/ 

Democratic Victory Raises Spirits of Those Favoring
Citizenship for Illegal Aliens 
by Randal C. Archibold

PHOENIX, Nov. 9 — Supporters of granting citizenship to some or all illegal immigrants say the Democratic takeover of Congress has galvanized their cause and could lead to sweeping changes in immigration law.

Democrats will take over leadership of committees in the House and the Senate that could guide new immigration legislation, while President Bush and the presumptive House speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, have cast changes to immigration laws as an opportunity to demonstrate bipartisan bonhomie.

“We have never had the table set for the possibility of action as we do now,” Andrea LaRue, a Democratic political consultant, said in a conference call with reporters.

Some immigration experts, however, predict a more arduous debate. Although conservative Republicans have led the opposition to accommodating some illegal immigrants, a handful of the newly elected Democrats, including Claire A. McCaskill of Missouri and Jim Webb of Virginia in the Senate, campaigned promising a tough approach to illegal immigration. Some Democratic incumbents who won re-election did the same.

“It is still a long way from a deal,” said Roberto Suro of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington research group. “The question is, can somebody illuminate a middle ground where people who come at this issue from all different directions can reach a settlement.”

Supporters of more relaxed policies on illegal immigration count among the casualties of the Democratic victory at least 11 House members who had opposed giving illegal immigrants an opportunity to gain legal residency and, ultimately, citizenship.

Representative J. D. Hayworth published a book on immigration titled “Whatever It Takes” and campaigned heavily on a platform of sealing the border and ejecting illegal immigrants. Although Mr. Hayworth, a six-term Republican from the suburbs of Phoenix, has not conceded defeat, unofficial tallies indicate that he has lost his seat by four percentage points to a Democrat, Harry Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell, who is a former mayor of Tempe, had said that a path to citizenship made sense in some cases.

Also in Arizona, a self-described Minuteman border vigilante, Randy Graf, a Republican seeking an open seat near the border, was soundly defeated by Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat willing to consider citizenship for some illegal immigrants.

The Republican-controlled Congress failed to pass a broad immigration bill this session, stuck over whether to provide steps toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, although a measure calling for 700 miles of fencing on the 2,000-mile border was approved, with the backing of several Democrats, and signed by Mr. Bush. Many political analysts, however, called the fence an election-eve effort to placate conservatives that stood little chance of being completely built.

Still, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington group favoring tighter limits on immigration, said six state ballot initiatives making life harder on illegal immigrants were approved by voters on Tuesday, four of them in Arizona, where immigration is intensely discussed, and two in Colorado.

The Arizona measures include blocking illegal immigrants from collecting punitive damages in civil lawsuits, being released on bail for serious felonies and taking state-subsidized adult education and child care programs.

In Colorado, the measures require the state attorney general to sue the federal government for failing to enforce immigration laws and deny tax credits to employers who knowingly hire illegal workers.

Bruce Merrill, an Arizona State University pollster, said the measures were popular because voters believed the federal government was not taking action. “My feeling is that the frustration with nothing being done was so strong that if there had been 10 initiatives dealing with cracking down on illegal immigration, all 10 of them would have passed,” Mr. Merrill said. “In other words,” he said, “what the initiatives were proposing substantively may not have been as important as giving people something, anything, they could vote for to feel something was being done.”

Advocates of a get-tough approach said that despite their losses they had gained in the battle of ideas. “When the incumbent Democrat runs a race on securing the border and cutting taxes, our ideas are doing just fine, let’s remember that,” said Len Munsil, the Republican candidate for governor who was soundly defeated by the incumbent, Janet Napolitano, a Democrat. The governor had declared an emergency on the border last year and called for National Guard troops to go there.

Senator Jon Kyl, a two-term Republican who supports a temporary guest worker program but not provisions that would lead to citizenship for illegal workers already here, won re-election by a healthy margin.

The final days of the race, however, focused less on immigration than on the backgrounds of the contenders. Still, immigration advocates said the Democratic gains had brought new energy to a cause that seemed to flag after a round of demonstrations in the spring were followed by disappointing results in legislation and voter registration drives that fell short of goals.

The election “shows what we have been saying all along, that the anti-immigrant, enforcement-only rhetoric to motivate conservative voters was not reflecting where the majority of Americans are on this issue,” said Angela Sembrano, director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles, one of the groups that helped organize large pro-immigrant marches in the spring. Ms. Sembrano and other protest leaders said that, in the afterglow of election night, they would refrain from detailing what they will ask of Democrats until they meet with the new leadership in the coming weeks. But Chung-Wha Hong, executive director the New York Immigration Coalition, said the goal would still be “legalization for as many people as possible.”

People on all sides of the immigration debate had watched Arizona closely because illegal immigration has surged dramatically here in the past decade while its politics drifted toward the center from the right. Earl de Berge, a veteran pollster here, said Republicans who made a hard-line approach the centerpiece of their campaigns misjudged a moderating shift. “The fact is immigration was not, never has been, and is not the No. 1 issue in this state,” Mr. De Berge said. “The big issues were the same as the ones nationally, the war, the economy and Bush and so on.”

“The mistake Graf and Hayworth made,” he said, “is that they simply were outmaneuvered by their own insistence on beating on that one issue.” “This,” he added, “is a moderate state, not a conservative Republican state.”