According to Pew, while only 41 percent of Americans as a whole say they want a bigger government that provides more services, a whopping 75 percent of Hispanics do.
The GOP’s post-election tendency to reduce Latinos to people who are motivated by immigration and social issues rather than by economic concerns or merely want government handouts is wrong—and dangerous to the party, says Peter Beinart.
If you listen carefully, you can hear two, divergent, Republican responses to the new, browner, America that defeated Mitt Romney last week.
The first can be summed up in a term deployed by Charles Krauthammer, and numerous other conservative pundits, in recent days: Hispanics are “natural” Republicans. They’re culturally traditional; they run small businesses; they’d have voted for Romney in a heartbeat if only he’d not asked them to deport themselves. For right-wing Beltway pundits, many of whom were already more pro-immigration than their party’s grassroots, the answer is obvious: cut a deal that gives illegal immigrants a path to citizenship; eliminate immigration as a wedge issue and watch Hispanics embrace the GOP.
The nice thing about this view is that it’s not racist. It envisions Hispanics as Tea Partiers with visa problems. But it’s wrong.
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