Immigration re-enters national debate

Posted 30m ago
By Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY

Four years ago, immigration was a major issue in congressional campaigns across the country. Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords won her first term representing a southern Arizona district in 2006 against a Republican she described as "an immigration hard-liner." Two years later, she says, she was surprised that the nation's broken borders got hardly a mention in the presidential campaign.

This year, after the still-unsolved March shooting of rancher Robert Krentz along the Mexican border in Giffords' district, "immigration is back," she said.

A controversial new Arizona statute would allow law enforcement officials to demand identification from suspected illegal immigrants. Giffords says the law was prompted in part by Krentz's death, in an area traversed by illegal immigrants. The law is set to take effect later this month unless a federal judge supports a legal challenge from President Obama's administration.

No matter what its fate in the federal courts, the proposed Arizona law already is having an impact on the midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress and 37 governor's offices. Meg Whitman, a Republican running for governor in California; Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, running for re-election in Nevada; and Republican Lou Barletta, an eastern Pennsylvania mayor making his third bid for Congress, are among the candidates from coast to coast making the Arizona law a campaign topic.

ARIZONA: No ruling yet in hearing

This week, nine state attorneys general — including three Republicans running for governor — filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing Arizona in its fight with the federal government. Latino groups, meanwhile, unveiled polling data showing the Arizona law has infuriated the nation's fastest-growing voting bloc.

All of this is happening at a time when, according to federal government statistics, illegal immigration is down and "the border is safer than it has ever been," says Doris Meissner, a former U.S. immigration commissioner now with the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank.

That's not how it feels to people living there, Giffords argues. She points to reports of drug-related beheadings and lynchings in Mexico, just a few miles from some of her constituents' homes. "The crime in Mexico has created a different kind of fear than we have seen before," says Democratic pollster Lisa Grove.

Elsewhere in the nation, immigration appears to be serving as a stand-in for even deeper anxieties.

"The problem of illegal immigration only compounds the frustration people are feeling with the federal government," Barletta says.

Pollsters are tracking two trends that appear to be on a collision course for the Nov. 2 general election:

• A wide majority of Americans consistently say they favor the Arizona law. Separate Quinnipiac surveys in the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania showed overwhelming support for the measure. "This is a very powerful issue," says Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll.

• Hispanics are equally unanimous — on the other side. A survey released this week by a coalition of Hispanic groups found that eight in 10 Hispanic voters oppose the Arizona law. Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials said those numbers track "a dramatic shift in Latino attitudes" that his organization found in a separate survey, to be released next week.

The deep split in the electorate is reflected in campaign strategies. Hispanic Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval in Nevada and Senate candidate Marco Rubio in Florida, have endorsed the Arizona law.

In Arizona, former congressman J.D. Hayworth is making immigration the centerpiece of his campaign to oust veteran Sen. John McCain in next month's GOP primary. Hayworth frequently notes that McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, co-wrote a bill four years ago that would have provided a path to citizenship for millions of people now living in the USA illegally.

This year, McCain is emphasizing his support for border security. "Build the dang fence," he says in one of his campaign ads. In Arizona's gubernatorial race, incumbent Jan Brewer has pulled away from her GOP primary opponents since signing the immigration law in April, according to a poll by the Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center.

Elsewhere, other candidates take a different tack. In Nevada, where Hispanics made up 15% of the electorate in 2008, Reid has made his opposition to the Arizona law a centerpiece in his re-election bid. In California, Whitman cut a GOP primary ad promising to be "tough as nails" on illegal immigrants. For the general election campaign, she's released a Spanish-language ad touting her opposition to the Arizona law.

Jim Kolbe, a Republican who represented Giffords' Arizona district for 22 years, says the statute may produce some election victories this year for his party, but "will damage Republicans" in the long run by alienating Hispanic voters.

The solution to illegal immigration, Kolbe argues, is a bipartisan approach that would include border security, a program to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants already in the USA and another to allow foreigners to work here legally. The former congressman says he "got clobbered" politically for co-authoring such a bill while he was in Congress. A 2007 version by McCain and Democrat Edward Kennedy, backed by then-president George W. Bush, fell just short of passage.

"The two sides have been getting further and further apart ever since," Kolbe said.

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