Time for grown-ups to lead on immigration reform Cokie and Steven Roberts:

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opin...7533d69bd.html

President Barack Obama has called for an “adult conversation” about the country's fiscal failures. Well, Washington desperately needs a grown-up approach to another unavoidable crisis — the immigration mess.

Being an adult means two things: Confronting reality, not fantasy, and taking responsibility for your actions. And both issues — budget shortfalls and immigration overloads — are rooted in the same fundamental truth: Demography is destiny.

Retiring baby boomers are fueling deficits (at least in part), and they will continue to overwhelm programs like Medicare and Social Security. The immigration quandary starts with about 12 million undocumented newcomers who are often related to citizens, including their own children. These immigrants (like the boomers) are not going anywhere. Can the political system summon the will to deal with them?

So far, the answer has been no. Even a modest and popular proposal — providing a path to citizenship for hardworking young people who were brought here as infants — failed at the end of the last Congress. But there are small signs that sensible people in both parties are ready to start talking — like adults.

Early steps
Politico reported recently that two key senators — Democrat Charles Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — are “taking some early steps to test the political will” in both parties for grappling with immigration. “Who knows,” said Schumer, “we might surprise everyone and get something done.”
The skeptics might well be right, Politico rates the chances for an immigration deal at “zero,” but there's another factor pushing Republicans like Graham to take the issue seriously: political self-interest. In the 2008 election, two out of three Hispanic voters favored the Democrats, but among younger voters under 30, four out of five rejected the Republicans. In 2010, Hispanic voters provided key margins for victorious Democrats in at least three states: California, Nevada and Colorado.


If demography is destiny, the power of minority voters is only going to grow. Last year was the first one in American history where the majority of babies born in this country were nonwhite. Factor in immigrants, and whites now account for less than half of all 3-year-olds in the country, according to a study of census data by the Brookings Institution. Four out of five new Americans added to the population in the past 10 years were racial minorities. “This is a huge demographic transformation,” William Frey of Brookings told the New York Times. “A cultural generation gap is emerging.”


Smart Republicans — meaning those who can count — understand the threat to their party posed by these trends. Enduring hostility to immigration reform could kill the GOP's chances of competing in future national elections. Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who is married to a Mexican woman, delivered a blunt message to fellow Republicans last month: “It is important to realize that the Hispanic population, which is the fastest-growing population in the country, will also eventually be the fastest-growing population of voters. It would be incredibly stupid over the long haul to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote.”


Political consequences

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a former Republican congressman with Cuban roots, reinforced Bush's grim prediction: “If we become perceived as an anti-immigrant party, America, being a country of immigrants, will never allow us to be the majority party.”

This is not guesswork; it has happened before. From 1932 through 1964, Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections, and a key part of their coalition were the immigrants — and their children — who came here by the millions from Ireland and Italy, Poland and Russia, between 1880 and 1920.

The problem is that while the United States is certainly a “country of immigrants,” it has also been a country of immigrant haters. Nativism is as American as the Statue of Liberty, and open-minded lawmakers like Graham have to fear primary challenges from right-wingers who cynically exploit those xenophobic impulses. (That's exactly what happened to John McCain in Arizona last year.)

As a result, resolving immigration might be even more difficult than balancing the budget. Courage is not a cardinal virtue in Washington these days, but that's what it will take. Courage and a grasp of basic arithmetic. Those nonwhite 3-year-olds will be voting in 15 years. And when they come of age, they will certainly know which party embraced their aspirations and which party shut them out. As Jeb Bush says, it would be “incredibly stupid” for the Republicans to ignore demographic reality. And that's why an adult conversation about immigration is not a totally impossible dream.