The Dreamers Have Destroyed the Republican Immigration Strategy

[applegrove]

The Dreamers Have Destroyed the Republican Immigration Strategy

By Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/dreamers-have-destroyed-gop-immigration-strategy.html

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Then there is the optical problem, which can be summarized as a primary season of endless presidential debates in which moderators and candidates goaded each other into endorsing “self-deportation” and electrified fences. (If you’ve already forgotten, Mitt Romney attacked Rick Perry for having a tiny degree of compassion for immigrant children.) Republican leaders also proposed to resolve this problem by controlling and limiting their televised debates.

But the optical response is crumbling, too, in the face of a brilliant media strategy by the Dreamers. The Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. Since their parents decided to bring them, and since they grew up in the United States, deporting them to a foreign country would be unjust and cruel. The Dreamers have a simple media strategy: They publicly question Republican leaders wherever they appear, asking them to straightforwardly explain why they propose to have them deported. The confrontations are powerful and immensely awkward for their subjects. Rand Paul fled in terror; Paul Ryan awkwardly ignored the question. Rubio, speaking in South Carolina, opted for direct confrontation.

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The result of this encounter thrilled conservatives. The crowd booed the Dreamers. An angry 73-year-old audience member “stalked them out of the building, clutching his cane as if it were a baseball bat.” (The cane is the historic weapon of choice for South Carolina reactionaries.) Breitbart News exulted that Rubio had executed “a ‘Sister Souljah’-type moment.”

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Of course, the 2016 campaign has hardly begun. (Though begun it has.) The trouble for Republicans is that the political theater created by the Dreamers is not going to stop. They can try their best to control officially sanctioned media debates, but the Dreamers are staging debates without permission, endlessly highlighting the cruelty of the Republican stance. It is a strategy for which the Republicans so far have no answer. The symbolic denouement of Rubio’s immigration debacle may well be an angry old man brandishing his cane at young Dreamers.



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[applegrove]

1. I wonder how many groups the GOP has attacked will fight against

them in the election in this self propelled fashion.