"People are joining in so spontaneously, it’s almost like the immigrants have risen"

So said Partha Banerjee in the New York Times a few days ago. Needless to say, the immigration issue isn't going very well in the U.S., and looks to be only getting worse.

The Poorman's reaction?

Isn’t that fucking cool?

Go on, motherfuckers, mess with the poor people that outnumber you some more. You’d think, with the black bag searches, the indefinite detentions, the giant fences, the eagle-eyed redneck sentinels, and warrantless access to the whole fucking internet, it wouldn’t be quite so easy for a million plus people to just sneak up on you like that. Especially since it seems to keep happening over and over again, doesn’t it? You fat little shitheads all grabbing for the
money in the water and hey, whoah, this raft is kind of tippy, and nobody said there were sharks in the water, just mermaids. Almost like there’s some kind of cycle going on. Some kind of wave.

Paraphrasing George Peppard, I love it when a giant, angry, highly motivated voting bloc (grass roots, spontaneous, exponential, virulently anti-GOP) comes together. Especially when that bloc’s been kicked around for, like, ever, and it’s all your fault, you and your racist bedfellows. And you were trying, on the ludicrous basis of a shared love of pickup trucks, to get them to LIKE you? To vote for you? How’s that going?

See, here's how it works. You can't play both sides forever. You can't court the nativist whites who think that a horrible brown wave is washing over the United States from the barbaric south and the members of said "wave" at the same time. It just isn't going to work; either you'll lean too far towards the latter and end up with Lou Dobbs calling you names on CNN, or you lean too far towards the former and, well, look at what's happening. Trying to paper over these difficulties with blather about abortion and shared Catholicism or whatever isn't going to work, because most people don't set their self-identity that way. Anti-Latino nativists don't care about whether or not immigrants feel the same way they do about conservative litmus tests, and immigrants aren't going to sit back and take it for that reason.

This isn't the death knell of the Republicans, of course. What it does mean is that cheap attempts to court Latinos by inserting a bit of spanish into a speech is now dead. You decided on the Southern Strategy, now you have to live with its consequences.