I've been looking at the Republican National Committee's "Growth and Opportunity Project", released with a certain amount of understatement a couple of days ago. It has been alternatively described as a look forward and as a post-mortem of why the Republicans lost the election. My gauge is that it's both: one (the post-mortem) being packaged as the other, since in political circles "optics" and "atmospherics" count for so much, and one can't appear to be so absorbed in resounding defeats as to be unable to move forward.
Still, it's important that the Republicans give some thought to the whys and wherefores, if for no other reason than they need to carefully consider what they need do not to become the political equivalent of the dinosaur, the dodo, and sundry other extinct entities. But that's their burden to carry, since it's their party.
From a less self-serving perspective (mine) we, the American polity, deserve better — much better — than to become a one-party system. The Republicans need to remake themselves and become competitive at the national level, and ultimately at the state and local level, if demographic trends relating to young adults are to be taken into account.
So it was with great interest, and then dismay and disappointment that I took a look at what they had to say about their immigration proposals. It is a sad piece of confusion and misunderstanding.
Consider this, from page 8: "If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy".
Wait, what was that? "Self-deportation"? Where, exactly, would American citizens of Hispanic descent self-deport to? The land of their citizenship, which would be … America?
The long and short of it, where this "growth" plan is concerned, is to fall into the trap of arguing that the Republicans must support "comprehensive immigration reform", which is neither comprehensive nor reform as envisioned — it is not much beyond a broad-based amnesty that, contrary to the views of the authors of the report, will unlikely sway Hispanic youth to vote for Republicans solely on that basis. Rather, it is a classic example of a species hastening its own demise through swelling the ranks of future Democratic voters. Remember the last amnesty? How does the GOP think we got to where we are at this moment?
Third parties, where are you when we need you?