The immigrant issue gave Republicans, and many nativist Democrats, an air of hypocrisy and even bigotry.
Sadly, in state after state, nativist sentiment beats out economic sense time and time again.
FORBES: Alabama's Disgraceful Immigration Law is Bad for the Economy
The Republicans have become fat, lazy and too many show signs of going over to the nativist nut wing.
The Republican Party's nativist rejection of immigration reform has clearly cost it dear.
Mr McCain is not one of the main stirrers, but nor has he sought to calm the nativist passions.
Since the immigration debate has such a nativist tone, however, Democrats are doubtful that Republicans can win over many Hispanic voters.
The latter is important: it suggests that he is willing to take on the wrath of the nativist right of his party.
On the right, nativist voices in last year's primary campaign gave birth to phrases such as "electric fence" (Herman Cain), "self-deportation" (Mitt Romney) and other nuggets that turned Hispanic voters off.
WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Marco Rubio: Riding to the Immigration Rescue
John McCain, the Republican candidate last time and a senator from Arizona, thinks that Latinos are up for grabs in these states and even in his own, if Republicans will just change their nativist tone.
Mr Thackeray - his father anglicised his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, English author of Vanity Fair - ran the nativist Shiv Sena party which excelled in populism and xenophobia over four decades.
This, too, is an implicit part of the political appeal for many Republicans, who are secretly aghast at the nativist tone of recent presidential-primary debates and know they must reach out to Latinos in coming elections.
The Republicans' nativist wing is hotly opposed to the bill because it allows the estimated 12m illegal aliens already in the United States to become legal straightaway, and offers them a path (albeit a long one) to citizenship.
ECONOMIST: The latest attempt to fix the immigration system is stuck
Some groups pushing the restrictionist agenda -- such as NUMBERS USA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies, all of them started with the help of nativist John Tanton -- want to limit legal immigration as well.
CNN: Commentary: Fear of foreigners drives immigration debate
In a short and sweet post at Psychology Today, Scott James, author of An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics (and a friend of mine from grad school) offers a summary of the contemporary moral nativist view inspired by Noam Chomsky and John Rawls.
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