24-Mar-09 11:00 PM CST

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Key Conference Topic

ANLA summer legislative conferenence to host conservative think-tank policy analyst.

Richard Nadler addressed the need for Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform during the 36th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held recently in Washington, D.C.

President of the conservative think tank, America’s Majority, Nadler is a well-known conservative policy analyst, opinion journalist, political strategist and commentator on issues ranging from immigration and border policy to school choice to African American and Hispanic voter outreach and education. He opened his comments saying, “If we conservatives continue to insist on the mass removal of illegals, either by roundups or by starving them into self-deportation, our losses in the Latino community will persist and intensify.”

Addressing the costs of the conservative, “enforcement-only” agenda, Nadler reviewed the significant gains that Democrats made in wooing the Hispanic population during the 2008 national election, erasing President Bush’s substantial gains just four years earlier.

Citing the increasing size of the Hispanic voter block, he warned about current losses in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico and future losses in Arizona and Texas. Nadler stated, “We all enjoy happy talk about the natural affinity between Republicans and Latinos. But…it is increasingly irrelevant… as long as the prospect of mass deportation remains in our playbook. The linked prospects of ICE raids, persecuted clergy, ruptured families and mass profiling spook the legal, working-class Latino.”

Nadler warned of the added threat to the American economy posed by eliminating or reducing American access to an immigrant workforce. “You can hypothetically deport 9 million Mexicans from America,” Nadler stated, “but you’ll have less luck eliminating the Mexicans in Mexico, the Argentinians in Argentina and the Chinese in China. Rural export enterprises -- agriculture, horticulture, forestry, fishing, ranching -- can, and will, go elsewhere.”

He added that the white collar jobs created by those industries would follow the export of production to other countries.

At the 2009 ANLA Legislative Conference, slated for July 20-22 in Washington, D.C., Nadler will address immigration and many other issues as he looks at future prospects for the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the historic 2008 elections, he will explore whether the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America is headed for extinction, long-term minority status or a period of reflection and renewal.

He will offer thought-provoking insights into the 2008 elections, whether we are in for a long-term political realignment and how GOP positions on contemporary issues like immigration reform will influence conservatives’ quest to regain political traction.

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