The Economist: Democracy in America: Immigration reform g

is not enough: If November's presidential election, in which some exit polls had Mitt Romney winning just 27% of the Latina vote, was a wake up call to Republicans, the sleep must have been deep indeed. For months, it had been clear enough to anyone with half an eye on the polls, that the Republicans were tanking among Latinos. In August, Mr Romney emerged 39 percentage points behind Barack Obama in the first of 11 weekly tracking polls carried out by Latino Decisions. Those, of course, turned out to be the good days. Whether or not Mr Romney's fondness for self deportation was to blame, the Republican pre election spin, that a focus on jobs and growth would be enough to win around Latino voters, is not only risible in retrospect, it was obviously wrong at the time. OK, election campaigns do funny things to people's brains. At least the Republicans are on board now. After all, as Reagan is once supposed to have said, Latinos are natural Republicans. They just don't know it yet. Ditch the crazy rhetoric, silence the wing-nuts, and take at least partial ownership of immigration reform, and the shared values of Republicans and Latinos, aspiration, pro enterprise, social conservatism, should emerge clearly enough to help satisfy Reagan's formula. This is certainly how John McCain is selling the proposals put forward by his "Gang of eight" senators. His home state of Arizona, where the Latino population grew by almost half between 2000 and 2010, is one that many Democratic strategists see as ripe for competition in 2016. The state has backed the Republican candidate in every presidential election, bar one since 1848. Elsewhere in the mountain west Latino votes have already helped shift the 20 electoral college votes of Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, all of them once reliably red states, into the Democratic column in the last two elections. Mr McCain acknowledges the danger, but because of "small business, less regulation, big service in the military, pro life, all these reasons," he argues, Republicans should be able to attract enough Latino support to keep the demographic tide at bay. Mr McCain's commitment to sorting out America's broken immigration system is not in doubt, and the Republican tin ear to immigration concerns certainly helps explain Mr Romney's dismal performance among Latinos.