This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 27th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Republicans have shown themselves to be broadly out of step with the electorate on a number of issues.

One of those is immigration.

Cato Institute Policy analyst Alex Narasta evaluates the prospects for immigration reform

as the GOP tries to regroup.

Since the election, Mitt Romney's campaign manager has said that he regrets the immigration stance taken by the Romney campaign.

George W Bush has re-emerged as a person who talks about issues in public,

and in this particular case about immigration.

The George W Bush Institute has been pushing for immigration reform and I think that's one

of those issues that he actually genuinely does care about.

He speaks intelligently about and

passionately for that matter. And Republicans more broadly have begun to

re-evaluate how they feel about immigration. Ran Paul and others have suggested that maybe the Republicans need to take a hard right

or left depending on how you look at it on immigration.

Yeah, so taking a look at the election outcomes for one thing.

The Republicans got shellacked by the Latino and Asian vote in the United States.

I mean exit polling shows that they got somewhere around 25% of the Hispanic vote and even less of the Asian

vote. So it's not, if they got say the numbers that George W Bush got of the Hispanic vote, about 40 to 44 percent,

then it probably would not have changed the outcome of the election, but a few states might

have changed.

So Nevada would have been a razor thin. It would have been right on the edge a few votes going either way.

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