Demographics drive politics

By PETER SCHRAG

SACRAMENTO BEE

The departure of Mitt Romney from the presidential campaign ought to lower the decibel level on what loomed as the nastiest wedge issue of 2008: illegal immigration. Although John McCain supported comprehensive reform, then flipped and pleaded mea culpa before the conservatives he’s now courting, he obviously understands its complexity. Ditto Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

That hardly means immigration will vanish as an issue. It will be played to a fare-thee-well in a lot of congressional and legislative races, even in city and county races, especially in districts where new immigrants are increasingly visible on the streets and in the malls, but not yet on the voter rolls.

Opponents of illegal immigration have also seized on it in a lot of bills, including the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program, where there could be a claim that some benefit might go to somebody who wasn’t supposed to be here.

And there are still the frothers — Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and countless other drive-time talkers who, without questioning or (often) checking the data, retail the stuff of anti-immigration outfits.

The GOP, said Frank Sharry, the head of the National Immigration Forum, which supports comprehensive reform, “is a party that’s in the grip of nativism.”

Getting past slogans

Still, given the demographic and economic realities, a realistic debate that gets past shouted slogans like “illegals” and “amnesty” would be a healthy thing.

Earlier this month, the California Budget Project released a report showing, among other things, how big a chunk of the state’s current deficit is due not to spending increases but to tax cuts. It’s called “Two Steps Back: Should California Cut Its Way to a Balanced Budget?” (Find it at www.cbp.org.)

But the most striking chart in the report is one that shows that while California’s work force will grow about 26 percent between 2000 and 2020, the part of the population that’s 65 or older — the retiring boomers — will grow a whopping 75 percent. There are similar numbers for the nation as a whole. By 2030, 22 years from now, it gets worse. Where, in 2000, there were 4.74 people of working age for every retiree, by 2030, there’ll be 2.46.

Yes, the proportion of kids 19 or under will increase a little less slowly than the working-age population, but it doesn’t come close to offsetting the huge increase in the older population.

Missing workers

Who’s going to do the work to support all those seniors, pay for their pensions, Social Security and Medicare, pave the roads they’ll still drive on, and fund the cops, the firefighters and all the rest? Who’ll pay for national defense, current, past and future?

Even with no change in immigration policy, a growing portion of the workers of 2020 and 2030 will be immigrants and their children, but unless they can come out of the shadows, can get an education past high school, can drive and can work in the above-ground economy, there’s not a prayer that they’ll be able to do the high-tech jobs that the retiring boomers were doing.

Researchers such as Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California have been generating these kinds of demographic data for some time. Myers also points out that with the shift of immigration patterns to the Midwest and the Southeast and with the sharply declining Mexican birthrate, immigration pressure on California and the Southwest may decline to the point where even conservatives will want more immigrant labor, not less.

Virtually all of today’s arguments against illegals were made at the turn of the 20th century — with one exception: In those days, there were no “illegals” except those who, by the categories of the time, were classified as idiots, feeble-minded, insane, prostitutes, criminals, anarchists, carriers of communicable diseases (and, of course, Chinese).

The charge back then: They would undercut wages, take good American jobs, dilute the native stock, save a little money and run back to Poland or Italy with their loot. They had criminal tendencies, and they’d never assimilate.

Take Rep. Tom Tancredo, the loudest opponent of immigration in Congress. A few years before his grandfather arrived from Sicily in 1900, southern Italians were classified as an inferior race. Once that belief was written into law in the 1920s, the old man would almost certainly have been excluded.

Growing numbers

There’s one other demographic factoid about which McCain and many other Republicans are obviously aware. By 2020, according to the Census, 18 percent of American residents will be Latino (assuming the high rates of intermarriage will still make such a count possible), almost half again as many as there were in 2000; by 2050 for every three non-Hispanic whites, there’ll be one Latino, a projected total of 102 million. A lot of them will vote.

In the meantime, the exclusionists want to make things so miserable for illegals that they’ll all pack up and go home. It ain’t gonna happen, but in the meantime, the GOP is converting a lot of potential Republicans into Democrats. That’s two-ways stupid.

Scripps Howard News Service