“If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” the report stated.

Two immigration experts -- Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leo Chavez, Professor and Director of Chicano Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine -- said an ideological crossroads has emerged within the Republican party. Read the Q&A below:

Chavez: I would say that in terms of being the right time, I don’t think we’ve seen a time where it’s going to be more possible than probably right now. It was just very difficult to get immigration reform in the last 15 years, being with George Bush, who was President, who had Republicans in the House... in his party… found it very difficult to get immigration reform, even though he was a major supporter of it. So basically yeah, I think it’s the right time. It looks like the stars are aligning somewhat. If we don’t do it now, I’m not sure when it’d be done.

Garcia Bedolla: I think there are a couple of things. I think that first, the Republicans need to be able to appeal to the Latino vote in greater numbers than they are currently, if they want to have any chance of winning, of being the majority party at the national level. It’s not that immigration is the most important issue for Latinos, but it is a gateway issue, it’s a symbolic issue that really speaks to how that party or that candidate thinks about Latinos and whether they welcome them to the country, so you have the larger numbers of the Republican section thinking now, in their self-interest, to act on immigration reform. The other thing that’s happened – immigration reform has always been supported by a coalition of business interests and labor and other civil rights organizations. And so over the weekend, you had an agreement across businesses. It’s the kind of thing that had preceded reforms in the past – you know, with IRCA, the Cato Institute – that suggests that coalitions in the private sector, among the advocacy organizations, are aligning in a way to support what members want to do on immigration.

Chavez: I think, number one, it’s the reelection of President Obama. I mean, clearly the Republican strategy over the last 20, 30 years, has been using immigration – particularly Latino and Latina immigration – as sort of a fear factor to gain votes and stir up their base, which has been pretty much an anti-immigrant base, particularly with the election of many of the Tea Party people, many of whom themselves were part of the Minuteman Project. So that was pretty much a part of their slate, the anti-immigrant position. And it didn’t really serve them too well in the last election – many were voted out of office, Governor Romney, who basically was advocating for self-deportation and other sort of negative positions on immigration, lost very soundly to President Obama. And a lot of the votes President Obama got were from Latinos – 77 percent. And I think the Republican Party now is realizing that that anti-immigrant fringe base is not going to do well, and the moderates, who really fell on the outside of the political debate and the Republican Party for the last, I‘d say at least six, seven, eight years, suddenly are being invigorated to assert their position in the Republican Party, and say, you know, moderation on many issues is a virtue in the Republican Party, not a negative. So I think the moderates in the Republican Party just have a lot more power, at this point, to say, “You guys had your chance, and it hasn’t done us too well in the last election, and we need to re-think how to become more inclusive, not to be so exclusionary in my rhetoric.”

And I think immigration has been one of the areas, particularly after the election of President Obama, that they’ve really focused on in order to try to win back some of the votes they lost. You know, when George (W.) Bush was running for President, Latinos voted for him in large numbers. 44 percent voted for George (W.) Bush. So it’s not as if the right kind of the message from the Republican Party can’t get votes from the Latinos. So it just depends on what kind of road they want to take.

Chavez: I think one of the things was, healthcare is a big issue. Latinos, I think of any group in the United States, are most likely not to have medical insurance, so I think the Democratic push to include low-income people into some sort of healthcare system was really a positive for many people who voted for President Obama, and I think the message from the Republican Party, was sort of where Romney put his foot in his mouth – about being concerned with the 1 percent, not the 99 percent – and I think many people in the Democratic Party saw themselves not as the 1 percent, but as the 99 percent. So that kind of rhetoric can really maybe stimulate your base, but it doesn’t really create a great deal of enthusiasm among those who aren’t part of the base. And I think they’re seeing, as well, they need to moderate a little bit of the Republican focus on the 1 percent and try and include more people into their policies. So I think that’s another issue.

Garcia Bedolla: Which Republicans, the members or the constituents?

Garcia Bedolla: In terms of softening, you know, McCain hardened his decision because he had a primary challenge, and so a lot of the senators who are at the forefront of supporting immigration reform are individuals who have supported it in the past, and if we could tell, the political climate after 2006 made it very difficult to maintain that support.

Chavez: I think there are two issues there. One is, how much of their views are going to be moderated for the public, and how much of their real, internal views are going to stay the same, or change? Because it’s one thing to say something; the issue is, whether you do when you’re in power, how much you change your policies. I think there’s going to be a great deal of window-dressing. There’s a lot of window-dressing right now in terms of immigration. But whether or not that means they’re actually going to change any sort of way they do business is another question. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. 

I think they’re going to try and convince people they’re changing their views – at least, the moderates are. And the Republican Party is going to be more interested in… the 99 percent, let’s put it that way, metaphorically. But when the time comes when they have the power to actually make laws, what will they do? We’ll see whether or not the rhetoric follows with a change in actual behavior. 

Chavez: Window-dressing means suddenly we’re now in favor of immigration, we’re in favor of a path to citizenship, we’re in favor of reaching out to Latinos. I think that’s a new rhetoric we haven’t heard from the Republican Party for many, many years. George Bush was very good at it. And I would say that many people voted for George Bush, but then when the Republican Party got power, there was a certain amount of window-dressing in the sense that the policies implemented didn’t necessarily help those people.

Chavez: I think that if people see that the Republican Party is changing, and that they are trying to do something, rather than just say nice words, then I think people are going to give it a chance.

Garcia Bedolla: I think this last primary fight in fact was a deeper reflection of the different factions of the Republican Party. I mean, the Republican Party has been, since the New Deal, kind of a train set of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, who kind of banded together in opposition to the Democrats. And that coalition has started to fray, somewhat… because of the demise of all moderate Republicans that fiscal conservatives all feel like don’t have a place in the party anymore, so I think a lot of friction is already present. And immigration is just one of those issues that show where they exist, right? But they’ve existed anyway. [In terms of their constituents,] the reason they’d have that difficulty is there’s very strong states of individuals who feel very deeply that there should be deportation for people without documentation. So I think that’s not going to change. But what is also true is you have a large business community, which is also a constituency of the Republican Party who believes strongly that we should have reasonable reform, which everyone agrees with. So the question is, which constituency is going to win, and are they willing to stand up against the one in order to do what the other wants?

Chavez: Oh yeah, I think the Republican Party is hugely divided right now. So that’s part of the problem, the moderates are gaining more power because of the election, but the people who got them in trouble, let’s put it that way,  are still there… So yeah, not everybody is on board with the new vision. I think they’re incredibly split. I think we see a lot of that now, with the media, with McCain and others now arguing for immigration reform, and you see a lot of the constituents yelling at them. 

Garcia Bedolla: I see no evidence of that thus far.

Chavez: Well, that’s sort of the point I was trying to make. I don’t think that healthcare they’ve been trying to compromise as much. There’ve been some minor concessions by some of the Republican governors now to take some of the Obamacare, where they were incredibly resistant to them in the past, but the benefits are so great, that they were moving in that direction. They haven’t made as much movement on the issue of healthcare as they have on immigration reform. And I think in terms of how we’d see the government’s role in monitoring, let’s say, the banks, I haven’t really seen that much movement in those areas. There’s still very much a Republican position, pre-Obama election as it is post-Obama election. It’s still early.