barking_iguana | The GOP's Immigration/Xenophobia Problem

As Kos notes, the immigration issue may help the Democrats pick up a US Senate seat in Texas in 2008. But the Republican's problems go beyond 2008 and beyond specifically Hispanic immigration. The only thing that the various factions of the GOP have in common is xenophobia (or, in the case of Wall Street, profiting on that xenophobia).

Since immigration rates were abnormally low from 1915 to 1965, that was a viable glue for a while. But with increasing numbers of Hispanic and other immigrant families becoming integrated into society and voting, Rove's and Bush's fear of demographics will be realized.

It took WWII for all the 1870-1915 immigrants to be almost fully recognized as Americans, and it wasn't for 30 years after that until the acceptance was virtually complete.

Perhaps that's why they so desperately wanted the War of Civilizations, hoping that the rather ridiculous militant A-Rabs could be pumped up into a menace of the same scale as the Nazis, or at least the Stalin-era Communists. A sufficiently scary outside menace would be the psychological prerequisite for the xenophobic 'culture' voters to accept non-Muslim Americans into the fold, so that we wouldn't be outnumbered and overrun.

But losing the war in Iraq is forcing people to look more critically at the magnitude of the 'Islamist' problem. Believing that one is losing to a threat of the same importance as the Nazis carries a prohibitive psychological cost, even if the actual threat and tangible cost are much less.