Suman Raghunathan

Running Scared on Immigration

Ah, political strategists. They hold sway over candidates and their stances on important issues. They’re featured in heady, intellectual TV shows like “The West Wing”. They get to wear cool glasses while hosting their own political talk shows, a la George Stephanopoulous. At the rate they’re going, there’ll probably soon have ‘Bratz’ dolls in their likenesses.

Too bad they’re all not doing their job advising politicians (hello, their bosses!) on how to come up with immigration policy that helps native-born and immigrants alike.

I know Governor Spitzer could have used them in the past two months. Instead, Spitzer decided earlier this week to run scared from his own proposal to provide undocumented immigrants with a form of driver’s licenses.

In a rare moment in his pugilistic political career, Eliot actually had support from immigrant rights groups, security experts, road safety advocates, civil libertarians, libertarians (the ‘live free or die!’ types) and privacy advocates – and in true contrarian Spitzer fashion, he walked away from it all (and basically into the arms of his old friend, Joe Bruno). Click here for more on just how much of a lost opportunity New York’s driver’s license plan was for all state residents.

What Spitzer, his political operatives, and quite frankly Democratic and Republican party hacks don’t seem to get is, running on an anti-immigrant platform doesn’t get you political play. And it sure isn’t going to help fix our nation’s fundamentally hamstrung immigration system.

Let me be perfectly clear: there’s some serious, coke-bottle-glass myopia on immigration. Everyone seems to be running scared on the issue, willy-nilly, on both sides of the aisle. So far this year, over 1200 anti-immigrant bills have already been introduced at the local, state, and national levels – and there are sure to be more. Senator Clinton flubbed her take on Spitzer’s driver’s license plan at the last Democratic Presidential debate, then vaguely came out to support issuing driver’s licenses to the undocumented. The result? Her numbers only dropped in the polls by 3% - within the margin of error, for you statistics buffs. ‘Course, then Senator Clinton started listening to those political strategists. Yesterday she backtracked again, to come out against issuing driver’s licenses to the undocumented. Makes perfect political sense to me. Take a stand on an issue, don’t suffer politically for it, then change your mind. Crystal clear.

Looks like Clinton’s been listening to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (and supposed the new face of the leaner, meaner Democratic Party that’s out to win for sure) who last month told his favorite Congressional candidates at a DCCC-sponsored training they ‘needed to move to the right on immigration’. Hmm… let’s see how this makes sense here. Emanuel’s district on Chicago’s North Side is nearly 25% Latino; the next largest constituency is Polish-American; and Asians and South Asians are moving into the neighborhood fast. Seems like Emanuel needs to go back to the political basics fast and look at who he’s accountable to. An unlikely pairing of progressive bloggers and Illinois’ largest immigrant rights group certainly is paying attention: they’ve formed a PAC to take out ads demanding accountability from Emanuel, who’s fond of touting his pro-immigrant credentials out of one side of his mouth while nudging his party to the right from the other side.

In the meantime, enlightened Democratic Mayors like San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom (ok, he may not be enlightened when it comes to marital fidelity, but hey, he’s great on policy!) and New Haven’s John DeStefano have decided to issue municipal identification cards to undocumented residents so they can come out of the underground economy to patronize banking institutions, report crimes and workplace violations, and cooperate with the police. Despite his recent verbal diarrhea opposing driver’s license for the undocumented in New York State, even New York City Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg has a longstanding city policy promising confidentiality on resident’s immigration status. Maybe Emanuel should be paying attention to these mayors, who’ve been getting re-elected with landslide margins.

Last week’s state and local elections in some bellweather states like Virginia give us a much more realistic picture of immigration as a politically toxic topic in local races : it wasn’t.

In a supposed flash of its customary long-term planning brilliance (sic), the GOP poured serious political capital into an anti-immigrant platform in key suburban and rural county legislature races in Virginia. In Fairfax, Loudon, and Prince William County (which over the past six months saw virulent protests against day laborers in addition to denying state aid to any locality that provides any services to undocumented residents, hurray for the Grand Ol’ Party, wahoo!) the GOP’s candidates hoping to capitalize on a cheap-shot anti-immigrant platform lost.

Which now brings us to Iowa, another political bellweather state where our political strategist friends are running amok. In a Quinnipiac University poll done last week, a majority (55%) of those precious Iowa voters all the candidates are salivating over supported comprehensive immigration reform. And this in the midst of the national hoo-ha over driver’s licenses for the undocumented. Take that, political strategists.

Come to think of it, maybe our Mayors should talk to Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC), a former football player and protégée of Emanuel’s DCCC. Shuler has just teamed up with my friend Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO and lifelong friend of immigrants, clearly) to introduce a bill (H.R. 4088, The 'Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act' to require employers to use the recently re-branded federal E-Verify employer database (which verifies little except the errors within its ranks) to identify workers who may not be authorized to work in the US. (I’ve written before on the problems with E-Verify and the SSA No-Match program – click here for more on how the program clearly only verifies it's a car crash.)

Problem is, government studies have shown E-Verify and its records could result in up to 2.5 million people per year being incorrectly identified as unauthorized to work – and therefore branded as undocumented. Once that happens, studies have shown most employers wait to use their worker’s undocumented status as blackmail against them when workers demand fair wages and safe working conditions. In fact, the Social Security Administration is so suspicious of its own work authorization records that it decided yesterday it won’t send out so-called ‘No-Match’ letters that alert employers there may a question about their workers’ work authorization and by extension, their immigration status. Way to go, Congressmen! Yay for bipartisanship and using undocumented workers as a punching bag!

What we need is comprehensive immigration reform that gives undocumented workers and their families their due as residents, workers, and individuals. That’s what a majority of voters support.
I will leave you with prescient words from the WashingtonPost:

“The one point on which [Republican] moderates and conservatives seem to agree is that their party overplayed the illegal immigration issue. "They went for a magic bullet with immigration, and it didn't work," says a conservative strategist who doesn't want his name used because his clients don't agree that immigration is a losing issue. …Moderates say harsh rhetoric on immigration repelled independent voters. Northern Virginians "know this crackdown on illegal immigration was posturing.“

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 4:46 PM, Nov 15, 2007 in Immigration
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