You know the old joke about the guy with a dog whose vet tells him the dog’s tail has to be removed. Guy says “it’ll hurt too much to cut it off all at once, let’s do it an inch at a time”.
It’s pretty obvious that’s how things are for Republicans on immigration. They can for immigration reform now, which will hurt a little by increasing the number of Latino voters (but probably isn’t completely fatal to the GOP as a party) or they can spend the next five-to-ten years talking about sharks with frickin’ laser beams in the Rio Grande and further alienating the brown enemy within. The latter will just be killing time, painfully and self-destructively, until president Hillary Clinton or Julian Castro finally gets immigration reform passed. Every year they let Rush Limbaugh tell them to brown-bash is another year non-white people will hold against them for the next generation or so.
So I think the idea that Republicans shouldn’t do immigration reform until they’re prepared to start competing for Latino votes is just dumb. Republicans aren’t going to embrace the Other all of a sudden. Even Bobo doesn’t think so:
Can current Republicans change their underlying mentality to adapt to these realities? Intellectual history says no.
The obvious thing to do is cut loose some non-southern Republicans to vote for immigration reform, take their lumps the next few elections, and then hope they can eventually compete for non-white votes.