SANTA FE, NM
(By
Gabriel Arana,
American Prospect)
June 29, 2010 — Despite the outcry
over Arizona's immigration-enforcement bill and mounting pressure from
Hispanic groups, the lead immigration-reform advocate in the House, Rep.
Luis Gutierrez, admitted yesterday that any immigration bill that
includes a citizenship provision for the undocumented doesn't have the
votes to pass.
"We are 102 strong, we are 102
commitment, but we are insufficient," he said at a press conference
yesterday.
That's of course a far cry from the
requisite majority in the 435-member House.
As depressing as it is, the dim prospects for immigration reform aren't
surprising. Since the last push for reform in 2007 — when the Senate
actually passed a bill that included a citizenship provision — the
politics of immigration have turned sharply right, so much so that even
many Democrats understand "reform" only to mean beefing up border
security.
Gutierrez said "there's still time"
to pass a reform bill after the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings, but
this seems like a quixotic goal.
And with Republicans likely to take
over one of the houses of Congress in the midterm elections, prospects
for next year look dim as well. Of course the need isn't any less
pressing.
If there's a silver lining, it's that anti-immigrant sentiment is giving
this group a more cohesive sense of political awareness.
In the past, immigrants from Latin
Americans — who account for the majority of the current migration wave —
have been politically heterodox and fractured.
That is, neither have they been
reliably Democratic nor have the interests of different Latin-American
immigrant communities always aligned.
Cuban immigrants, for instance, have
tended to support Republicans more than Hispanics from other
Latin-American countries and Hispanics across the board helped push
George W. Bush to victory by giving him 44 percent of their votes in
2004.
But the anti-immigrant push has served to unify and mobilize Hispanic
voters, leading them to rethink their ties to Republicans and demanding
action from Democrats on immigration.
The significance of this is not just
that Hispanics are reorienting themselves politically.
The Arizona law and similar
anti-immigrant measure have led many Hispanics, who have historically
had lower levels of political participation than other minority groups,
to voice their opinions — on the streets, to their representatives, and
in the pages of Hispanic papers — on an issue that affects them
directly.
