The GOP's hopelessly complicated immigration politics

While Hillary Clinton was shattering one more glass ceiling on her way to the Democratic presidential nomination last week, no Republican senatorial candidate even managed to advance to the general election in California's nonpartisan "jungle primary."

In November, the state that gave America Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan will not have a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate on the ballot. Instead, two Democrats will face off in the general election, since they were the top two vote-getters in California's primary. (Distant Democratic runner-up Loretta Sanchez ran more than half a million votes ahead of the top Republican vote-getter, who received just 8 percent of the statewide vote.)

This is the first time this has happened in California since the direct election of senators began. And it raises an important question: Is the GOP's tough-on-immigration stance to blame for turning the nation's biggest state so clearly and reliably blue? After all, Latinos now outnumber whites in the Golden State.

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Donald Trump's supporters often urge critics to look at California. If you don't reduce immigration, they contend, a flood of liberal Latinos will enter the country and turn the entire U.S. as Democratic as the Golden State. It's the destiny of demographics, and the conservative agenda will be sunk.

Nonsense, counter Trump's detractors. It was precisely the kind of anti-immigrant politics that Trump is peddling that led to Proposition 187, a 1994 California ballot initiative backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) that prevented illegal immigrants from utilizing government services. This alienated a generation of Latino voters and turned California into a one-party Democratic state. Trying to control the influx of Latino immigrants, Trump's critics say, will only alienate the tens of millions of Latinos who are already here.

Of course, as with most things in life, the politics of immigration are more complicated than either side claims.

In 1992, California went big for Bill Clinton and elected two liberal Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. That was two full years before Prop 187 passed. As for Wilson, he managed to get himself re-elected in 1994 by campaigning as a supporter of the initiative, which itself passed easily (with 59 percent of the black vote and 31 percent of the Latino vote). And though Prop 187 has come to be seen as Wilson's eventual downfall, it didn't necessarily turn California blue. You may recall that California recalled a highly unpopular Democratic governor in 2003 and replaced him with a Republican movie star.

Still, Trump has taken things much further than immigration restrictionists in the GOP typically do. Exhibit A: his attacks on the federal judge handling the Trump University case. Trump argues that the judge is biased against him because of his Mexican heritage. The remark has been justly criticized because Trump offered no evidence that Judge Gonzalo Curiel was actually biased, all while calling a native-born American a "Mexican."

Yet as Trump's critics within the GOP implicitly acknowledge when they argue his immigration stance will doom the party with the descendants of recent immigrants for generations, heritage does matter.

This is true even when you take immigration out of the picture and just look at people with long ties to the United States. William T. Sherman is a war hero up north, a war criminal to many with southern roots. To the white descendant of a Confederate soldier and the black descendant of American slaves, the Confederate battle flag represents entirely different things.

These different perspectives can influence how people vote for generations. It takes time for them to lose their salience, just as it takes time for immigrant groups to assimilate culturally and economically.

With rare exceptions, such as refugees fleeing communist countries like Cuba during the Cold War, immigrant groups have only started voting for the Republican Party once that assimilation has already taken place. If Republican champions of increased immigration make assimilation sound too easy, some Trump-style restrictionists speak as if it cannot happen at all. The Irish-American, German-American, Italian-American and even the occasional Latino showing up at Trump rallies donning “Make America Great Again” hats should tell them otherwise.

Latinos have been becoming more socially liberal in recent years. Recent immigration groups have tended to vote for politicians who support legal abortion and same-sex marriage. And California is obviously no bastion of social conservatism. It’s something that conservative advocates of more immigration ought to consider rather than simply arguing that various immigrant groups would be “natural Republicans” if it weren’t for the immigration politics of people like Trump.

But there’s also nothing inevitable about this. Realism about immigration shouldn’t preclude talk about assimilation, outreach to Latino churches, or recognizing the potential of the explosive growth of Global South Christianity to alter the contours of this issue in the future.

People who come from different backgrounds can have common values. Trump has taken a half-step in the direction of acknowledging this when he argued that he was as interested in protecting first-generation American workers as tenth-generation ones.

A more intelligent immigration debate might be too much to ask for during this crazy campaign, but it is something we sorely need.