(Repeats Saturday story to additional subscribers)
* In low-key meetings, lawmakers asked to act
* A contrast to nasty “town hall” meetings in past years
* Some conservative lawmakers warming to immigration changes
By Andy Sullivan
HOUSTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) – If Texas Representative Ted Poe
was looking for reassurance that backing an overhaul of U.S.
immigration laws won’t be political suicide for conservatives
like him, he may have found it this week at a seafood restaurant
on the outskirts of Houston.
During a roundtable discussion, several business executives
told the five-term Republican that they can’t find enough
Americans willing to cook fajitas, repair sidewalks and perform
other types of unglamorous work that keeps the fourth-largest
U.S. city humming. A more robust guest-worker program would
help, they said.
Poe told the executives he was working on a bill to tackle
the problem and assured them that his fellow Republicans would
help overhaul the U.S. immigration system in the coming months.
“Just doing nothing is a vote for the status quo, which is
broken,” Poe said of an immigration system that has struggled to
deal with the estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the
United States.
As lawmakers return to their home districts in the final
weeks of summer, hundreds of U.S. businesses have quietly
mobilized to persuade Republicans such as Poe that an
immigration overhaul is broadly supported by their constituents,
even if some conservative activists loudly object.
The low-key strategy by businesses, along with a decision by
several conservative lawmakers to spend the month campaigning
against President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul, appears to
have lowered the temperature of the immigration debate.
Public “town hall” meetings held by members of Congress this
month generally have not disintegrated into the raucous,
racially tinged sessions on immigration that some had feared.
As a result, many involved in the effort are cautiously
optimistic that one of their top priorities of the past decade
could become a reality sometime in the next year and a half –
even though huge obstacles remain in the Republican-controlled
House of Representatives.
“We’re confident that this is going to get done sooner
rather than later,” said Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona
Chamber of Business and Industry.
Immigration reform has long been a top priority for business
groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which say that
current laws and regulations make it too difficult to find
workers they can’t recruit at home and expose businesses to a
tangle of conflicting labor regulations.
Business groups mobilized an army of lobbyists to push for
passage of a sweeping immigration bill by the
Democrat-controlled Senate in June. The bill – backed by 14 of
the Senate’s 46 Republicans and all 52 Democrats – included new
visa programs for foreign workers, additional requirements for
employers to verify workers’ legal status, billions of dollars
for extra security on the nation’s borders, and a 10-year path
to U.S. citizenship for undocumented workers.
But the dynamics on immigration are different in the House,
where many lawmakers represent uniformly conservative districts
that give them little incentive to compromise.
House Speaker John Boehner says his chamber won’t even vote
on the Senate bill. Instead, Republicans are expected to advance
a series of bills that tackle the issue in pieces.
A path to citizenship is a non-starter for most of the 233
Republicans in the 435-seat House, though a few – including
Florida Representative Daniel Webster and Illinois colleague
Aaron Schock – have come out in support of the idea in recent
weeks. The lobbying by businesses and other groups this summer
has focused on urging House conservatives to pass a bill of
their own that could emerge as the basis for compromise talks
with the Senate.
Many Republicans are warming to a measure that would provide
undocumented workers with some type of legal residency status,
said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a business
group that organized the Poe roundtable. Those workers then
could apply for citizenship through other means, she said.
“Can Republicans get to that path to legal status, and can
Democrats accept that? That would be the makings of a sweet
spot,” Jacoby said.
‘FRIEND OR FOE?’
The debate over immigration pits the business-friendly
Republican establishment against many of the conservative Tea
Party activists who helped the Republicans win control of the
House three years ago.
Many individual employers have been reluctant to publicly
wade into the debate for fear of alienating potential customers,
organizers of the effort say.
Conservative activists, by contrast, are not afraid to kick
up dust in public.
Half an hour before Poe’s event this week, members of a Tea
Party group unfurled signs on a freeway overpass several miles
away that questioned Poe’s conservative bona fides. “TED POE:
FRIEND OR FOE?” one sign read.
One member of the group, dispatched to monitor the
roundtable, said she worried that “the elites, the One World
Order types” were winning over conservative lawmakers such as
Poe.
“I’m afraid since he’s gone to Congress and he’s been living
in that cesspool that some of that dirt has rubbed off of him,”
said Jeanne Hall, a Houston grandmother who worries that
immigrants are taking jobs from Americans.
Poe, a former state judge who built a national reputation
for handing out stiff punishments, has gone from skeptic to
advocate in recent years on immigration reform.
Poe’s district is now 30 percent Hispanic, up from 13
percent when he was first elected in 2004. He has argued that
his fellow Republicans need to work harder to appeal to this
growing slice of the electorate to remain competitive with
Democrats in future elections.
Last month he repudiated comments by Iowa Republican
Representative Steve King after the immigration hard-liner said
that young illegal immigrants who were brought into the country
by their parents were more likely to wind up being drug
smugglers than school valedictorians.
Unlike many of his fellow conservatives, Poe says tighter
border security or tougher enforcement of existing laws won’t
solve the problem alone. He said he is undecided about how to
treat undocumented workers.
“I’m not sure that the solution is. Deporting them is not
the answer, but the other extreme is not the answer, saying,
‘OK, amnesty for everybody here.’ We can’t do that, that’s not
in the works,” he told Reuters.
STATING THEIR CASE, PRIVATELY
Beyond their roundtable meetings with lawmakers, some
business owners are making sure they have a presence at town
hall events.
After Poe’s roundtable this week, Houston insurance agency
owner Norm Adams planned to drive three hours to another
lawmaker’s public forum to ensure that opponents of an
immigration overhaul weren’t the only ones in the room.
“Every time we have a chance, we clearly prove that they are
the minority. But they’re the screamers, and the loudest,” Adams
said.
More often this summer, business groups are making their
case behind closed doors.
In Minnesota, business executives have peppered Republican
Representative John Kline with questions on immigration at
several private events, said Bill Blazar, a vice president at
the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.
In Colorado, a group of six business executives who
collectively donated nearly $500,000 to Republicans in the 2012
election, wrote a letter on July 29 to the state’s four
Republican House members last month urging them to support
changes in immigration laws.
In Arizona, where Republicans in the state legislature have
enacted one of the strictest immigration laws in the country,
business leaders are arguing that a hard-line stance is not the
political winner it once was.
In Texas, the state’s close ties with Mexico and a sizable
Hispanic population have made many business leaders especially
aware of the need to do something on immigration, and the
state’s 24 Republican House members could play a pivotal role in
the coming months. Representatives Sam Johnson and John Carter
have worked for months to craft a compromise with Democrats,
while Poe and others plan to push legislation on various issues.
Poe said he had heard a range of opinions from his
constituents in recent weeks, from those who back the Senate
plan to those who want to deport all of the nation’s 11 million
undocumented residents. But he had not heard anything to sway
his conviction that the issue must be addressed.
“There are those who with vocal rhetoric really don’t want
anything fixed,” he said. “But immigration has been broken for a
long time.”
(Editing by David Lindsey and Tim Dobbyn)
