comprehensive immigration reform

The White House, in an apparent attempt to mollify right-wing critics of comprehensive immigration reform, announced last week that it would sharply step immigration enforcement—and at least one group that attacked reform is taking credit for this latest move. Matthew Spaulding of the Heritage Foundation writes:

The Border Security and Immigration Administrative Reform initiative is smart and sensible and deserves to be commended. Virtually all of the policies within it have been proposed by The Heritage Foundation's policy research and analysis.

The anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA is crowing about its amazing growth: According to the New York Times, the group’s membership has reached 447,000, compared with less than 50,000 in 2004.

The “little-known” outfit has become a key player in the immigration debate, according to the Times, coordinating daily with well-known groups like Eagle Forum and the Heritage Foundation and working closely with Congress. “We’re involved in weekly discussions with Numbers USA and other immigration-control groups as part of a team effort,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray, the successor to Tom Tancredo as head of the Immigration Reform Caucus.

NumbersUSA’s success in capitalizing on opposition to comprehensive immigration reform bills considered in Congress recently stems in part from its efforts to channel raw anti-immigrant sentiments, which congeal around NumbersUSA’s explicitly restrictionist stance, into what Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “kinder, gentler” movement:

“Numbers USA initiated and turbocharged the populist revolt against the immigration reform package,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant advocacy group. “Roy Beck takes people who are upset about illegal immigration for different reasons, including hostility to Latino immigrants, and disciplines them so their message is based on policy rather than race-based arguments or xenophobia.”

But it also stems from a savvy – and numbers-intensive – use of the Right’s Internet marketing industry. During the debate over immigration, it’s been hard for conservatives on the Internet to avoid NumbersUSA. Those who subscribe to right-wing e-mail lists – such as those of GOPUSA, NewsMax, and Human Events – have received countless “sponsored” or “third-party” e-mail messages from NumbersUSA over the past months, sometimes multiple copies in the same week. Here’s one received via Human Events, and another similar message sent through GOPUSA. Both feature an “instant poll” on whether “Kennedy’s Illegal Alien Amnesty Should Fail” (95 percent of respondents agree), taking you to a site where you can send a fax to Congress and join NumbersUSA.

These spurts of faxes and e-mails, driven by NumbersUSA e-mail, can have a heady impact on members of Congress. “You have to give them credit: The phone calls, the faxes, the people who show up at town halls and meetings — you have to say NumbersUSA is behind a fair amount of that,” said Sharry of the National Immigration Forum.

Sharry acknowledged NumbersUSA's influence on lawmakers, pointing to Georgia's two Republican senators, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss. The two, who helped write the immigration bill, were immediately in NumbersUSA's crosshairs. Both have withdrawn their support, saying the bill fails to provide adequate border security.

While the effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate suffered a setback last week, supporters vowed to continue to pursue a compromise this term. Nevertheless, right-wing activists declared victory. Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events, said it was a “Miers Moment” for the Right, referring to the far Right’s successful campaign to undo Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Mark Krikorian praised a “vigilant citizenry” that “inundated” Senate offices, and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum credited “overwhelming opposition to this amnesty bill.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said, “I think there were people dancing in the streets in cities across America [after the vote]. I hope I can see the tape of some of that someday.”

While the Right Wing claims that the people have spoken, as the New York Times points out, polls find broad public support for the Senate bill’s provisions. For example, about two thirds of Americans support legalization of undocumented immigrants, according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll – the very provision opponents decry loudly as amnesty.

The effort to pass comprehensive reform continues, but meanwhile, local politicians and activists are working to undermine it. Like national anti-immigrant figures, Butler County, Ohio Sheriff Richard K. Jones declared that “the 'silent majority' was heard after all by federal legislators.” We heard from Jones last year, as he ramped up his personal campaign against undocumented immigrants in his county – putting up billboards and newspaper ads implying grave consequences for hiring “an illegal,” and making mass arrests of Hispanic workers only to release them without charge.

Like his attempts to “bill” the Department of Homeland Security and Mexico for his police expenses supposedly related to immigrants, Jones’s freelance efforts to treat immigration violations as if they were felonies did not seem to accomplish more than a breakdown of police relations with the Hispanic community.

Now Jones is teaming up with a state legislator to oppose the U.S. Senate bill and try to deport more immigrants:

"Let's create stricter state laws to go after employers who hire persons who are in this state illegally," he said. "Also, let's make English the official language of the state. Those who live in Ohio should know our language. Taxpayers should not have to pay for interpreters in schools, and U.S. citizens living here shouldn't have to learn another language."  …

"If we would make it a crime to be in Ohio illegally and local law enforcement could charge offenders with that as a state criminal offense, then we probably could get the federal government to deport those offenders," Sheriff Jones said. "Now is the time for Ohio to show the rest of the country how to deal with immigration problems."

Lawmakers in other states have sought to make illegal aliens subject to arrest under state and local criminal-trespassing laws since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Homeland Security agency responsible for deporting illegal aliens, generally does not respond to pick up illegals unless they have committed a crime.

It is widely acknowledged that, for the last several years, James Dobson has been the most powerful Religious Right figure in the nation, commanding an organization with a massive staff and an equally massive budget that can influence grassroots activists across this country.  

And while Dobson is still throwing his political weight around, there is speculation that some of his influence may be waning:

The 70-year-old Mr Dobson (who has already suffered a heart attack and a stroke) is increasingly looking like a relic of an ancien régime rather than a harbinger of a new order. The average age of people on Focus’s mailing list is 52. Mr Dobson and his acolytes are rapidly being displaced by what Mr Gilgoff calls a New New Right—people who are concerned about international justice and climate change as well as abortion and gay marriage, and people who are willing to work with liberal pressure groups over issues such as Sudan and sex slavery.

If that is indeed the case, it appears as if Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has quietly been positioning himself to challenge Dobson as the Right’s leading powerbroker. 

“With some people, the issue of amnesty is a litmus test and anything short of a concentration camp is amnesty,” said Republican National Committee member Paul Senft Jr. of Florida. He was speaking of his fellow RNC members, a number of whom are plotting a party coup to prevent Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Florida), Bush’s pick, from assuming the title of general chairman.

Bush picked Martinez to head the Republican Party shortly after the midterm elections, in which the party lost control of both houses of Congress in spite of – or because of – the obsessive efforts by many to cement a Republican alliance with anti-immigrant extremism. Despite Martinez’s partisan and right-wing credentials – the Family Research Council gave him a perfect score – the Right reacted immediately by attacking the senator, who immigrated from Cuba as a teenager, for his support for comprehensive immigration reform. Pat Buchanan accused Bush of “pandering” to minorities only to alienate whites, and Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies called the pick “disturbing.”  Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) warned that if Martinez continues to support comprehensive reform he will alienate “rank-and-file Republicans” and cause “another shellacking at the polls.”

While the president’s selection seemed like a foregone conclusion, a group called English First unveiled a campaign to “defeat” the nomination, launching StopMartinez.com: “Wrong on English. Wrong on Amnesty. Wrong for the Republican National Committee.” In addition to immigration reform and declaring English as the national language, the web site decries Martinez’s use of Spanish in a Senate speech, as well as his alleged position on statehood for Puerto Rico. (“Think West Virginia or Alaska, only poorer,” warns the group ominously.)

Now, at the RNC meeting in Washington (which began today), many members are planning to vote against Martinez – and according to The Washington Times, some are planning to invoke parliamentary rules to disqualify him.

The conservatives -- one of whom accused the Bush White House of "outsourcing" party leadership -- say the general-chairman post does not exist under RNC rules, which can be changed only at the party's presidential nominating convention.

Unhappy committee members say that, in the past, Republican presidents and RNC leaders have successfully run roughshod over the rules, because the RNC officer presiding over votes at committee meetings have simply overruled points of order and other objections from the floor, with no accredited professional parliamentarians to exercise a check.

This time, the organizers of the rebellion say, their strategy will rely in part on having a parliamentarian present. And violations of Robert's Rules of Order and of the RNC's written rules -- adopted at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York -- could result in legal challenges. …

[RNC member Randy] Pullen pointed out that Mr. Martinez, who served as Mr. Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development before winning a Senate seat, is not an RNC member. RNC rebels say the rules are clear that the person who heads the committee must be a member of the committee.  "Outsourcing our leadership at this critical time is not an option," Mr. Haugland said.

While the anti-immigrant faction hoping to undermine Bush’s selection may not succeed in preventing Martinez from becoming general chairman, they may succeed in further distancing the party from Hispanic voters.