Doc, I've Come Back, Back From The Future

As annoying as Arcadian can be in the comments section, he's right about one thing:  Immigration is not a winner for the Democrats.  Not in the short term, anyway, and that's the caveat.  There's two sides to this story.  One is the short term pandering blitz that the GOP is doing right now.  Balloon Juice's DougJ flags this Michael Gerson piece in the WaPo on the long term problems this will cause the GOP:

Immigration issues are emotional and complex. But this must be recognized for what it is: political suicide. Consider that Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.

Which is true.  But in the next 20-30 years, throwing Latinos under the bus may very well mean the GOP controls the country until then.  We've seen how much damage the GOP can do in just eight years.  Imagnie what they can do with another two, three decades, as Steve M. points out.

I'm concerned that, just as the Democratic Party lost the South (for two generations and counting) as a result of LBJ-era civil rights laws, a pro-immigration stand, however much it's a bulwark against nativist rage, may be how the party loses broad swatches of white America for decades.

This isn't even like gay marriage -- that other "someday the demographics will be on our side" issue -- in that it doesn't seem as if young whites disagree all that much with older whites. In a new Pew poll, which also finds a tremendous amount of support among whites for the Arizona law, 18-29-year-olds are evenly split on the law (59% of whites support it overall) -- but 61% of young people approve of "requiring people to produce documents verifying their legal status," and 52% approve of "allowing police to detain anyone unable to verify legal status."

And if the Dems lose the white vote now, they will get smashed in 2010 and 2012.  2040, 2050 will be cold comfort after another couple decades of GOP rule.  How do we fix this?  Steve again:

The problem, I think, is that opponents of the law aren't speaking across ideological lines -- we're not clearly rebutting the understandable notion that this is just a commonsense way to enforce the law. We're not making the heavyhanded nature of this law vivid and (to use a modish word) "relatable" to whites. We're just saying it's racist and fascist and contenting ourselves with nods of agreement who are already on our side.

This is a bad moment in American history, and frustrated, anxious citizens are receptive to scapegoating. The Arizona GOP has found quite a group of scapegoats, and Democrats and progressives underestimate the potency of this scapegoating at their peril.

Boycotting the All-Star game in 2011 won't matter if the GOP rolls to victory in 2010 on the backs of rounding up Latinos and crushing civil liberties. Getting out ahead of this now is important and explaining that this should be illegal.

Unfortunately, this is where Obama's whole Eric Holder problem comes into play, and the whole carrying over the Bush torture apologist regime means Obama's got no moral standing on opposing Arizona's law.  The GOP can rightfully attack the Dems as hypocrites, and Arizona-style laws will spread or become nationalized the instant we get a GOP president.

We're right back in a huge hole again, folks.  Getting out is going to be a long, long process.