The Republican Party needs illegal aliens like a drowning man needs an anchor

Heather Mac Donald eviserates Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman today in NRO:

Proposition 187 drove Hispanics from California’s Republican party! So argue Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman in today’s Wall Street Journal, recycling one of the most cherished myths of the open-borders lobby. According to this nostrum, had Californians, fed up with the costs of providing free public services to illegal aliens, not voted to require legal residency to receive those services, California would today, in Bush and Mehlman’s phrase, still be “Reagan country,” its burgeoning Hispanic population reliably pulling the lever for Republicans.

Too bad they didn’t read their own op-ed. No Republican presidential nominee has won California since 1988, they report. Prop. 187 must be one powerful toxin, if it can alienate Hispanics six years before it even exists.

In fact, California’s transformation from “Reagan country” to labor-union country is the far more likely consequence of the growing Hispanic population per se and the corresponding outflow of white Republicans to other states. In 1990, California was one-quarter Latino and 57-percent white; in 2000, it was 32-percent Latino and 47-percent white; in 2005, Latinos constituted 35 percent, and whites 43 percent, of the population. Those shifting demographics have been accompanied by the growing clout of the Democratic party, and of California's public-service unions, not because of some vestigial memory of 187, but because they appeal to low-wage, low-skilled Hispanics. Los Angeles politics are now closely intertwined with the unionized Left, now that Latinos in 2005 made up 47 percent of the population and whites, 30 percent. The idea that Prop. 187, now 12 years old, is driving this massive shift is fanciful. California provides a glimpse of the likely political future if poor Hispanics continue to be the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

Exactly! The weird fantasy that all we need to do to make Mexicans into Republicans is give the alien criminals among us amnesty for their crimes is a break with reality so profound that I have to suspect some kind of Red Chinese Manchurian Candidate style mind control.

I know why Democrats are pushing this legislative abortion on us. It would give them perpetual control of the country so that they could happily set about destroying it. But what in the name of all that's holy are the Republicans playing at?

I know that some of them really are stupid enough to believe this bullshite about how the hard working family oriented Mexicans are a natural Republican constituency (idiots like Lindsay Graham come to mind here), but George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Rudy Giuliani have to be smarter than that. Don't they?

Well George W Bush might really believe it. Not because he's stupid but because he's the kind of man who, once he gets an idea in his head believes it with a stubborn tenacity which is immune to any fact or logic.

But not the rest of them. All the Senate and House Republicans who are supporting this thing (other than the Lindsey Graham short bus crowd) must have some ulterior motive. But what can it be? What can be so important to them that they would destroy not just their own political careers and their own political party but their own nation over it?