New York Times
By Ashley Parker
August 27, 2013
Representative Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican, was up early last Thursday morning, tapping along to a mariachi beat and speaking what he calls “West Texas” Spanish.
“Mi madre is a teacher en Espanish,” Mr. Pearce told Alejandra Soto, the host of a Spanish-language drive-time radio show in southern New Mexico.
During the 10-minute interview, Mr. Pearce and Ms. Soto gamely talked past each other — him in English, her in Spanish — as he earnestly tried to answer her questions about immigration. They seemed to understand each other only some of the time.
“Vamos, vamos, let’s go!” Mr. Pearce said as Ms. Soto talked over him in energetic, rapid-fire Spanish, revving up her morning listeners.
Mr. Pearce’s dogged and aggressive outreach to Hispanics is one of the reasons he has continued to win re-election in New Mexico’s Second Congressional District — where Mexico borders to the south and Hispanics make up 52 percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau — despite his continued opposition to a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
Mr. Pearce, 66, embodies the challenge, as well as the real possibility, of pushing an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws through a Republican-controlled House when Congress returns in September.
Many Republicans see Mr. Pearce as a model for how their party can attract Hispanic voters. He is responsive to constituents when they ask for help and hears out even those he disagrees with on the question of immigration. Among non-Hispanic Republicans, Mr. Pearce represents the most heavily Hispanic district.
Advocates working on behalf of immigrants, however, view Mr. Pearce as a target, as someone who, based on the demographics of his district alone, should be supporting a path to citizenship and could pay a steep political price if he does not.
“How he votes on this is going to be one of those defining votes that will either dog him or help him throughout his career,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a group pushing for an overhaul of the immigration system. “He’s facing a growing Latino vote, a district in a state that’s trending blue, and if he gets to ‘no’ on immigration reform, that’s going to really hurt him.”
Mr. Pearce says he wants to fix what he calls a broken immigration system, and he sees himself as a border-state pragmatist.
“One side says everybody just gets citizenship, the other side says deport them or put them in jail, whatever. And I’m saying there is another alternative that would allow families to stay together, that would allow people to work, that just would not make them citizens,” Mr. Pearce said on Wednesday night in a response to a question at a town hall-style meeting in Deming. “Because that makes me very nervous as a policy.”
Later in the evening, he added: “I think that the plan I’m suggesting is the compromise plan. It’s somewhere out between kick them out and give them full citizenship.”
Mr. Pearce’s proposal would create a guest worker program, which would allow illegal immigrants to stay in the country as long as they were working. But it would not provide citizenship to those workers over time. He would allow illegal immigrants to become citizens, but they would first have to return to their home country and wait in line there.
“You can’t get control of the borders if you tell people you can come here illegally and you can work until you work your way to the front of the line,” Mr. Pearce said in an interview on Thursday. “The whole world would want to do it that way. Who would want to wait and do it properly?”
Despite Mr. Pearce’s strong opposition to a path to citizenship, advocates of an overhaul still believe that he might be persuadable, and various groups have descended on his district over the August break, holding marches and protests and filling his public meetings. “They simply realize that this is a 34 percent Republican district, and they’re hoping to bring enough pressure that would change me,” he said.
At a meeting on Thursday night in Las Cruces, advocates and activists packed the room, many having marched over from a local church. The crowd was hot and restless; people fanned themselves, and toddlers squirmed and mewled on their mother’s laps.
The questions came in both English and Spanish and frequently returned to the topic of immigration from both ends of the spectrum. “What are you people going to do about immigration?” one man demanded. “It’s getting out of hand, you can tell that right here tonight.”
Other attendees, many of whom belonged to the Border Network for Human Rights, an immigration advocacy and human rights organization, worried aloud about the “militarization” of the border and said immigrants without documents lived in constant fear, with families being split up through deportations.
Mr. Pearce answered their questions for 90 minutes, calmly giving similar versions of the same response. “I agree that it is not good for people to live in fear,” he said. “We need to solve the problem. I’m saying just solve the problem by giving guest worker permits to those people who would work.”
Mr. Pearce, a mild-mannered Vietnam War veteran who was a baseball catcher at New Mexico State, grew up poor, the son of a sharecropper who went broke when Mr. Pearce was a toddler.
Mr. Pearce says that he is among the most conservative House Republicans. He was one of 12 Republicans who voted against re-electing Representative John A. Boehner as speaker. And he opposed both the Dream Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for immigrants brought here illegally as young children, and President Obama’s directive to stop deporting “Dreamers.”
Immigration is one of the few issues on which he finds himself out of step with many of his conservative colleagues. For example, Mr. Pearce said in the interview that he was willing to support a path to citizenship for the young immigrants, as long as doing so did not encourage another wave of illegal immigration.
At the meeting Thursday, he offered an undocumented student a similar answer, saying he was “sympathetic to the position of people like yourself” but urging the young questioner to “tell me how we don’t recreate the problem again.”
David Wasserman, the House editor for The Cook Political Report, said that “what’s remarkable about Pearce is that on most issues he’s one of the most conservative members. But his willingness to work towards an immigration bill is a sign of just how needed such legislation is in his district.”
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, visited Mr. Pearce’s hometown, Hobbs. Mr. Pearce says he spoke to Mr. Romney, who had already alienated Hispanics by suggesting a policy of “self-deportation,” for half an hour and urged him to reach out to and embrace Hispanics.
“I just think it was a killer mistake,” Mr. Pearce said of the Romney position. He estimates that he won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in his district last year, compared with the 27 percent that Mr. Romney won nationwide.
On Thursday evening after the meeting, Mr. Pearce stayed to shake hands and answer more questions, many from constituents who still wanted to persuade him to support a path to citizenship.
“He’s doing his best, I should admit that,” Monica Garcia, a Las Cruces resident and member of the Border Network for Human Rights, said as she watched Mr. Pearce mingle.
“But,” she added, “we’re not going anywhere.”
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