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-- WITH PHOTO -- TO NATIONAL, AND POLITICAL EDITORS:
Continued High Legal Immigration Steadily Erodes GOP Prospects
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The nation's
prolonged flow of legal immigration has changed - and continues to
change - the political landscape. A new Center for Immigration Studies
report, "Immigration's Impact on Republican Political Prospects, 1980
to 2012", finds that each one percentage-point increase in the
immigrant share of a large county's population reduces the Republican
share of the two-party presidential vote by an average of nearly 0.6
percentage points.
This shift is relatively uniform throughout the country, from
California to Texas to Florida, regardless of the local party's stance
on immigration. It is due to immigrant communities' lopsided support
for big-government policies, which are more closely aligned with
progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a
two-to-one party identification with Democrats over Republicans.
Increased immigration also significantly expands the low-income
population, making voters overall more supportive of redistributive
policies championed by Democrats to support disadvantaged populations.
See the report at
http://www.cis.org/immigration-impacts-on-republican-prospects-1980-2012.
"As the immigrant population has grown, Republican electoral prospects
have dimmed, even after controlling for alternative explanations of
GOP performance," wrote James Gimpel, author of the report and a
professor of government at the University of Maryland at College Park.
"Republicans are right to want to attract Latino voters," he
continued. "But expanding the flow of low-skilled immigrants into an
economy ill-suited to promote their upward mobility will be
counterproductive."
Over one million legal immigrants enter the United States each year.
If this number were drastically increased, as called for by the Gang
of Eight bill (S.744), the decline of the Republican Party would be
accelerated. "The impact of immigration is easily sufficient, by
itself, to decide upcoming presidential elections," Gimpel wrote.
The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan,
non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's
only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of
the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of
immigration on the United States.
Contact: Marguerite Telford mrt@cis.org, 202-466-8185
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120806/MM52838LOGO
SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies
-0- 04/15/2014
/Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120806/MM52838LOGO
CO: Center for Immigration Studies
ST: District of Columbia
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