What Went Down At The CNN Republican Debate

If Rubio or Cruz wins the nomination, reaching out to the broad demographic of Latino-Americans may require some uncomfortable conversations about ethnicity, immigration privileges, and tensions between different Latino groups. The majority of Latino Americans are of Mexican descent, followed by Puerto Ricans (who are immediately eligible to vote if they move to the U.S. mainland), and Cubans. But today, there’s a debate over who gets right-of-way at the border. Cuban immigrants are offered a path to legal residency immediately, which is different not only than most Latinos but most immigrants from other parts of the world. The U.S., for the moment, has no plans to change policy, but some now argue the entry and accommodations offered to Cubans should be phased out since the U.S. has re-opened its embassy. Also, the Cold War tensions with the island have eased because the Soviet Union no longer subsidizes the Cuban economy… and, well, the Soviet Union no longer exists. One new twist: tensions at cities along the U.S./Mexico border, including Laredo, Texas, have seen tensions and protests over how Cubans are treated compared to other immigrants. President Obama is scheduled to visit Cuba next month — the first time in 88 years a sitting President will visit the nation.

Moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Trump: “If you eliminate [the Department of Education and the EPA], that’s $76 billion. The current deficit is $544 billion. Where are you going to come up with the money?” That’s a throwback to an earlier debate era, when deficit questions were more the norm than the exception.

It seems like we spent about the first half hour of this debate on immigration. Is this normal? A quick glance at GOP debates 16 years ago reveals that no one mentioned immigration, like, at all. The only person who brought it up really was Gary Bauer, who was a pretty minor candidate. This changed in 2008, and Republican primary debates have featured quite a bit of immigration discussion ever since. Below is a very rough measure of this, with a raw count of debate mentions of the words “immigrant” and “immigration” during each primary season. There are two takeaways from this. First, Trump isn’t totally responsible for a pivot toward this issue for Republicans. It’s not clear whether economic decline, national security concerns, or the exposure of intra-party fissures after Bush’s attempt at immigration reform are the cause of this (or some combination). But there’s a big change between 2000 and 2008. Before we let Trump and the current field off the hook, though, we should also observe that this year’s debates have almost caught up to 2012 in terms of numbers of immigration references – in half as many debates. If the field continues to look like it does, I think we can expect to catch up with the 2008 numbers fairly quickly.

YEAR	NUMBER OF GOP PRIMARY DEBATES	MENTIONS OF THE WORD IMMIGRATION OR IMMIGRANT	MENTIONS PER DEBATE (ROUNDED)
2000	11	2	0.2
2008	16	293	18
2012	20	218	11
2016	9*	191	18