As is
well-known, the modern Republican Party was born in the 1850s when the then
Whig Party, one of the two majors of the time, split over the matter of
slavery. Rather, it split primarily over the matter of the degree of expansion
of slavery into the Western Territories that should be permitted, and under
what conditions that expansion would take place. The Slave Power, represented
primarily by the Democratic Party, wanted unlimited expansion. The Southern
Whigs were willing to make some compromises on that question, but not too many.
The Northern Whigs, for the most part, wanted to limit that expansion almost in
its entirety. Abraham Lincoln certainly belonged to that wing of the Whigs: no
interest or intention to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
then-present slave states, which after all had been ensconced in the
Constitution, but with every intention of preventing its further expansion
westward. So the Northern Whigs were the main component of the new party.
However,
there were other components as well. One was the "Temperance
Movement," which campaigned to bring down the level of alcoholic beverage
use if not ban its sale altogether. This strand of thinking has remained in the
Republican Party down to this very day. The GOP was the principal force behind
the adoption of the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution which went into
effect in 1920 and was repealed in 1933. There was a strong element of
religious/ethnic prejudice underlying this movement from its beginnings:
originally rural Protestants against Catholics: Irish (whiskey), Italians
(wine), and Germans (both Catholic and Protestant, beer).
It was
President Richard Nixon who launched the modern version of Prohibition, the
so-called "War on Drugs," in 1971. It differed in one major way from
its predecessor. While Prohibition illegalized the importation and sale of
alcoholic beverages, the "Drug War" illegalized the possession and
use by individuals of the targeted substances. Nixon's "war," really
a war on certain users of certain recreational mood altering drugs (RMADs), has
continued down to this very day, and has a strong element of racism in it.
Although it has had little impact on the overall use of the drugs at which it
is aimed, it has had a major impact on the sub-set of the drug-using population
--- African-Americans. While about three-quarters of users of the
targeted-drugs are white, about three-quarters of those in prison for
drug-use-related offenses are non-white. For the most part it is the Republican
Party, tracing its roots back to its Temperance Movement co-founders, which
maintains the highest level of support for continuing this "war."
A second
major component of the original Republican Party was the "American
Party" of the time, known also by its street-name, the
"Know-Nothings." For a brief period their leader was former President
Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded to the Presidency upon the death of Zachary
Taylor in 1850, and then lost the election of 1852 to yet another of the line
of totally incompetent pre-Civil War US Presidents, Franklin Pierce. Fillmore
then ran as the American Party's candidate for the Presidency in 1856, after
which time at least some of his supporters joined the Republican Party over
that question of expansion of slavery into the territories. And that is the
strand of the Republican Party which has had a major impact on immigration
policy down to the very day, just like the Temperance Movement has had on
RMAD-use policy.
It was the
Republican Party which passed the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924
which set country-by-country immigration quotas, based on the census of 1890.
The "Reagan Reforms" of 1986 were supposedly set up to
"solve" the "illegal immigration problem" of people coming
into the country without immigration papers from South of the border. But one
of its major objectives was to make sure that Reaganite factory-farmers could
continue to receive a steady supply of low-wage farm workers. It
"solved" nothing else. And so we come down to the present time. 
.The Wall.. The GOP: Don't tear it down --- put it up, further! by longislandwins
For some
years now the GOP has been out in front on demanding: a) that the Mexico/US
border be made impermeable or at least as impermeable as possible and b) that
as many undocumented workers as possible be rounded up and then deported,
regardless of the fact that many families have US citizen children (which the
Obama Administration happens to have been doing, to no applause from the GOP
whatsoever). Some churl on that side made up the delightful term "anchor
babies" to describe such children. "Tough," is their position.
"Deport them all." Lindsey Graham, appropriately enough Senator from
the First State in Secession, South Carolina, has proposed amending the
Constitution to end the provision that if you are born here you are
automatically a citizen.
But there
have been some changes recently, led in part by that self-same Sen. Graham.
Ostensibly because the GOP is steadily losing market-share among Latino voters
some GOP leaders and advisors are telling the GOP that they have to modify
their position on immigration. Working with certain Democrats, some Senate
Republicans have come up with a very cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming
supposed road to citizenship for currently undocumented immigrants. Well folks,
I'm here to tell you (actually the House Republican leadership has already told
us), that just ain't going to happen. So don't hold your breath. And neither
should the 11,000,000 or so undocumented immigrants and their families,
US-citizen or not. For several reasons.
First, is
that the reason certain Republicans give for supporting the "creation of a
road to citizenship" (however arduous), that the party needs to do so to
increase its appeal to Latino voters, is completely fatuous. Why should any
Latino voter (other than a political supporter of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) vote
Republican just because that party had changed its immigration policy? First,
Latinos are hardly a homogenous group (although Republican racists are very
likely to think of them in that regard). Second, Republican economic and social
policies are more and more becoming less-and-less attractive to Latino
working-class voters, just as they are to working-class voters of all ethnic
groups. And if the Republicans think that they could make any serious in-roads
among Latino voters, why is that group one of the principal targets of the GOP
Voter Repression Campaign.
Second, and
perhaps more importantly, the GOP is gradually losing hold of policy positions
that they can use to appeal to their demographically shrinking base: white,
rural, Protestant and reactionary Catholic, racist, homophobic. They are losing
on their dog-whistle issue for homophobia, gay-marriage. They are stirring up
the abortion rights movement that has been so quiescent in recent years. They
cannot yet use open anti-black racism, although more-and-more they are using
dog whistles there and their out-in-front leaders like Rush Limbaugh and Sean
Hannity are more-and-more engaging in open code-word racism. But the
"anti-illegal immigrant" policy is a solid one with their base, right
now, and they are not going to give it up, Marco Rubio and John McCain to the
contrary notwithstanding.
And so,
third, nothing is going to pass when Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama says "I
will not support citizenship for people who entered the country
illegally," Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte of
Virginia gets an "A+ immigration reduction grade" from a leading
anti-immigration group, "NumbersUSA" (betcha he gets an A+ from the
NRA as well), good old Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, interviewed by
fellow reactionary Laura Ingraham, on the air told Sen. Rubio to "walk
away" from the issue of immigration reform.
Anti-immigration
nativism is as much in the blood lines of the Republican Party as is using the
criminal law in an attempt to control the use of certain RMADs (or course as of
this time never against the use of the two by-far major drug killers, tobacco
and alcohol --- too much campaign funding from them). For the variety of current
political reasons briefly summarized above, there it shall remain.
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Note: The quotes from current Republicans are taken from "Comment: Working," The New Yorker, June 3, 2013, by William Finnegan.
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Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony
Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books.
Dr. Jonas' latest book is The 15%
Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S.,
1981-2022: A futuristic Novel, Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books,
Punto Press Publishing, 2013,
click here, and
available on Amazon.
