Special Report: Why The Child Migrant Crisis Is Hurting Republican Hopes For 2016 Election

Republicans, apparently, have a difficult time learning from their mistakes. In the 2012 Presidential election, Mitt Romney received just 27 percent of the Latino vote. Following Romney's landslide defeat, the Republican National Committee warned that "if Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States, they won't pay attention to our next sentence."

Recent events suggest the GOP has failed to heed its own warnings. Far from working towards any kind of reasonable reform, the Republican party has turned the child migrant crisis into another battlefront for pushing tougher border security and increasing deportation. Of children. John Boehner has insisted that George W. Bush's 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (which states that any minor from country's other than Mexico and Canada must be given an immigration hearing) must be drastically altered.

Senator Ted Cruz is insisting that President Obama's 2012 executive order (a watered-down version of the failed Dream Act allowing minors who arrived before 2007 to stay temporarily) be repealed. Texas Governor Rick Perry is suggesting that the Democratic Party is somehow involved in luring the children so that they might grow up to be Democratic voters.

In an America where the Latino population is increasing from coast to coast, the GOP seems increasingly out of touch. Their few Latino politicians, like Senator Cruz, are not only refusing to engage with this key demographic, but are seemingly out of touch with reality (Senator Cruz still denies global warming). Meanwhile, progressive Republicans like Eric Cantor are ousted by anti-immigration candidates like Dave Brat.

Immigration reform was the GOP's chance to show American Latinos, and Americans at large, that it was willing to make progress on important issues. Above all else, the child migrant crisis was an opportunity to demonstrate some compassion. Instead, the Republican party has done little more than force the government into shutdown, continue alienating the Latino vote and, as Amy Davidson suggests in The New Yorker, "define themselves in opposition to America's future."