In Raising Immigration, G.O.P. Risks Backlash After Election

New York Times

By Jeremy Peters

October 21, 2014

In Raising Immigration, G.O.P. Risks Backlash After Election 

New Hampshire has one of the smallest populations of illegal immigrants in the country. Only about 5 percent of its 1.3 million residents are foreign-born, and 3 percent are Hispanic.

But tune into the Senate race between Scott P. Brown, the Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent, and you might think the state shares a border with Mexico, not Canada.

When someone called a talk radio show to ask Mr. Brown about global warming the other day, Mr. Brown immediately started talking about border security. “Let me tell you what I believe is a clear and present danger right now,” he said, brushing aside the caller’s concerns about the environment. “I believe that our border is porous.”

Footage of agents patrolling the rocky, arid Southwestern landscape is featured in Mr. Brown’s ads — not quite the piney highlands of New Hampshire.

A political group led by prominent conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Ms. Shaheen last week with a video that juxtaposed two alarming images: a horde of people rushing a fence, presumably along the Mexican border, and a clip of Islamic militants right before they beheaded the journalist James Foley, a New Hampshire native. The ad was pulled after the Foley family complained.

Republicans have long relied on illegal immigration to rally the conservative base, even if the threat seemed more theoretical than tangible in most of the country. But in several of this year’s midterm Senate campaigns — including Arkansas and Kansas, as well as New Hampshire — Republicans’ stance on immigration is posing difficult questions about what the party wants to be in the longer term.

Some Republicans are questioning the cost of their focus on immigration. Campaigning on possible threats from undocumented immigrants — similar to claims that President Obama and the Democrats have left the country vulnerable to attacks from Islamic terrorists and the Ebola virus — may backfire after November. At that point, the party will have to start worrying about its appeal beyond the conservative voters it needs to turn out in midterm elections.

“You should never underestimate the ability of the Republicans to screw something up and blow an ideal opportunity,” said Ralph Reed, an influential conservative who has battled with hard-line Republicans to take a more charitable view on immigration.

“There is a sense in which, I think, the overwhelming desire to gain control of the Senate has kind of so fixated the party’s strategic brain trust that trying to get a hearing on long-term strategic issues doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment,” he said.

Still, immigration could be important to voters in states that do not have significant immigrant populations, and that seems to be the calculation of the campaign of Mr. Brown and others.

Much of the harsh talk on immigration today may have to do with simple math. In the states that Republicans need to win to retake the Senate, Hispanics are a sliver of the electorate. Nationally, they make up 11 percent of eligible voters. But in the eight states with close Senate races, fewer than 5 percent of eligible voters are Latino, according to a new Pew Research report.

Colorado is the only state with a competitive Senate race where Hispanics make up a significant share of the electorate — 14 percent. As a result, Republicans there have steered clear of making immigration policy an issue. Faced with polling that showed immigration could help Representative Cory Gardner, the Republican Senate nominee, strategists there still decided not to focus on it.

Instead, the Republican-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce is running ads in Spanish in Colorado featuring Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and possible 2016 presidential candidate.

In Kansas, where Hispanics account for 6 percent of eligible voters, the opposite scene is unfolding. The campaign of Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican, has been running an ad reminiscent of the infamous 1994 spot by Gov. Pete Wilson of California that showed immigrants racing across a busy highway to enter the country illegally. Mr. Roberts’ ad depicts two shadowy figures climbing a fence. “Illegal immigration is threatening our communities and taking jobs away from Kansans who need them,” the announcer says.

Opposition to the immigration bill that passed the Senate last year (and has languished in the House since) has become a focal point for many Republican candidates who denounce any “amnesty.” And the split between Republicans who support an overhaul and those who do not has led to some awkward moments on the campaign trail.

In New Hampshire, Mr. Brown slammed the Senate bill as too lenient just hours before Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who helped write the legislation, went to campaign for him.

In North Carolina, Thom Tillis, the Republican Senate nominee, held a campaign rally with Mr. Bush at the end of September. But after Mr. Bush made the case for an immigration overhaul, Mr. Tillis quickly tried to put distance between them, saying, “You have to make it clear that amnesty shouldn’t be on the table.”

Republicans who want to see a broad-based immigration overhaul say the debate is unhelpful.

“Those that support the status quo are supporting amnesty,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the Chamber of Commerce. “And we hope this election is about leadership and governing, instead of all talk, no action.”

It is not just Republican candidates who are focusing on immigration to the concern of many in the party, but outside groups. Citizens United, the conservative political organization, is running ads in states like Arkansas attacking Democrats for being too easy on people who entered the country illegally.

“Mark Pryor voted against building a border fence? What was he thinking?” says one commercial from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund that goes after the Democratic senator who is fighting to hang on to his seat.

David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said the issue of immigration was resonating at the moment because of how it played into the broader notion that the government was failing on a number of fronts, from fighting the Islamic State to responding to Ebola. “Can we trust the government to secure the border?” Mr. Bossie asked.

As for any long-term damage Republicans could suffer by alienating Hispanics, Mr. Bossie said, “I don’t go through life trying to calculate every single possible way things can and can’t go, because that’s an incredibly negative, jaded way to do things.”

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