Immigration issue at a boil
Rising emotion - Oregon's senators have been hearing from very vocal folks about the bill
Monday, June 18, 2007
JEFF KOSSEFF
The Oregonian
WASHINGTON -- At Sen. Ron Wyden's annual Sherman County town hall meeting last month, the most discussed issue was not the Iraq war or the uncertainty of the timber county payments program. Folks had traveled great distances to talk about immigration.

Passions were intense. One farmer at the meeting in Rufus forcefully interrupted the Democratic senator, trying to demonstrate statistically the magnitude and harm of illegal immigration.

While Wyden hears emotional pleas at community meetings, his colleague, Republican Sen. Gordon Smith, gets thousands of phone calls and regular immigration demonstrations at his Portland office.

Both say the emotion makes it difficult to find the common ground legislators need to pass any bill on comprehensive immigration reform.

"The passions run very, very high," Wyden said. "The emotions on this are really extraordinary. We're going to have to pull out all the stops to try to bring together the center again. But I think it can be done."

Neither Wyden nor Smith has been at the national forefront of the immigration debate. But for both, any vote on immigration will mean upsetting a large constituency, whether it is labor, business or human rights groups.

The bill that recently stalled in the Senate seemed promising, with backers ranging the political spectrum from President Bush to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. But the bill also had vociferous opponents on the left and right. Some complained that the bill was unfair to families; many others argued that it would provide amnesty to illegal immigrants who steal U.S. jobs.

For a bill to receive an up-or-down vote in the Senate, 60 senators must vote to close off debate. Earlier this month, only 45 senators, including Wyden, voted to move to a final vote, so it stalled. The Senate Democratic and Republican leaders said they plan to continue debate on the bill -- possibly this week -- but finding common ground will be difficult.

"It's hard to see how you come up with a governing center on this bill to get 60 votes, but it is a very important issue and I think we need to continue working on it," said Smith, who voted against having a final vote.

Smith's office received about 4,000 calls on immigration in the three weeks before the vote. Iraq, the second most common topic for callers, drew about 120 calls in that same period.

"It's fair to say the response was enormous," Smith said. "The feelings were heated."

Smith said that "slightly more" Oregonians were opposed to the bill than in support of it, but "we heard from both."

Wyden's office has received hundreds of passionate calls a day about immigration.

"The strongest sentiments are from people who are against the bill," Wyden said. "But in that sense, that is always the way it is. Folks who tend to be in the middle of the debate listening to both sides tend to be fairly quiet in terms of speaking out."

In search of the center

Wyden, who holds at least one town hall meeting a year in every Oregon county, said immigration has been the most discussed issue at his recent meetings.

"There is a strong tier of very vigorous opposition," Wyden said. "It centers on the word 'amnesty.' What I've tried to do is be part of a center that can find some common ground."

The Rufus meeting, he said, demonstrated the intensity he must confront both in Oregon and in Washington, D.C.

"People feel very strongly," Wyden said. "That passion is going to ripple back on the floor of the United States Senate."

In Rufus, Wyden said, he attempted to lay out three concepts where all sides could agree: make border security the top priority of immigration reform; enforce the immigration laws that are on the books; and allow employers to bring in workers from other countries if there is no U.S. labor available at wages that would allow them to stay in business.

"There's an effort to try to nail down the center," Wyden said. "To me, that's the challenge here."

Wyden contrasts it with his work on health care, another area that affects people personally.

"People work through health care in a very personal way and very methodically, but at a different decibel level," Wyden said. "Immigration comes at you from the get-go at a very high decibel level."

Risky issue for GOP

Politically, Smith has more at stake in the immigration debate than Wyden does, said Bill Lunch, an Oregon State University political science professor. Not only is Smith up for re-election next year, but Republicans tend to be far more passionate and divided about immigration than Democrats, according to national polls.

A Pew Research Center poll released in April found that immigration will be the most important issue for 12 percent of Republican voters in the primaries, compared with 3 percent of Democrats.

"The Democrats are much more concerned about the economy, Iraq, other things," Lunch said in an interview earlier this month, before the vote failed. "On the Republican side, immigration is right up there."

Smith also has a unique perspective as the owner of a frozen-food packing plant that employs seasonal workers, many of whom are Latino. Smith has not actively run the plant since the early 1990s, but its management says that it vigorously checks workers' documents to make sure they are in the country legally.

Smith said he ultimately voted against ending debate on the immigration bill because he believed it needed more work.

"It was just an enormously complicated bill," Smith said. "I felt it was the wrong time to pull the plug on working on it."

Smith said the bill insufficiently walled off Social Security against illegal work and identity theft.

"We need to get to a place where there are biometric Social Security identity cards and a national database that identifies legal workers with American jobs," Smith said.

He said he disagreed with some of the amendments that were added in the past few weeks, including a cap on the number of guest workers and a five-year sunset provision for the guest worker program.

Although Wyden voted to limit debate and move to a final vote, he could not say whether he would vote for a final bill until he sees its contents.

"It's such a big, complicated piece of legislation," Wyden said. "I'm not going to be able to give a thoughtful answer to that until I see what you end up with."

Wyden said he doubts that Oregonians leave his town hall meetings convinced of a new position. But the passion surrounding the immigration issue, Wyden said, reinforces the importance of holding the regular constituent gatherings.

"I want people to have an opportunity to weigh in personally," Wyden said. "This is not the kind of issue that's helped when elected officials just go off behind closed doors and say, 'The heat's too great. I don't want to go out and face folks.' This is one where you have to give people a chance to be part of a discussion."

http://www.oregonlive.com/metro/oregoni ... xml&coll=7