recent survey by the company found that 84 percent of Republicans were dissatisfied with the current level of immigration.

Most Americans who told Gallup they were dissatisfied with current immigration levels wanted less immigration. Only 7 percent wanted more.

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Looking at the crowded Republican presidential primary field, these voters have slim pickings. Yes, even Jeb Bush is (sort of) opposed to Barack Obama's executive amnesty. But the only GOP presidential candidate actually talking about immigration reduction is Rick Santorum.

My colleague Jamie Weinstein at The Daily Caller recently reported that nearly all the major Republican candidates for the 2016 nomination either currently support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants or have supported one in the recent past.

There's clearly a constituency for border security and lower immigration within the GOP. It's also an issue on which so many of the big-name candidates are vulnerable.

So why hasn't anybody come forward and tried to fill this void? Recent rumblings from Republican mega-donors may provide the answer.

Consider last week's conference call in which major GOP donors held up Bush as their model on immigration.

"Certainly Gov. Bush has decided to lead on this issue," the Tampa Bay Times quoted former Romney national finance chairman Spencer Zwick as saying. Zwick reportedly added that candidates must avoid saying the "most outrageous thing so that they can make national news."

"We have to have someone who is willing to take on this issue," he continued. "We have to nominate a candidate who is willing to let action be stronger than inaction. Because as Republicans, we've let inaction be our model for too long."

"[Immigrants] did not come here for anything else other than improving their lives and we need them in order to improve our economy," said billionaire GOP donor Mike Fernandez.

The first half of his statement is largely true, but the economic benefits of mass unskilled immigration are much more ambiguous.

What wasn't so ambiguous: the message that Republican presidential candidates will rail against Bush on immigration at their peril. Indeed, why risk pissing off your donors and the media at the same time?

"This call with Norquist and GOP fundraisers [is] really drawing a stark line between Republican donor class and conservative base on immigration," BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins observed.

So who will take the conservative base's side of the argument?

Oddly enough, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney was the last person to do so, for the duration of the primaries at least. By running to the right on immigration, he was able to halt Rick Perry's rapid rise and then prevent Newt Gingrich from building on his South Carolina primary victory.

Romney had the money to tell the immigration-expanding donors to buzz off. Because the donors thought of Romney as one of them and knew his issue positions were subject to change, he was able to buck them without suffering the consequences. But Romney's subsequent loss in the general election hardened the Republican donor class' conventional wisdom on immigration. Mr. Do-It-Yourself Deportations performed terribly with Latinos and even worse with Asian Americans.

Immigration doves point to the fact that two of the last three nominees agreed with the donor class on immigration. Or that Tom Tancredo's single-issue restrictionist campaign went nowhere.

There are holes in this conventional wisdom, however. John McCain didn't do much better than Romney with Latinos, despite doing much more on immigration than George W. Bush had by 2004, the year the GOP presidential ticket actually did do relatively well among Latinos. And just because Tancredo's eccentric candidacy flamed out doesn't mean a better candidate couldn't improve upon his performance. Santorum and Mike Huckabee took their social conservatism further in the primaries than Sam Brownback did.

But there is an extent to which this kind of thinking about immigration becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A Republican who is willing to stand up to donor pressure on immigration is likely to be so monomaniacally focused on the issue as to repel voters who care about other things. Immigration attracts more politicians like Tancredo or Steve King than Barbara Jordan or even Jeff Sessions.

Nevertheless, you have to figure that some entrepreneur will eventually serve any identifiable market — unless they can't find the seed money to get off the ground.