IMMIGRATION AND THE GOP. David Frum thinks the immigration bill has "detonated the slow-motion trigger on a Republican debacle in 2008." Vague confusion over the imagery aside -- can you detonate a slow-motion trigger? Wouldn't that mean blowing it up? -- he makes a strong case. Indeed, I think he's exactly right on this: "As complicated as this immigration deal is, it rests on a simple compromise: The Democrats get the amnesty they want - in exchange for the Republicans getting the guest-worker program they want. By identifying the guestworker program as the GOP's highest immigration priority, the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first." But if the national GOP will lose luster in the eyes of its base, its supporters risk doing significant and enduring damage to their standing among the emergent Hispanic electorate. "Republicans have done so well," writes Frum, "because until now, the highly diverse Hispanic population has not voted as an ethnic bloc. Now we ourselves are forcing that to change. It's as if this Republican president and these Republican senators have said, 'Hmm. Can we invent an issue that will teach Cuban-American doctors, Honduran day laborers, and Mexican-American army officers to think of themselves as a unified ethnic group? Can we then provoke a fight that all of them (whatever their diverging practical interests) will treat as a symbol of acceptance in American society? And can we then stage-manage this fight to ensure that two-thirds of our party will have no choice but to fall on the wrong side of it?'" --Ezra Klein
