Immigration and Iraq driving '06 races

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON — It’s now clear that Republicans have decided to fight the 2006 campaign on the battlefields of Iraq and the Mexican border.

But Democrats also think Iraq and immigration work to their benefit in this fall’s elections. The paradox: both parties believe the issues of immigration and Iraq will be winners for them.

Can both be right? Only if what's a winner in one district — a message of getting tough on illegal immigration, for instance — is a loser in another district.

House Republican leaders said last week they’ll dispatch their members to spend the July and August recesses holding hearings around the country to expose what they see as flaws in the Senate-passed immigration bill.

That measure, OK’d last month but not yet reconciled with a House immigration bill, would allow illegal immigrants to become citizens and would set up a guest worker program. The House bill takes a tougher, secure-the-border approach with no guest worker provision and no legalization process.

In an early test of the immigration issue, Rep. Chris Cannon, R- Utah easily won the Republican primary in his district Tuesday, fending off challenger John Jacob, who took a hard anti-illegal immigration stance and was backed by Team America, a political action committee created by Rep. Tom Tancredo, R- Colo., the most outspoken foe of illegal immigration in the House. It was a rebuff for Tancredo and a win for President Bush who had endorsed Cannon.

Santorum starts ad pitch with immigration
An indicator of how significant GOP incumbents think the illegal immigration issue is for this November’s election came last Friday when Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who most analysts see as the most endangered Senate incumbent, kicked off his television advertising effort with a spot contrasting his immigrant father and grandfather who “came here with dreams of a better life for their family” with today’s illegal immigrants.

“Some enter our country with more sinister intentions,” Santorum warned.

Santorum faces Democrat Bob Casey Jr. who supports the Senate bill.

Another sign that Republicans see illegal immigration as an issue that favors them came Sunday night in a debate between New Jersey Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean, Jr. and incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez.

Kean accused Menendez of voting to give “a direct path to citizenship for those individuals who have entered our country illegally and broken our laws. I think that's wrong.”

Menendez did vote for the immigration bill which the Senate passed last month, as did almost all Senate Democrats. But that vote also highlighted the schism in GOP ranks. Voting for the bill were 23 Republican senators; opposing it, 32 Republicans.

Not a winning issue?
Democratic pollsters and strategists say Republican efforts to use the immigration issue to win in November are doomed to failure.

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said voters aren’t as fired up about illegal immigration as Republicans think they are.

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“From what I’ve seen in the national (survey) data, we have a very polarized debate in Congress and yet a pretty moderate electorate, even in states like Arizona,” Greenberg said.

Joe Garcia, the director of the Hispanic Strategy Center for the New Democrat Network, a group that identifies key issues and rallies Democratic voters, said of the Republicans’ election-year immigration push, “They’re about to engage in what will probably go down in history as one of the more nefarious acts of political expediency and baiting of a community that we will have seen in our lifetime.”

He added, “Maybe there will be short-term (Republican) victories here, but the long-term defeat for Republicans is inevitable for their inability to control the rhetoric” in the immigration battle.

In Arizona, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado, NDN is running Spanish-language TV ads pegged to the World Cup soccer championship telling Latino viewers “the moment of truth is upon us” and urging them to “join the (Democratic) team.”

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