Texas Republican Personifies Challenge for Immigration Bill

Jennifer Whitney for The New York Times
Representative Blake Farenthold, a Republican, spoke to his constituents in Gonzales, Tex., on Tuesday, where he faced many questions about the immigration overhaul.

By ASHLEY PARKER

Published: July 3, 2013

GONZALES, Tex. — The questions about immigration at Representative Blake Farenthold’s town meeting were urgent and to the point.



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Few Heavily Latino Republican Districts

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Progress on an Immigration Overhaul in 5 Areas






So were the answers.
Mr. Farenthold, a Republican, told an audience here on Tuesday that the overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that recently passed the Senate “doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell in the House of Representatives.”
The 70 or so constituents — largely older, largely white — who filled the small, warm room in the Gonzales Municipal Building were more curious than combative, more earnest than angry. They wanted to know, for instance, why Mr. Farenthold thought that Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, had supported the Senate’s immigration bill, which includes a path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. “I think he wants to be president,” Mr. Farenthold said with a laugh.
Mr. Farenthold embodies the challenge for advocates of major immigration changes as they press the issue in the House. Even though he represents a district with a significant population of Hispanics, he has strong reservations about providing a path to full citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, a provision that backers of the Senate measure consider a condition of their support. Mr. Farenthold instead favors what he calls “earned legalization” — a process in which immigrants would have to meet a series of conditions for remaining in the United States. Immigration advocates say that approach would create a second class of people who could never become citizens.
“My deal is you start as far to the right as you can get, and go to the conference committee with the Senate, and hopefully end up with something you can live with,” Mr. Farenthold said in an interview after his event. “Getting to citizenship is going to be tough, but never say never.”
Mr. Farenthold is among the House Republicans who have expressed some openness to an immigration overhaul. Elected in 2010 on the Tea Party wave, he defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent by 800 votes. His district at the time stretched from Corpus Christi down to Brownsville, on the border with Mexico, with Hispanics making up more than 70 percent of the population.
After a politically favorable redrawing of his district after the 2010 census, Mr. Farenthold now holds what is considered a safe Republican seat, with a decreased, but still significant, share of Hispanics — 49.5 percent, according to the census.
For many other House Republicans, however, the redistricting changes were starker, creating little political incentive to support an immigration overhaul.
Only 24 Republicans sit in districts that are more than 25 percent Latino, and last year Mitt Romney won 17 of those districts by more than 10 points. That leaves, said David Wasserman, the House editor for The Cook Political Report, only a handful of districts that are “substantially Latino and remotely competitive.”
Redistricting, Mr. Wasserman added, “makes the Republican majority in the House almost impenetrable,” but it also makes the job of Speaker John A. Boehner “almost unmanageable.”
Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, described the Republican predicament similarly. “Redistricting puts them in a very difficult position when they’re contemplating voting for immigration reform,” he said. “They know in their hearts it’s the right thing to do, but their political brain is blaring warning signals that they’re exposing themselves to a primary from the Tea Party and extreme right-wing base.”
In person, Mr. Farenthold can come off as slightly goofy. He is fleshy, with a gap between his top front teeth, and he kicked off his hourlong question-and-answer session by joking, “We can now play stump the congressman with questions.” After the event, he turned to his district director and said good-naturedly: “You never got me a Dr Pepper, Bob. That’s a hashtag fail.” Moments later, the soda appeared.
He also threw out bits of red meat intended to appeal to his conservative base. On guns: “I’m a Texan — my idea of gun control is hitting what you aim at and nothing else,” he said. And on potential budget cuts: “I think there are several departments we could completely get rid of, and we wouldn’t miss it,” he said, as the crowd murmured its assent.
But his tone turned more moderate when he talked about immigration changes, a reflection of the cross forces in his redrawn district: a voting base that disapproves of anything that smacks of amnesty, but also a population that is about half Hispanic, and a business community that believes that undocumented workers are critical to the economy.
The consistent message that he hears from constituents, he said, is “no to the Senate bill and no amnesty.” He added, almost wearily, “Where the lines of amnesty are have not been sorted out in the American psyche.”
Mr. Farenthold told the crowd that he favored the piecemeal approach being taken by the House Judiciary Committee, on which he sits, “where you’re able to say yes or no on whatever issue, rather than having to vote up or down on a big comprehensive bill.”
Later, in the interview, he said that some of those pieces could include a path to legalization for the “innocent victims” brought to the country illegally as young children, he said, or “for folks who served honorably in the military.”
Referring to the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, he added: “It could be a pathway to legalization. It could be way back in the line, after everyone else.”
If nothing else, Mr. Farenthold hopes to use his background as a talk radio host to help his fellow Republicans “talk to constituents in a way that isn’t offensive, and that shows compassion and that is reasonable.”
He recalled recently doing a radio interview with another Republican legislator, who three times referred to immigrants as “those people.”
“I’ve been in radio since I was 15 years old — you might as well have used a racial slur,” he said. “ ‘Those people’ is a bad word.”
Some pro-immigration groups are taking Mr. Farenthold at his word. Jeremy Robbins, the director of the Partnership for a New American Economy, said that Mr. Farenthold was on his organization’s list of lawmakers it was hoping to persuade to vote for an immigration compromise.
“He’s from Texas, he’s on Judiciary, and he’s thought about immigration,” Mr. Robbins said.
And Fernando Garcia, the executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, which recently helped organize an immigration overhaul tour throughout the state, said he believed that Mr. Farenthold was “on the fence.”
“If Farenthold doesn’t see the future of his district, and if he doesn’t see the future of the party as a whole, then he is betting on the wrong side,” Mr. Garcia said. “He needs to make a decision within the next few months, because votes are going to happen soon.”



A version of this article appeared in print on July 4, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the