In last night’s Republican debate, candidates finally addressed immigration head-on. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called for comprehensive immigration reform, while Donald Trump cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s approach to deporting immigrants in the 1950s as a way of rationalizing his plan to mass deport 11 million people, including the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants.

This was definitely an improvement in terms of time devoted to the topic from the last Republican debate in Colorado, where immigration was given little airtime. During that contentious GOP/CNBC debate, GOP candidates became so incensed about the questions posed by CNBC’s moderators that immediately following the event, the Republican National Committee (RNC) moved to suspend its partnership with the NBC network, with the party’s only Spanish-language debate this primary season a casualty of that decision.

Telemundo, a co-host with NBC News of the canceled debate, would not comment on the GOP’s decision, though a representative from the news station did direct Rewire to NBC’s statement, which said: “This is a disappointing development. However, along with our debate broadcast partners at Telemundo we will work in good faith to resolve this matter with the Republican Party.”

The rapidly changing demographics of the U.S. Latino community might suggest language alone is not as important as it used to be, but advocates and researchers say that the GOP is making a grave mistake by failing to engage any and all Spanish-speaking voters in every possible medium.

Latinos are the nation’s largest minority and one of its fastest-growing populations. U.S.-born Latinos now outnumber those born outside of the United States. With the rise of U.S.-born Latinos comes a sharp decline in the percentage of Latinos who speak Spanish exclusively at home. A Pew Research Center survey found that in 2013, 89 percent of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently. Also, a growing share of Latino adults are consuming television, print, radio, and Internet news in English, while a declining share are doing so in Spanish. Political strategists, journalists, and everyone in between are also writing about low voter turnout in Latino communities.

Perhaps these are some the factors the GOP considered when deciding to cancel its only Spanish-language debate, but for advocates this is just another example of how, regardless of the language, GOP candidates don’t value Latino voters. This time it’s even more of an insult given the 2012 GOP autopsy report, which called for Republicans to embrace Latino voters.

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, pulling in just 23 percent of the Latino vote, the RNC released the report to show how the party might address its shortcomings. Among other things, it recommended the GOP “invest financial resources in Hispanic media” because attracting “these groups to our Party and candidates, our budgets, and expenses need to reflect this importance.” The RNC’s report also said GOP surrogates should have “a high-level presence on all Latino media” to “help carry and sell our message to the Hispanic community.” Yet, there will be no Spanish-language debate for the Republican primary this campaign season.

Forty million Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2030, up from about 25 million in 2014. There are nationwide efforts to engage young Latino voters, from online voter registration meant to appeal to tech-savvy millennials to an unprecedented number of Latino-focused voter education campaigns. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project’s (SVREP) Jalapeño Challenge may be the most interesting push, challenging participants to either post a video of themselves on YouTube eating a jalapeno or, if they “can’t hang,” to donate $16 to the organization to register a voter. SVREP, which is the largest and oldest nonpartisan Latino voter participation organization in the nation, created the challenge in response to Trump’s anti-immigrant hate speech and as a way of mobilizing the nearly eight million voting-age Mexican Americans not currently registered to vote.

Advocates have asserted that understanding how to engage the Latino community should be a top priority for all presidential candidates, especially as those on both sides of the political spectrum will need Latino votes to carry them in crucial swing states like Nevada, Colorado, and Florida.

The conventional wisdom has been that Republicans need at least 40 percent of the Latino vote to win an election, a reference to the so-called Latino threshold reached in the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote. But Latino Decisions, a political opinion research organization, recently debunked the assumptions behind the threshold, reporting that the figure “assumes that the Bush-Kerry demographics of 2004 are still in effect, even though that election was 12 years ago.”

Given that the GOP will need a much higher percentage of the Latino vote than previously thought, the party must begin laying the groundwork to make that a reality. Canceling their only Spanish-language debate is not a helpful step toward following the autopsy’s recommendations and unlike previous elections, a considerable amount of additional work must be done because of the headlines Trump has been making.

Antonio Gonzalez, who is president of SVREP and has navigated the ups and downs of the Republican Party’s relationship with Latinos, including their wildly different stances on immigration, said that just by virtue of giving someone like Trump a platform, an “immeasurable” amount of work must be done to improve the GOP’s image in the Latino community.

Gonzalez told Rewire that in focusing on the past, the GOP is also failing to take current debates, such as the party’s association with anti-immigrant individuals and policies, into account.

“What Republicans seem to forget about Bush getting over 40 percent of the vote is that he didn’t put himself in the anti-immigrant pot. Immigration is one of the single most important topics to Latinos and Trump has committed a huge political sin,” Gonzalez said. “The Republican Party has to figure out how to heal this self-inflicted wound in the media era—that is to say, the 24-hour news cycle where everything you say stays on the Internet forever. You can’t say one thing in California and another in Ohio. You can’t get away with that anymore and because of that, so much brand damage is being done.”

Some, like former political consultant Avi Green, say there is more than enough time for the GOP to repair its relationship with Latinos before Election Day, but Gonzalez told Rewire that whatever repairs can be done will not be sufficient for a Republican to carry the 2016 presidency.

While Latinos may not need a Spanish-language debate, having one could act as a needed symbolic gesture—because Latinos are paying attention and according to advocates and researchers, what they’re hearing isn’t good. Gonzalez said that of the millions of Latino voters, a small percentage are seasoned voters who have a better understanding of nuances during election season. Five million, he said, are new to voting and more apt to make blanket judgments based on the snippets of news they see.

“That’s five million people who heard Trump call Mexicans rapists. Trump is a Republican nominee, therefore all Republicans are bad,” Gonzalez said commenting on what new Latino voters might be thinking when they go to the polls. “What the GOP didn’t calculate for is that by allowing Trump this platform, there are more eyes on them than ever before. We have never seen viewing numbers like this for primary debates. Latinos are really paying attention to what these candidates are saying about immigration and Marco Rubio speaking Spanish and Jeb Bush pushing for immigration reform doesn’t fix what’s been done.”

The fact that the GOP decided not to do a Spanish-language debate at all is why the work of organizations like Mobilize the Immigrant Vote (MIV) becomes so crucial, advocates said. MIV, according to its website, “amplifies the voices of low-income immigrant and New American communities of color,” two populations parties on both sides fail to engage, and not just during election season.

MIV’s Suguey Hernandez is a senior field organizer and a first-generation Mexican American. From that intersection, she told Rewire, she has seen how many segments of immigrant populations are dismissed entirely with the assumption that these populations can’t vote, so why try?

“The issue is that engaging these communities requires building trust and that requires an investment a lot of politicians aren’t willing to make,” Hernandez said. “You have to really value grassroots leadership and not just during an election season. The strength of the alliances we’ve built with 11 other organizations is that we all understand civic engagement isn’t just about pushing folks to go out and vote. It’s about prioritizing the needs of these communities and not just engaging them when you want them to show up for you during election time.”

Organizations like MIV that build multiethnic alliances to address immigration shouldn’t be a rarity, given the drastically different populations that immigration affects, but “immigration” has become synonymous with “Latino”—and that’s a problem.

“It’s very harmful that immigration is only seen as a Latino issue,” Hernandez said. “The way that it erases non-Latino immigrants, including Black immigrants, leads to the idea that there is not only a homogenous Latino population whose relationship to immigration is the same, but it also creates community issues where certain populations are advocated for and see advancements and other communities don’t.”

From a voting perspective alone, this should inspire candidates to re-evaluate how they’re engaging immigrant communities and people of color as a whole. In California, for example, people of color became the majority of voters in 2014 and soon, they will become the majority of voters across the country. Advocates strongly argue that politicians can no longer afford not to engage these communities in real ways.

Echoing Gonzalez, Hernandez said Latinos are noticing how these issues are addressed and how little immigration has been addressed by GOP candidates. This, despite refugee crises at home and abroad.

“At a very basic level, not having a debate on Telemundo that addresses the issues of such a large segment of the population—and I mean immigrants and people of color—just reads as disrespectful,” Hernandez said. “That disrespect is going to have a lot of consequences.”

Pew research found that the growing U.S.-born Latino population is markedly younger, with a median age of 19 years “compared with 40 among immigrant Hispanics.” Every month, 50,000 Latinos celebrate their 18th birthdays.

Community leaders note that young people today are politically active in ways that won’t benefit the GOP. Hernandez said that countless times during recent community events, young people have approached her to say that they were inspired to vote so “the other side doesn’t win.”

“So many people are overlooked, dismissed, or mistreated during this [election] process,” Hernandez said. “I can’t speak for all Latinos and MIV doesn’t speak for all new citizens, but I thought a conversation with my mom, a recent naturalized citizen, was very telling. I asked her how she felt about the GOP pulling out of the Telemundo debate. She said, ‘We don’t need a Spanish-language debate to know how they feel about us.’”