Report on Non-Citizen Voters Shows Why Amnesty Would Be 'Suicide' for GOP

A new study that asks whether non-citizens can tip elections for Democrats gives more credence to an Eagle Forum report that concluded that massive amnesty legislation would be “suicide” for the conservative movement and the GOP.

In a provocative article, Old Dominion political science professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest asked in the Washington Post, “Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens?” 

In their forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, Richman and Earnest concluded that enough non-citizens vote to “change the outcome of close races.” The professors analyzed data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and determined that “more than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote.” Their “best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.” 

Their analysis gives more credence to an Eagle Forum report that concluded that massive amnesty legislation would be “suicide” for the conservative movement and the Republican Party. As Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly noted, although “a Harris poll found that 81% of native-born Americans believe schools should teach patriotism,” 50% of recent immigrants do not want their children to be “taught to be proud of America.” Schlafly said that means new immigrants will be offended when conservatives emphasize patriotism and assimilation. 

The Eagle Forum report concluded that, though “Republican outreach to Asian and Latino voters” is “critical,” Republicans “can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children into supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of legal immigration (one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters.” The report found that new immigrants “and their adult children are significantly more liberal than the average American voter on a host of policy issues, including the size of government, Obamacare, affirmative action, gun control, greater environmental regulation, and other issues championed by the Left.”

The Old Dominion professors concluded that non-citizen “votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass” Obamacare, because just .65 of Minnesota’s non-citizens could have voted to give Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) a 312-vote margin of victory in 2008. Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) is in a dogfight with Republican Thom Tillis in North Carolina, and the professors concluded that it was “also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.” In North Carolina this year, non-citizen DREAMers were found on voter rolls, as Breitbart News reported. 

Democrats are advantaged when non-citizens vote. The professors found that “non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample),” and “this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”

Yet, Republican establishment politicians and strategists continually and reflexively say amnesty legislation is needed for the GOP to survive, even though studies have found that Republicans can win elections well beyond 2016 without passing massive amnesty legislation.

The Obama administration is also quietly preparing millions of potential new immigrant ID cards and work authorization ahead of Obama’s planned executive amnesty “before the end of the year,” and non-citizens could use those ID cards to vote as well. The nonpartisan academic study on non-citizen voters found that voter ID laws favored by conservatives “to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective,” since “nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.”