6/23/2022 The Surprise Issue Driving GOP CampaignsKatie Britt won the Alabama GOP Senate primary runoff last night, and one of the main issues she ran on was immigration. Britt has endorsed Senator Tom Cotton’s 2017 RAISE Act, which was a plan to decrease legal immigration by 50 percent. Britt is not the only Republican Senate candidate to come out in favor of stricter immigration policies. Blake Masters, running for the GOP nomination in the Arizona Senate race, wants to triple the size of the Border Patrol, wants to finish the border wall, and opposes all amnesty for illegal aliens. While he has espoused liberal immigration policies in the past, he now pledges to “end illegal immigration.” The winner of the Ohio GOP Senate primary, J. D. Vance, is focusing part of his campaign on illegal immigration, promising changes similar to Masters’s. Yet Vance goes a step further, seeking to overhaul the current legal immigration system: “Millions of people want to come here, and we should only allow them if they contribute something meaningful to our country.” Vance wants to curb the number of legal immigrants coming into the country, prioritizing skilled immigrants. In one of his primary-campaign ads, called, “Are You a Racist?,” Vance said, “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” These Republicans clearly believe immigration is an issue that can drive voters to the polls, even in an election year dominated by inflation and other economic concerns. The RAISE Act, endorsed by Katie Britt, was a plan pushed by Senator Cotton and former Georgia senator David Perdue in 2017. The bill, reintroduced in 2019 by Cotton and Perdue as well as Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.), was pitched as a way to boost job and wage growth, end chain migration, and welcome the highest-skilled immigrants to the country. The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act would cut the number of green cards issued on an annual basis from 1 million to 500,000. Until recently, Republicans generally maintained a position on immigration that illegal immigration needs to be halted, but legal immigration is good and should be encouraged. And after Mitt Romney lost the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2012, Republicans believed that in order to cater to the Hispanic vote, they would have to move their immigration stance to the left. Some, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), endorsed amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Even the staunchly pro-Trump Fox host Sean Hannity suggested in 2012 that some law-abiding illegal immigrants should be granted citizenship. Donald Trump’s clinching of the nomination in 2016 and the ascent of populism within the GOP pushed immigration restrictionism to the forefront of Republican politics. Trump campaigned on building a wall on the southern border and deporting illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration, Trump maintained, undermines the American workforce by taking American jobs and lowering wages for native-born Americans. Comments are closed.
|