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Republican and Democratic Strategists Agree: Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Endangering GOP's Chances

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paul begalaWith demographic realities now undeniable, more and more political analysts agree that Republicans are committing political suicide by embracing hard-line, anti-immigrant policies.  A piece by Paul Begala today in The Daily Beast lifts up some important quotes from prominent GOP strategists who agree that Republican candidates must change on immigration if they have any hopes of winning a national election.

Begala writes:

For generations, we Texans gave our boys names like William Travis and Sam Houston. Know what the No. 1 name for boys in Texas is today?  No, not Rick Perry or George W. For 14 of the last 15 years, it’s been Jose.  With Latinos the fastest-growing segment of the population, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yet the Republican Party seems not to have gotten the memo…as on so many issues, Romney has put his principles in a blind trust and raced to the furthest fringe of the kook right on immigration. He’s comically called for ‘self-deportation’ of the 11 million souls living and working in America without papers. He’s also proposed to use Arizona’s draconian and controversial immigration law as ‘a model’ for the United States. (Eighty-one percent of Latinos oppose the Arizona immigration law.).

To further his point, GOP strategist and former Mitt Romney aide, Mike Murphy, says that in order to win the Latino vote, Republicans need to change more than just their rhetoric.  They need to change their policy: “We need to reject nativism and give undocumented aliens a way to earn legal residency status and eventually earn the right to citizenship.”

View the entire piece at The Daily Beast.