Advocates for Immigration Reform Target Republicans

Most Americans - at least those outside of the GOP's Christofascist/Tea Party/white supremacist base - and most business interest want to see comprehensive immigration reform.  Yet Republicans who are always only to happy to prostitute themselves to the GOP's toxic base remain the primary obstacle to need reform.  Indeed, John Boehner (a pathetic excuse for a human being, in my view) has flatly stated that no vote on the bill passed by the Senate will occur in the House of Representatives.  What are reform advocates to do?  Start targeting Republicans and putting heat on them.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the strategy.  Here are highlights:

As House Republicans have all but ruled out the possibility of passing any sweeping legislation before the end of the year, immigration advocates are operating with an increased sense of urgency. Their goal is to pressure lawmakers like Mr. Tipton to support an overhaul, creating a call for action from Republican House members that they hope Speaker John A. Boehner and his leadership team will find impossible to ignore.

But persuading Mr. Tipton, a two-term lawmaker who rode into office on the Tea Party wave in 2010, to support any broad immigration legislation will be a tough sell.

Democrats, perhaps optimistically, hope to get Mr. Tipton to sign on to the broad bill they recently introduced, which includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country. Immigration advocacy groups hope to show him that there could be political consequences if he does not take steps to help overhaul the nation’s immigration system. 

According to the most recent census, Mr. Tipton’s district, which covers nearly the entire western half of the state as well as part of its southern border with New Mexico, is 24 percent Hispanic. Combined with the large agricultural businesses on the Western Slope, the demographic forces alone would seem to compel Mr. Tipton to support some form of immigration overhaul. President Obama won the state narrowly in both 2008 and 2012, and Mr. Tipton won re-election last year with 53 percent of the vote.

This month, a coalition of immigration advocates, as well as labor and religious groups, inaugurated the “Cost of Inaction,” a voter education and outreach campaign that targets nine House Republicans, Mr. Tipton included, to push for a vote on an immigration overhaul before the end of the year.

We feel that to move them, we have to awaken the electoral vulnerability that Republicans face, both specific Republicans that have large and growing immigrant electorates and also the party as a national party,” said Tom Snyder, the immigration campaign director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., one of the groups behind the campaign. “It’s very hard to think about them winning a presidential election with an immigrant electorate that’s growing and overwhelmingly hostile to the party.” 

Immigration advocates are hoping that Colorado is particularly primed to be on the forefront of their push in Congress. 

“There is not a part of our state, from the agriculture economy to the tourism economy to the high-tech economy, that is not reliant on our having a functioning immigration system and is not compromised by the broken system we have today,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, who was part of the group that drafted the Senate’s immigration bill. “What puzzles me about this issue is why it becomes partisan when it’s in Washington, D.C. It’s not partisan in Colorado.”