George Will debunks core part of MAGA doctrine

13 March

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on March 6, 2014 (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)

In the past, prominent conservatives — including President Ronald Reagan — were vocal proponents of immigration. Reagan famously argued that Latinos were natural-born Republicans — they just didn't realize it yet. And George W. Bush made a point of publicly speaking in Spanish when he was governor of Texas, which worried Lone Star Democrats who saw how many inroads he made among Latino voters.

GOP strategist Karl Rove had no problem with that, as he shared Reagan's view that Latinos, with the right messaging, could be persuaded to vote Republican. Florida has long been a bastion of right-wing Latinos, but as Reagan, Bush and Rove saw it, millions of Mexicans in the Southwest were potential Republicans.

But the GOP, critics argue, showed its xenophobic side when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) attacked Mitt Romney in a campaign ad during the 2012 GOP presidential primary simply because he spoke fluent French. And in 2016, Donald Trump criticized former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish in public.

In his Friday, March 13 column, Never Trump conservative George Will argues that the GOP — a party he once belonged to — and the Trump Administration are making a huge mistake by failing to recognize the value of immigration.

"Two dissimilar government agencies have inadvertently combined to clarify the immigration debate," Will explains. "Stomach-turning excesses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned many Americans' abstract political preference into something uncomfortably concrete. And the Census Bureau has demonstrated that the nation needs immigrants as much as they need the blessings of American liberty."

Will continues, "Given a clear binary choice — for or against deporting immigrants who are here illegally — most Americans favor deportation. However: One Sunday, a moderately pro-deportation American goes, as usual, for brunch at the neighborhood diner. Jose, who has put waffles in front of this American for 20 years, and who regularly exchanges pleasantries with him about their families, is gone. He has been deported for America's improvement. Suddenly, the immigration issue has a face, and complexity."

The conservative columnist notes that immigrants comprise "23.6 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) workers," while 15.9 percent of nurses are "foreign-born"— as are 28.4 percent of health aides.

"A recent Cato Institute report ('Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023') says: Immigrants 'generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government,'" according to Will. "They 'created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 U.S. dollars,' including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest that did not need to be paid on debt that was not added…. The Cato data comes from static, not dynamic, accounting: It does not, for example, gauge immigration's dynamism injection: Immigration — risk-taking for improved opportunity — is an entrepreneurial act."

Will continues, "Unsurprisingly, immigrants' workforce participation rate (66.5 percent) is higher than that of the U.S.-born population (61.7 percent), and immigrants’ portions of U.S. patents and start-ups exceeds immigrants’ portion of the population…. That fellow having brunch at the diner will still get his waffles. But he will miss Jose, and millions like him, in more ways that he can easily imagine."

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