A question for strongly partisan Republicans, "small government" (i.e., low tax) Republicans, and those few remaining Bush partisans: what if Bush is completely wrong about immigration? What if his pro-illegal immigration policies serve only to give more power to the Democrats and lead to policies that are against your beliefs?

Let's take a look at a couple data points.

TAPPEDOUT has an interview with Nolan McCarty, author of "Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches". They provide the following excerpt:

Typically economists, political economists, and political scientists think that economic inequality is self-correcting: If inequality increases there will be a mobilization of lower-income voters in a push toward greater redistribution of wealth to offset that inequality. Here's where immigration is a big part of the story, though, because at the same time as economic inequality in America was increasing, immigration was increasing, too. There were increasing numbers of low-wage workers, but an increasing proportion of those were immigrants who were not yet naturalized and therefore not able to vote for redistributionist policies. And so there's a reinforcing effect from the composition of the work force being more immigrant and less citizen, because these low-income workers can’t vote.

(Bear in mind that they're unapologetically in favor of all those illegal aliens that Bush allows in becoming citizens and then voting for "redistributionist policies".)

And, a Spanish-language newspaper story is summarized as follows:

Bottom line, the [Illinois] Human Relations Commission, Department of Labor and a dozen other taxpayer agencies need to drum up business because not enough Latinos are self-identifying as victims.