Continued High Legal Immigration Steadily Erodes GOP Prospects


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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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0000 04/15/2014 10:00:00 EDT http://www.prnewswire.com

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