Ann Coulter can’t stop raging against Hispanic voters.
The conservative pundit blasted House Republicans as "sell outs" in a column on Wednesday for crafting guidelines on immigration that would create a mechanism to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants, saying that the growing Latino population will “wreck the country.”
“Leave aside the harm cheap labor being dumped on the country does to the millions of unemployed Americans," Coulter writes. "What does it mean for the Republican Party?"
Casting aside conventional wisdom, Coulter says that embracing immigration reform would make the Republican Party lose voters. She argues that Latinos and other immigrant groups, particularly Asians, are so liberal on issues including Obamacare, gun control and the role of government that they’ll never vote in large numbers for Republicans.
Coulter refuses to acknowledge public opinion on the immigration issue, writing: “The only ones opposed to our current immigration policies are the people.” In fact, polls routinely show that a majority of Americans support immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented -- a more liberal stance than the one released this week by House Republicans, which would only create a pathway to legal residence.
To back her assertions, Coulter cites a study by Phyllis Schlafly, a fellow conservative pundit who has called on the Republicans to keep their party as white as possible.
Coulter violated the embargo on the study, writing that it was “too important to wait.” The study was not provided in the column, so it’s not clear what new information it contained. Coulter writes that the study brings together several different previously released surveys by Pew, Gallup, Latino Decisions, and other pollsters showing that immigrants and Latinos tend to lean more liberal than the average U.S. citizen.
“The people that Republicans ought to reach out to are white voters,” Schlaflly said last year during an appearance on conservative radio show Focus Today. “There is not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican.
Actually, there is. Former President George W. Bush pulled 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004. Avoiding the approach advocated by folks like Coulter or Schlafly, he spoke some Spanish, supported immigration reform and refrained from ranting against Latinos during interviews with the media.
Many observers have concluded that the Republican Party would perform better among Latinos if it moderated the intransigent stance on immigration adopted by hardliners like Coulter. Instead, Coulter has argued since Barack Obama’s reelection as president in November that Republicans should ignore the country’s largest ethnic minority altogether.
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