But what did happen is that the passion of illegal immigrants touched a deep chord with legal immigrants, who sensed that the animus behind the Sensenbrenner legislation was directed at them, too. And it touched a deep chord with native-born Americans who are deeply tied to the illegals—like their children. (When I asked a Latino immigration expert how many American-born Latinos have parents who came here illegally, he said, “Practically everyone.”) Suddenly, in 2006, a significant group of Americans was insulted—some say as deeply as when Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of the bus. And they have turned that indignation into a sense that they can and must influence the course of immigration policy, and beyond.

  The number of people feeling that way could be big enough to tip a presidential election. Let’s look at the figures.

  In the presidential election of 2004, just over 16 million Hispanics were eligible to vote, but only about 8 million did. That leaves at least 8 million prospective American voters who could turn out in 2008, if they felt newly energized.

  Could 8 million people swing a presidential election? You bet. In the past fifty years, the average margin of victory in the popular vote for a first-time president has been about 4 million votes. (Even in his second term, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by only about 3 million votes.) If even only 2 to 3 million more Hispanic voters turned out in 2008, they could be quite influential, indeed. And Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. In 1992, they were 4 percent of the vote, and 2004 exit polls said they were 8 percent. That’s a doubling of their political power in just three elections.

  But it isn’t the popular vote that determines who becomes president—it’s the electoral vote. Which means that Latino voters need not even tip the entire balance of the electorate—they just have to tip enough of the key swing states where they are already highly concentrated. If Hispanic voters came out in full force in Florida, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado—which together have 56 electoral votes—their candidate (assuming they had just one) would surely win. Their electoral strength has been increasing not just in numbers, but in their ability to influence the final outcome, because they have been settling in states that are on the verge of tipping from one party to the other.

  Source: Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States, Office of Immigrant Statistics, 2000, 2005

  In fact, if you look at the growth of Latino voters in those swing states between the 1992 and the 2004 elections, the rise is remarkable:

  Source: U.S. Census, 1993, 2005

  Are Latinos likely to vote? And who will their candidate be?

  Offended Latinos seem likely to vote in greater numbers. According to the 2006 National Survey of Latinos, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, 75 percent said the immigration debate of 2006 will prompt many more Latinos to vote in upcoming elections. (Indeed, they made up 8 percent of the House race electorate in the 2006 midterm elections—up from just 5 percent in the 2002 midterms.) Sixty-three percent think the pro-immigrant marches of the spring of 2006 signaled the beginning of a new and lasting social movement. And 54 percent think the debate made discrimination against Latinos more of a problem—which itself stirs up participation.

  And for whom will they vote? Historically, Hispanics have favored the Democratic candidate for president, with President George W. Bush getting the largest Republican share of Hispanic votes ever in 2004, but that still being only about 40 percent. But the 2006 immigration debate seems to have pushed many Latinos back to the Democrats. In the 2006 midterm elections, they voted about 2 to 1 Democrat, making the 2004 support for George W. Bush perhaps an aberration.

  On the other hand, the Democrats’ lock on Latinos is not certain. According to the Pew 2006 survey, the percent of Latinos who thought Republicans had the best position on immigration dropped from 25 percent in 2004 to 16 percent, which is pretty darn low. But Democrats didn’t actually make up the difference. Indeed, 1 out of 4 Hispanics said that neither party had the best position on immigration issues—more than triple the share who felt that way just two years before.

  In fact, the increasing independence of Hispanic voters may be the most important consequence of the immigration flare-up of 2006. According to the 2006 Gallup poll on Minority Rights and Relations, 42 percent of Latinos identify as Democrats and 17 percent identify as Republicans—but a remarkable 40 percent identify as Independents. Similarly, a July 2006 poll by the New Democrat Network of registered, Spanish language–dominant voters, found that 54 percent said the immigration debate had increased their interest in voting, but a 41 percent plurality said it had no impact on which party they were likely to support.

  Which means Latino voters will be open in 2008 to strong candidates who speak to their priorities, perhaps from any party. And what are their priorities? Beyond immigration itself, two key issues are health care and education. As of 2005, one-third of immigrants lacked health insurance—nearly two and a half times the rate for American-born citizens. And public schools, public schools, public schools. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, immigrants account for virtually all of the increase in public school enrollment in America since the mid-1980s.

  As illegal immigrants wield their political influence, Latinos who vote—inspired by their activist relatives—are growing more independent. In this way they will be a growing force in politics not just because their numbers are expanding and because they live in swing states, but also because they have shown they will increasingly look at the candidates and not the party alone. For this reason, they may become the most important voting bloc out there. George W. Bush would not have won reelection in 2004 without winning about 40 percent of their vote; and President Clinton, and now Senator Hillary Clinton, draw very strong support from this community. What an enormous mistake Pete Wilson made in the mid-1990s in California, and the congressional Republicans made again in 2006. Voters who want to keep immigrants out are already in the political system, but voters who want America to be true to its heritage of immigration are being awakened, mobilized, and newly activated. So the most powerful political force in the country, and the most important voting bloc in the upcoming elections, may not even be able to vote—but their cousins can. And that may make all the difference.

  Christian Zionists

  It is often said—and more often assumed—that America’s friendship with Israel is driven by America’s vocal and well-organized Jewish community.

  In fact, support for Israel among Americans in general is extremely strong, with about 65 percent of all Americans having a favorable view of the Jewish state. But here’s what’s really striking: In terms of sheer numbers, Christians who actively support Israel far outstrip the number of Jews who do.

  “Christian Zionists,” as they are called—those who believe that their Christian faith itself calls for support for Jewish rule in Israel—are estimated to be 20 million Americans. Even if every Jew in America supported Israel, which they don’t, they would barely reach 5 or 6 million.

  And so the relative numbers of Christians and Jews for Israel is remarkable. In 2006, a new organization called Christians United for Israel (CUFI) drew 3,500 attendees to its first Washington, D.C., summit and “lobby day.” According to CUFI’s executive director, David Brog, it took the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) fifty years to draw that many Jews to Washington for its policy conference and lobby day.

  AIPAC, with its fifty-year history and reputation for being a strong lobbying force on Capitol Hill, claims 100,000 members. While CUFI does not yet have formal membership, its mailings reach at least five times that many Americans.

  Sure, Israel is precious to Christians the world over as the land where Jesus lived, preached, and died. But what accounts for American Christians’ ongoing, devoted activism to the modern Jewish state? And given so many Christians’ passionate support for Israel, why does the myth persist that America’s support for Israel is driven mainly by American Jews?

  Some part of American Christians’ devotion to Israel has to do with politics: Israel is the lone democracy in a fairly totalitarian neighborhood, and is a close strategic and economic ally of the United States. Particularly since September 11, more and more Americans have seen that the U.S. and Israel share not just democratic values and institutions, but also specific enemies.

  But what tips Christian sympathy for Israel into passionate, pro-Israel activism is faith itself. Christians who interpret the Bible literally see God’s covenant with Abraham in the Book of Genesis—“I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee”—as a present-day call to care for the Jews and the land of Israel. They read the prophet Isaiah, “For Zion’s sake I will not keep quiet,” and “Comfort ye my people”—and they hear a direct call to action on behalf of the Jewish state. In addition, many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians believe that before Christ can return to earth, Jews from other lands must return to Israel. In the last decade, something like 600,000 Christians sponsored the emigration of 100,000 Jews from Russia and Ethiopia to Israel.

  But it must be a pretty small sect of Americans that directly commutes ancient biblical texts to modern-day geopolitics—right? Nope. According to a 2006 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than half of people in the American South believe the state of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. (Not the historical land of Israel, but the modern-day state of Israel.) Among white evangelical Protestants, it is 69 percent. Among black Protestants, it is 60 percent. How many American Jews think the state of Israel was given to them by God? Probably fewer than 2 in 10.

  All this means that while U.S. support for Israel is growing—even as its support is waning among certain intellectual elites—this has at least as much to do with American Christians as American Jews. Indeed, when in July 2006, two Israeli soldiers were captured by the radical militant group Hezbollah and Israel attacked Hezbollah hideouts in Lebanon, CUFI was holding its long-planned conference in Washington, D.C. That week, it was CUFI’s 3,500 Christians who descended on lawmakers’ offices to advocate giving Israel time to fight its war against America’s and Israel’s common enemy. AIPAC was there, too, but the new and surprising presence was the Christians.

  And that is the new potency of Christian Zionists. While they have been around for ages—evangelical Christians petitioned the U.S. government to create a refuge in the Holy Land for oppressed Jews as early as the nineteenth century—now they are active and skilled in American politics. And they are fired up against the radical Muslim threat to America. As the main organizer of the July 2006 CUFI event, Pastor John Hagee, said, “For the first time in the history of Christianity in America, Christians [are on] the Hill to support Israel as Christians.”

  The evangelicals’ influence on American foreign policy has not gone unnoticed by Christians who take a different view. Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book about Israel and the Palestinians—which drew a firestorm from the Jewish community and prompted the former president to apologize for at least a couple of sentences—was actually written less for a Jewish or even mainstream audience, as it was for the Christian Zionists who are at the heart of this trend. According to experts on U.S.-Israel relations, Carter, a liberal Christian, wrote to challenge his increasingly powerful conservative counterparts on the correct Christian position on Israel.

  Alas, a muddle of religion and politics—with Christians battling out what most people think of as a crisis between Jews and Muslims. And while they battle, American Jews and American evangelicals are finding themselves strange bedfellows. Historically, the two groups have been on opposite sides of most domestic social issues, from abortion to gay marriage—prompting both to wonder how close their alliance over this issue can truly be. Moreover, many Jews, understanding that the Christian vision of Christ’s Second Coming involves not just redemption for Christians but also conversion of the Jews, are wary that their political partners may have a hidden agenda in mind.

  Other Jews say that’s unfounded. Brog, the director of CUFI, calls Christian Zionists “nothing less than the theological heirs of the righteous Gentiles who sought to save Jews from the Holocaust.” Compared to the differences that Christians and Jews have with fundamentalist Islam, he says, what separates Christians and Jews from each other is “very small, indeed.”

  Surging Christian Zionism will surely mean greater pro-Israel activism on the part of Christians as America’s evangelical base—at least 40 million strong—increases its political activity. Will that convert American support for Israel to a Republican issue—challenging the bipartisan support it has enjoyed in the past? Will Jews themselves move Republican, despite their long-standing affiliation with the Democratic Party?

  Or could Israel actually become more important to evangelical Christians than it is to the Jews? Surveys of Jewish college students today show that Israel does not grab them either emotionally or politically the way it did their parents and grandparents. If, in a generation or two, Christians in America who support Israel outpace Jews not only in number but in intensity, to what extent will America’s support for Israel look less like an ecumenical, geopolitical alliance, and more like the centuries-old rivalry between Christianity and Islam for the heart of Jerusalem?

  At first, one might think Christians for Israel were basically the same people as Pro-Semites—the non-Jews who affirmatively seek out Jews to date and marry. But whereas Pro-Semites are largely Catholic and Northeastern, Christian Zionists are largely evangelical and Southern. Pro-Semites have no particular interest in Israel, but a lot of interest in a Jewish mate. Christian Zionists are just the opposite—they have little interest in a Jewish mate, but a lot of interest in the state of Israel. This phenomenon is perplexing to a lot of people, but perhaps most of all to Jews—who feel their community challenged by the high rates of intermarriage, and yet also stronger with the growing support for the state of Israel.

  Newly Released Ex-Cons

  Do you remember the 1973 hit single “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”? A man just released from prison is riding the bus home, but he has told his wife that if she doesn’t want him back, he’ll understand. He says he’ll just stay on the bus unless he sees the signal: a yellow ribbon tied around the old oak tree. And, to the delight of the whole cheering bus, the guy sees a hundred yellow ribbons tied round that happy tree.

  If this were really the scenario for most returning prisoners in America, there would be a boom in the yellow ribbon industry, not to mention oak tree care. Because back in 1973 when Tony Orlando and Dawn were singing that song, there were only about 100,000 people coming out of prison every year. Today, that number has grown by something like 600 percent.

  Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 1977–2005

  These 650,000 or so ex-cons are called “reentrants”—people leaving prison or jail, thanks to either parole or the end of their sentences, to reenter society. They are 90 percent men (with women rising from 8 to 10 percent in the 1990s). Almost half are black; a little more than a third are white; and about 16 percent are Hispanic. Their average age is 34.

  The reason there are so many more people coming out of prison now is that, in the last couple decades, we sent so many more in.

  Between 1972 and 2004, the combined prison and jail population in the United States went from 330,000 to over 2 million. Add to that 5 million on probation or parole, and you have over 7 million people in America under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts. That’s over 3 percent of the adult population, or something like 1 in every 31 adults. It’s equivalent to the entire population of Virginia.

  In California alone, the prison population grew by more than 500 percent between the early 1980s and now.

  This is because in the 1980s and early 1990s, America went on a tough-on-crime spree—imposing longer sentences, more mandatory sentences, and more determinate sentences (meaning less discretion for parole boards to decide how much of, say, a ten–twenty-year sentence a prisoner would actually serve). Forty states passed laws making it easier to try juveniles as adults.

  As a result, the U.S. prison population more than quintupled. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, Kings College, London, America now imprisons 700 people for every 100,000 of population—handily topping all other nations measured, including Russia (680), South Africa (410), England (135), and Japan (50).

  But for all this locking up, we don’t really throw away the key. Over 90 percent of prisoners at some point come out. And so, in 2006, a record-breaking 650,000 people in America left confinement to reenter their communities.

  That’s more than the entire city of Baltimore. It’s practically the entire population of San Francisco. It’s almost half as many as come out of college every year.

  Everyone knows how Australia was founded largely by prisoners who were bursting through the seams of nineteenth-century British jails. But in the entire eighty or so years of prisoner deportations, fewer than 165,000 criminals total were actually sent over to the new continent. Today in the U.S., we release almost four times that many convicts every year. If 150,000 lawbreakers could help found a continent, just think what six times that could do.

  But alas, the tale here is not so constructive, at least yet. The typical reentrant in America is a low-income male with little education, who went into jail with a drug problem and didn’t get any treatment for it. (Something like 1 in 10 inmates gets drug treatment, compared to the 7 in 10 who need it.) About a quarter were in for violent offenses. Twenty-five percent of reentrants not only have no yellow ribbons waiting for them, but are heading for homeless shelters. Many are mentally ill.