The immigration issue is turning the people of the United States blue, Democratic blue, a new report claims regarding the effect the immigration issue has on elections. The document, which was released on Tuesday by the Center for Immigration Studies, indicates that the Republican Party is continuing to turn off legal immigrant voters as a result of its anti-immigration stance.
“Each one percentage point increase in the immigrant share of a large country’s population reduces the Republican share of the two-party vote by nearly 0.6 percentage points on average,” says College Park’s University of Maryland professor of government James Gimpel. The report, published by the Center, which is in favor of low levels of immigration, states that: “The conclusion is inescapable… An urban county that cast 49 percent of its vote for the Republican candidate in 1980 could be expected to drop to 43 percent by 2012, just as consequence of a rising immigrant population.”
The slow motion process is also splitting the political wing of the Republican Party from its business wing, which includes the party’s leading advocates, legislators and voters. The business wing greatly profits from the inflow of immigrant workers and consumers and is now working alongside the Democrats to try and pass the Senate approved immigration reform bill, which would increase the inflow of temporary guest workers and legal immigrants by as much as 40 million in the course of the next ten years.
The report says that the political wing’s refusal to move with the times is causing their legislators to be rejected by voters and risks shutting their party permanently out of the White House.