Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (18 page)

Carpe Diem Schools (we love that name), founded in Yuma, Arizona, by visionary educator Rick Ogston and now expanding
to other states, do exactly that: Each student is taught through computer-based learning at his or her own pace. Tutors circulate within the classroom to monitor student progress and provide assistance. Students also participate in group and social activities. By tailoring education to individual abilities, no time is wasted and students are always engaged. Nor surprisingly, Carpe Diem has achieved great academic success, particularly for students who do not flourish in more traditional educational environments—and at far lower cost than traditional public schools.

The best way for education policy to catch up with technological advances is to fund students rather than schools. After the Arizona Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for foster and disabled children under the state’s Blaine Amendment, the Goldwater Institute proposed an innovative idea called education savings accounts.
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For any eligible student who leaves the public schools, the state each year deposits the student’s share of state education spending in an account owned by the student’s family. The accounts can be used for any educational expense, from private school tuition to distance learning, computer software, tutors, community college classes, and discrete public school services. Any money remaining can be saved for college.

Education savings accounts initially were made available to
foster and disabled children displaced from the voucher program, but were expanded to children in D- and F-rated public schools after Arizona adopted Florida’s public school grading system, so that 200,000 Arizona children are now eligible. Coauthor Bolick is defending the program against legal challenge, and other states are eying education savings accounts as a means to dramatically broaden educational choices.

Every state must align its academic standards with the expectations of colleges and employers to ensure that high school graduates have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Too many states have standards that are too low or that are insufficiently focused on students mastering basic skills that colleges and employers expect. Florida recently adopted the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards, which includes assessing grammar, vocabulary, and spelling on annual essay tests. Previously, writing scores reflected only whether students sufficiently understood the topic and provided a concise conclusion. Raising the bar may cause student and school grades to decline initially, but it is important to make sure those essential skills are being learned. If history is any guide, students ultimately will meet the newer, higher standards.

The research is clear that the effectiveness of the classroom
teacher directly affects student academic achievement. Many states are adopting commonsense reforms to transform teaching into a profession, not a trade, and to attract and reward the most capable teachers. That is a critical component of bringing systemic change to our nation’s education system.

These examples barely scratch the surface of the exciting policy and educational innovations that are taking place across the nation in an increasingly dynamic educational marketplace. But the special interests that profit from the status quo are powerful and dead set against meaningful reforms, so that every step forward requires strenuous effort. Ironically, many of the same advocates and elected officials who most strongly favor immigration reform simultaneously oppose meaningful education reform. Immigration policy and education policy are joined at the hip. Fundamental reform is required for each. And progress in one reinforces progress in the other.

More than a half century ago, starting with the monumental
Brown v. Board of Education
decision and followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, our nation made a sacred promise to provide equal educational opportunities for every American child. Though we have made much progress since that time, our nation’s educational system is not adequate to our current needs, much less our
future. A system that should provide the primary means for upward socioeconomic mobility instead all too often produces failure and inequality. Yet with technology, innovative public policy, and courageous leadership, our generation has within it the means to deliver at last on the sacred promise of educational opportunity. There is no greater or more important legacy that we can leave to our children, to our children’s children, and to our nation.

P
RESIDENT MITT ROMNEY.

For many people reading this book, including the authors, those three words conjure wistful images. How different our nation’s course could have been, over the next four years and beyond, if the talented former Massachusetts governor had been elected to bring his extraordinary business acumen to the helm of our nation.

It is a tragic lost opportunity, made more so because it was largely self-inflicted. Many people expected Romney to be elected and nearly everyone expected a much closer race. Numerous explanations for Romney’s defeat came into play, and nearly all
of them were demographic. Political commentator Tucker Carlson recounts a conversation near the eve of the 2012 vote with a Democratic strategist who aptly observed, “We’re not having an election. We’re having a census.” Our nation has experienced rapid and dramatic demographic changes over the past decade, including an aging population; a reduced number of marriages; a decline of religion; and above all, a rapidly growing population of racial and ethnic minorities. Over the past decade, minorities have accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s population growth.
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Throughout that time, the Republican Party has clung to its core constituency, seeking to squeeze more votes from an ever-shrinking base—in other words, it has been living on borrowed time. In 2012, the inexorable math, combined with the party’s unwillingness and inability to expand its base, finally caught up with it.

Although this book is directed toward everyone, regardless of party affiliation or philosophical persuasion, we think it is important to conclude by directing these comments to the Republican Party itself. One of us is a former Republican governor who remains steadfastly committed to his party and optimistic about what it can achieve in the years ahead. The other was an active Republican from his teenage years who grew disaffected with the party over immigration and other issues and has been
an independent for the past decade. We both believe strongly that Republicans need to play a leadership role on immigration and to reach out to immigrants generally and Hispanics specifically in a much more serious and meaningful way, not just for the good of the country but for the party’s survival.

It was difficult for both of us to watch the candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination address immigration issues, each trying to outflank the other as the candidate who would do the most to keep people from crossing our southern border, while dealing the harshest with people and their children who are in the country illegally. By sharply criticizing Texas governor Rick Perry for his in-state tuition program for certain children of illegal immigrants, and by making his leading immigration adviser a prominent proponent of “self-deportation,”
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Mitt Romney moved so far to the right on immigration issues that it proved all but impossible for him to appeal to Hispanic voters in the general election. However little or much anti-immigration rhetoric counts in Republican primaries, it surely succeeds in alienating Hispanic voters come the general election. Although Romney eventually called for comprehensive immigration reform, a platform that hardened the party’s stance on immigration hung like an anvil around his candidacy.
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Romney’s missteps on immigration were especially frustrating given that President Obama had alienated many Hispanics before the election season, by breaking his 2008 campaign promise to lead the charge for comprehensive immigration reform and, especially, by deporting a record number of illegal immigrants.
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But near the end of the campaign, Obama suddenly reversed course, announcing his policy to allow young people who were brought here illegally to remain. The policy was enormously popular, and it appeared to demonstrate presidential leadership, energize Hispanic voters, and paint Republicans into a corner from which they could not escape.
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The results were as predictable as they were painful. Whereas Republicans had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote only eight years earlier, in 2012 that proportion plummeted to 27 percent. And it was a smaller share of a much larger number, as the record Hispanic vote doubled from 5 percent of the electorate in 1996 to 10 percent in 2012.
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Obama’s winning margin among Hispanics appears to have accounted for his victories in such pivotal states as Florida, Colorado, and Nevada.

Perhaps most shocking was Romney’s abysmal showing among Asians, who represent the largest-growing immigrant group. Despite the fact that only 41 percent of Asians identify as
Democrats, and that President George W. Bush received 42 percent of their votes in 2004, Romney won only 26 percent of the Asian vote—even lower than his percentage of Hispanics.
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The effect was especially pronounced in the northern Virginia suburbs, where Asians live in great numbers, and they helped deliver that crucial swing state to Obama.

Although this postscript focuses on Hispanics, our observations and recommendations apply generally. Most immigrants, including Hispanics and Asians, are entrepreneurial, family-oriented, deeply religious, and place a tremendous emphasis on educational opportunities. In other words, they fit the classic profile of Republicans. And yet Republicans are losing immigrant voters.

The rapidly declining share of Hispanic support for Republican candidates is alarming to us for a number of reasons:

• If this trend is not arrested and reversed, the growing influence of Hispanic voters will doom the Republican Party’s future electoral prospects.

• If Hispanics identify with a single political party rather than allowing competition for their votes, they will marginalize their potentially vast political influence.

• It doesn’t have to be this way: most Hispanic voters embrace core convictions of the Republican Party and have shown themselves willing to vote for GOP candidates.

Even if Hispanics are not quick to embrace the Republican Party, we should reach out in alliance on values and goals we share. Free-market policies can take our nation to new heights with more prosperity and opportunity than anyone can imagine. An opportunity society—where we have the freedom to pursue discovery and disruptive innovation and where individual aspirations are rewarded—will create huge possibilities far beyond any government program. We are not smart or prescient enough to predict the outcome of millions of people being inspired to strive, dream, and work, but we are certain it would produce a far better future than the command-and-control approach the current administration is on now. Immigrants come to our nation for precisely that freedom, whether on a small or grand scale. That is the basis for an enduring bond between conservatives and immigrants that transcends party labels.

The most strident immigration critics on the right reject outreach to Hispanics as hopelessly futile. “It would make a lot
more sense,” urges writer Sam Francis, “for the Stupid Party to forget about Hispanics as a bloc they could win from their rivals, start thinking about how to control immigration, dump the ads in Spanish, and start speaking the language of the white middle class that keeps them in office.”
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Others reject the notion that Hispanic immigrants are instinctively conservative. “Far from exercising a brake on the erosion of traditional values,” writes Heather Mac Donald, “the growing Hispanic population will provide the impetus for more government alternatives to personal responsibility.”
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Such prescriptions overlook four important facts:

• Even if not a single new Hispanic immigrant were to gain citizenship—an impossible scenario much as some might hope for it—the number of Hispanic voters will continue to increase inexorably as Hispanic children who are citizens grow to voting age. Indeed, births now exceed immigration as the main source of Hispanic growth in the United States.

• Hispanics are not yet strongly attached to either political party, and many Republican candidates (including the lead author and his brother) have experienced significant success in attracting their votes.

• Even if Republican candidates fail to win a majority of Hispanic votes, the difference between, say, a 25 percent share versus 40 percent is sizable enough to affect electoral outcomes.

• Republicans need not abandon or compromise their principles to attract Hispanic support—to the contrary, their best electoral strategy is to emphasize common conservative values.

Ronald Reagan once famously quipped that “Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.”
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The Republican Party’s overriding priority in the years ahead must be to expand and diversify its shrinking demographic base, embracing immigrants generally and Hispanics in particular.

Hispanics are the largest American minority ethnic group, and they are growing, both as a share of the population and of the electorate. The 2010 U.S. Census counted 50.5 million Hispanics, up from 35.3 million ten years earlier. The number of eligible Hispanic voters grew even faster, from 13.2 million in 2000 to
21.3 million in 2010. Those numbers will continue to grow. Every month, 50,000 U.S.-born Hispanics turn eighteen and become eligible to vote.
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Republicans need to recognize that Hispanics are not a monochromatic community but rather a deeply diverse one, reflecting a wide variety of national origins, geographic dispersion, and varying time spent in the United States. Indeed, some Hispanics trace their American roots more than four centuries. Still, Hispanics as a whole strongly favor Democrats: 62 percent say they identify as or lean toward Democrats, while only 25 percent identify as Republicans.
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But the Pew Research Center finds that an increasing proportion of Hispanics—46 percent compared to 31 percent six years ago—are registering as independents, indicating that they are not yet firmly anchored to the Democratic Party.
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