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Hispanic Link News Service
HOUSTON, Texas — Before the 2006 midterm elections, chances looked good that a Republican leadership approach of benign neglect of banking and finance, admiration of a growing income gap between the rich and the middle class, low personal savings, high public deficits, unreported war costs and a promise of incorporating migrating populations into our nation’s workforce would keep Republicans in office.
After all, George Bush had received unprecedented Hispanic support (read support for immigration reform) in the 2000 and 2004 elections crafted by Karl Rove. As a student of the 1896 William McKinley presidential campaign, Rove understood how a fundamentally changing economy, immigration and a very diverse national population affects political fortunes.
It worked in 2004 but Republicans needed immigration reform to bring in new members to the GOP base. Already Ronald Reagan’s 1982 reforms had gained sympathetic ears from new citizens and Republicans harvested new voters and a sympathetic hearing for their neoconservative pleadings.
But a wacky portion of the party radicalized the immigration issue. They fused it with the fear of terrorism and came up with screwball ideas — like constructing a 2000-mile wall and militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border and conducting national dragnets that made our civil servants be perceived as Brown Shirts.
Let’s face it. While there’s a legitimate problem about transnational migrant workers and families, it assumes an ugly new shape when commandeered into a jingoistic, mostly anti-Mexican, movement.
Now here is the strange part: Those wackos who took to the radio waves and went on TV promoting their anti-immigrant dogma through their narcissistic screeds couldn’t be heard by Hispanics. They didn’t seem to understand that hundreds of thousands of immigrants and Hispanics were listening as they were being publicly demeaned and belittled and their children called deprecating names.
The hate horde thought Latino evangelical ministers didn’t know that Right Wing radicals were targeting their congregations.
That was dumb.
By 2006, some 270 Hispanic evangelical ministers who saw through the hypocrisy formed the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference. Collaboration between Latino evangelicals and Republicans started coming quickly apart.
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