Latino Backlash Could Doom GOP

NEW YORK--As I watched political history on my television and computer screens Tuesday night, I couldn't help but think about Lionel Sosa, the Latino who may have lost the most in this week's election. Sosa, a political consultant and director of Mexicans and Texans Thinking Together (MATT), a nonprofit in San Antonio, is largely credited with developing the strategies that colored almost 40 percent of the Latino electorate Republican red. I was curious about how it felt for someone who worked closely with Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan to watch his work turn Democrat blue. (Experts I interviewed and exit polls estimate that about 70 percent of Latinos voted Democratic last Tuesday, as compared to 53 percent in 2004). So, I called Sosa at the MATT office.

"I don't think everything I worked for is lost," Sosa said, "but Latinos did send a message to the Republican party: If we don't humanize the approach to immigration, it will cost us the Latino vote." His choice of the word "humanize" was telling, for Tuesday's election is but another reminder of the GOP's urgent need to move beyond appeals to the baser instincts of its still predominantly white base. Lionel's soft-spoken strategic advice must roar in the ears of his longtime friend Karl Rove, whose efforts to broaden the largely white Republican tent appear to have imploded.

Whether Republicans' enforcement-only approach to immigration -- the infamous wall and other punitive measures -- drives Latinos as deep into the anti-Republican camp as African-Americans (whose support for GOP is consistently in single digits) depends on whether we see the 187-ization of the nation.

I came to understand the long-term effects of anti-immigrant policies after fighting such policies in California. The most famous is Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that called for the denial of health and education services to the children of undocumented immigrants. Prop. 187, which was eventually blocked in the courts, turned the Golden State into a template for the current immigration wars.

As I listen to strategists like Sosa and other experts ponder the possibility of an anti-Republican backlash among Latinos, I'm reminded of a 1993 meeting between a delegation of Latino activists and Latino elected officials and then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, the main sponsor of Prop 187. "I resent the implication that I'm a racist," Wilson told the group, pounding his desk. "I am not a racist and I give the Hispanic community more credit than to fall for this kind of race-baiting." I'd asked Wilson how he felt knowing that many of the 10-year-old Mexican and Salvadoran kids I worked with thought he hated them because of his leadership around Proposition 187.

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