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Politico: Immigration and the Harry Reid Election

Posted June 21, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

The politics site Politico has a long piece on the electoral considerations behind immigration reform. Here are some excerpts:

Soccer fans in Nevada watching the World Cup on Univision are suddenly seeing a lot of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is flooding the Spanish-language station with an ad campaign courting Latinos, who could help save his uphill reelection campaign.

But as he positions himself back home as a friend to Hispanics — who could account for 15 percent of the Nevada electorate — Reid is running into a different reality on Capitol Hill: Senate Democrats now concede they probably can’t do much about overhauling immigration policy, despite its importance to Latino voters.

Now, they are starting to look at alternatives to address the thorny issue while appeasing Hispanic voters, whom Reid desperately needs to win in Nevada, after a whopping 76 percent of them supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election.

“I don’t necessarily think we’re going to have a comprehensive bill this summer,” New Jersey’s . Robert Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the lone Hispanic senator, told POLITICO. “Here are the clear facts: If we put a bill on the floor tomorrow, we need Republican votes.”

But Menendez maintained that Reid stands to gain politically regardless of what happens in the Senate — given his GOP opponent Sharron Angle’s hard-line stance on the issue and her support for Arizona’s tough immigration law, which has put off many Latino voters.

Senate Republicans believe that any move Reid makes on immigration will be dictated more by his home-state politics and less about Senate reality.

“They had 60 votes here; they could have taken care of it,” said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. “Now it’s being used as a political ploy to get their base out.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who abandoned bipartisan efforts to pass a comprehensive bill this year, said talk of advancing one now had “a lot” to do with Reid’s reelection.

“The clock is going to run out, and Sen. Reid is behind [in his race]; ... He made that promise, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do,” Graham said.

Obama, Reid and Democrats nationally have already disappointed many in the Hispanic community by failing to make immigration reform a higher priority in 2009. Last year, Reid promised immigration reform advocates he’d take up the bill but, instead, was consumed by health care legislation. In April, he made a similar assurance at a Las Vegas rally, signaling the issue was moving to the forefront of the election-year agenda.

If failing to even bring the measure to the Senate floor forces some Nevada Hispanic voters to stay home, Reid could be in trouble in November.

“This is the year Hispanic voters will be very important for Harry Reid to get reelected,” said Jon Ralston, a well-known Nevada political analyst and columnist…

Last Thursday, at a closed-door meeting between senior Democratic senators and immigration reform advocates, the parties concluded that passing a comprehensive bill would be an extremely tall order this year because of stiff GOP opposition and uneasiness among some Democratic moderates. A number of advocates felt that bringing up a bill this year, only to see it fail, could set back reform efforts for years, according to several people familiar with the meeting.

So Reid and his allies are considering abandoning a comprehensive bill until after November, for possible action in a post-election session or in the 112th Congress, which begins in January 2011.

Where does that leave Reid with the Latinos he’s wooing back home? Looking for smaller victories.

Reform advocates are beginning to lobby fence-sitting Republicans to see if they’d go along with supporting narrower immigration issues this year — strictly dealing with undocumented agricultural workers and children of illegal immigrants….

Republicans are prepared to label even narrow Democratic approaches as “amnesty” for the nation’s illegal immigrants, a label that resonates with many independent voters in the swing state. A June poll in the Las Vegas Review-Journal found that Nevada voters supported the new Arizona law by 57 percent to 32 percent, and independents backed the law by 61 percent to 30 percent.

Republicans think any debate over immigration policy will help them at the ballot.

If Democrats try to advance an immigration bill in the Senate, “it would be very unpopular and would probably contribute to a larger Republican victory in November than we otherwise are likely to have,” warned Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

In the weeks ahead, while Reid targets Latino voters in Nevada, Democrats have a huge amount of business on the floor, including trying to extend unemployment checks for the jobless. (Nevada has the nation’s highest unemployment rate.) And politically sensitive business awaits like repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” passing energy legislation and confirming the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. Must-pass measures like extending tax cuts for the middle class are also waiting in the wings.

Immigration reform doesn’t exactly top most senators’ election-year wish lists.