You sir are obviously high. No GAO report from any year or on this planet supports a number near 600,000 imprisoned illegal aliens. No GAO report from any year but possibly your over-worked imagination can conjure up this or any number close to this number.
Back to reality and put the pipe down dude.
Read more:
GOP worries Arizona immigration law could hurt party
by Kasie Hunt - Apr. 30, 2010 04:35 PM
POLITICO.COM
Arizona's immigration law has been an immediate hit with the Republican base, but some of the party's top strategists and rising stars worry that the harsh crackdown may do long-term damage to the GOP in the eyes of America's Hispanic population.
From Marco Rubio to Jeb Bush to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Republicans who represent heavily Hispanic states have been vocal in their criticism of the Arizona law, saying it overreaches. Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a conservative hero for his win last fall, has questioned the law.
And the party's long-term thinkers worry that the Arizona law is merely a quick political fix which may create a permanent rift with the fastest growing segment of the U.S. electorate.
"It's like a virus that you get and you don't feel like you're unhealthy for the first few days, but after that you have a fever and you're really sick," says Matthew Dowd, former President George W. Bush's chief strategist in 2004. "You can't win a national election
and you can't win certain states without the Latino vote. And Republicans already had a problem."
"I think there is going to be some constitutional problems with the bill," top Bush strategist Karl Rove said during a stop on his book tour. "I wished they hadn't passed it, in a way."
"I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas," Perry said earlier this week.
Jeb Bush was also blunt: "I don't think this is the proper approach."
The already burning issue will escalate this weekend with protests around the country, including one in Los Angeles where police are preparing for a crowd of 100,000.
Yet polls show Arizona's law is popular, even with independents, and it's given Republican Gov. Jan Brewer a boost in the polls. In September she trailed her likely Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Terry Goddard, by 3 points with white voters. Now she leads him by 8 points with whites. But Goddard has increased his lead with Hispanics from 20 points to 46.
Arizona has far more white voters than it does Hispanic voters—for now – so the immigration law may not have an immediate impact on the election. But the long term demographic outlook for Republicans and the Hispanic vote is troubling for the GOP.
Ninety percent of Hispanics under 18 in Arizona are U.S. citizens, and the explosive growth of the Hispanic population this decade has been driven by U.S. births. That's a switch from the 1990s, when most of the Hispanic population's increase was due to non-citizen immigration.
"This law and potential copy cat laws have the ability to seal the fate of the Republican Party with Hispanics in the exact same way that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did with African Americans," said Matt Barreto, a pollster for Latino Decisions and an adjunct political science professor at the University of Washington.
In Florida, Senate candidate Rubio's extremely calibrated response showed the fine line Republicans have to walk on this issue. Rubio is young, bilingual, Cuban-born and running to the right of Republican-turned-independent Charlie Crist. And according to a new SurveyUSA poll, 82 percent of Florida Republicans who have heard about Arizona's law agree with it—and 81 percent think Florida should pass a similar measure.
So Rubio has his sound bite ready on amnesty—"I hope Congress…will use the Arizona legislation not as an excuse to try and jam through amnesty legislation," he said.
But he is terribly uncomfortable with the racial profiling he sees in the Arizona bill. "I do have concerns about this legislation," Rubio said, pointing out that the law could "unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens."
Rubio's logic recognizes Florida's changing demographics—and acknowledges that Obama tilted the state in Democrats' favor in 2008 largely because of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote.
It's a lesson California learned in the 1990s when state legislators passed and then-Gov. Pete Wilson signed Proposition 187, a law that required police officers to verify and report the immigration status of anyone who was arrested and denied a litany of basic services to anyone in the country illegally.
While most Republicans dismiss claims that it hurt the party, chalking Democratic gains up to demographic changes, the issue is still radioactive in California. Democrats are calling on Republican Meg Whitman to dismiss Wilson, who is now chairing her campaign for governor.