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Friday’s Wall Street Journal reported more alarming news for the Republican Party: according to the new WSJ/NBC Poll, Hispanics now identify themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans by a horrifyingly lopsided margin of 51% to 21%.

This reflects a collapse of Hispanic support for Republicans since 2004, when Bush nearly matched John Kerry in the Latino community, 45% to 55%.

Senator Mel Martinez, an ardent advocate of comprehensive immigration reform and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, tried to put the best possible spin on the new figures. He told the Journal that “a skillful 2008 Republican candidate can recover ground because ‘Hispanics tend to personalize politics’ rather than identify with parties.”

One can only hope that he’s right, and the Republicans avoid the obvious disaster of nominating anyone who has flirted with the anti-immigrant rhetoric so popular at the moment among conservatives. But even if the Presidential nominee can win back some of the lost ground among Latinos, that doesn’t necessarily mean progress for candidates on the rest of the ballot or on national efforts to recapture the House and the Senate.

The new poll should come as a sobering reminder that the current hysteria against “illegal aliens” (and even opposition to further legal immigration by Tom Tancredo and his followers) is helping to alienate the most rapidly growing ethnic segment of the American electorate.

Hispanics now represent at least 14% of the US population and the strong majority of these people have immigrated legally, or else they’re native born. Even if all the illegals went home in the next few years (fat chance), and even if we stopped all future immigration from Hispanic countries (both legal and illegal), Latinos would still rapidly increase their political influence and power. For one thing, their high marriage and birth rates means a growing population and, for another, every year more legal immigrants manage to complete the naturalization process to become citizens (and voters).  

In recent years, Republicans have managed to remain a competitive party in most states of the union in part because they have successfully competed for Latino support. If, on the other hand, we ever reached the situation where 80% of Hispanics automatically, unthinkingly, voted for Democrats (in addition to the more than 80% of African-Americans who automatically, unthinkingly vote for Democrats), then we will never again see a GOP president, or a Republican majority in either House of Congress.

Sure, Republicans might still win occasional local fights in Utah or Nebraska or Alabama, but they would become just as irrelevant in national terms as they are today in the State of California. The anti-immigrant posturing of former Governor Pete Wilson in 1994 helped transform the nation’s largest state from a battleground that Republicans often won (with strong Hispanic support) into an-all-but uncontested Democratic fiefdom where only a GOP anomaly like Arnold the Governator (with his outspoken record of sympathy and support for his fellow immigrants) can secure enough Latino backing to prevail.

Despite the courageous reform efforts of far-sighted Republican Senators and of President Bush, the loudest voices in the GOP currently speak in strident, angry, desperate, uncompromising and unmistakably anti-immigrant tones. In the midst of our ongoing debates, all those who care at all about the party’s future ought to keep in mind that the nation’s more than 40 million Latinos are avidly listening.