Majority of Public want Immigration addressed with tougher enforcement with a path to earned citizenship

Researcher T amar Jacoby has blown the lidoff immigration as a vital election issue. What she has to say has implications for candidates trying to use it as a last-minute wedge issue in November’s election.

Jacoby, who works for the Manhattan Institute, is a leading conservative scholar on immigration and citizenship. In the current authoritative journal Foreign Affairs, she argues that the issue is driven mainly by politicians and the media.

News junkies know there was no major concern 18 months ago. They were surprised last December to see the House pass the Sensenbrenner bill which criminalized illegal status.

The public has become much less divided on the issue than most of us are led to believe. Poll results are remarkably consistent. Two thirds to three quarters of the public want Congress to address the problem with tougher enforcement and a path to earned citizenship. Economic projections show that job growth through 2012 will easily absorb this work force.

The vast majority of the public does not have as much of a problem as does a recalcitrant minority, points out Jacoby. Since Congress failed to come up with a compromise law, a premium is now placed on the “20 - 25 percent of voters who depart from the emerging national consensus,” she says.

They are mostly male, white and lacking college degrees. And they are about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. They are the “naysayers” who, statistical evidence aside, still believe immigrants are bad for the economy. They want to wall up the southern border and feel real fervor at the thought that “illegal immigrants” can become citizens.

Many House Republicans, says Jacoby, are convinced”“this group is more intense - more concerned, more motivated, more likely to vote on the basis of the single issue” than others going to the polls, and they can make the difference in a very tight race.

That explains why in some places the divisive immigration issue is coming up as a last-minute wedge issue ripe for exploitation by candidates in either party.

In August, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sponsored a 35-second ad on its web site with two people scaling a border fence. In it, images of Osama Bin Laden and North Korea President Kim Jong Il were mixed in. That helped ...