The question of what to do about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States and how much public aid they should receive for education have ignited fierce debate in the presidential campaign, especially among Republicans.
With Congress having failed this summer to pass legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, the contentious issue has been kicked to the campaign trail.
There the debate over illegal immigrants and whether they should be granted access to such benefits as cheaper, in-state tuition rates and federal student aid has been fraught with emotion and political peril.
Believing that many Republican voters are looking for a president who will take a strong stance against people who entered the United States illegally, several of the Republican candidates — including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney — have sought to outdo one another in tough talk.
As Mike Huckabee rises in the polls in Iowa, where political caucuses are set for early next month, he has become a target of attacks.
The former governor of Arkansas favors making illegal immigrants eligible for state scholarships, putting him at odds with some of his Republican counterparts and with many of the conservative voters whom Mr. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, has courted with his views on other social issues, such as his opposition to abortion.
The immigration issue has become a prominent concern among voters, with nearly one-quarter of adults citing it as one of their top two priorities in a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. The telephone survey of just over 1,500 adults last month found that 38 percent of Republicans ranked it as one of their top two issues, compared with 27 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats.
Ross Eisenbrey, who has followed immigration policy as a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington nonprofit group, attributes the growing concerns about illegal immigrants to the nation’s faltering economy. As wages fail to keep pace with inflation and Americans’ bank accounts suffer, he says, people are likelier to worry about who is competing for their money and where their taxes are going.
Heated Exchanges
The passions underlying the issue boiled over during a Republican presidential debate last month, when Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, engaged in a testy exchange over whether illegal immigrants should be eligible for state scholarships.
Mr. Huckabee had supported a bill as governor that would have allowed some illegal immigrants who grew up attending schools in Arkansas to earn merit-based aid. (The legislation failed in the General Assembly.)
Helping immigrants earn degrees would bolster state coffers, he argued in the debate, because those people would pay more taxes on the higher salaries they would be likelier to earn, and the extra goods they could buy, than they would in low-wage jobs.
Mr. Romney bashed that argument, saying that Mr. Huckabee would give away “taxpayer money” to people who have broken the law. Doing so, Mr. Romney said at the debate, would limit state funds available for scholarships to help legal residents.
Mr. Huckabee retorted that such a view seemed un-American: “In all due respect,” he said, “we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.”
Outside the debate, Mr. Romney continued his attacks on Mr. Huckabee, mailing materials to Iowa Republicans last month that disparaged him for providing “shelter” to illegal immigrants, citing his position on granting them state scholarships.
The former Massachusetts governor has similarly criticized Mr. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City. Mr. Romney, who vetoed a bill when he was governor that would have allowed illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition, issued a news release in November in which he charged that Mr. Giuliani had operated a “sanctuary” city, in part because illegal immigrants qualified for in-state tuition at the City University of New York. (That policy, however, was signed into law by the governor, not by Mr. Giuliani.)
Mr. Giuliani has defended his record, saying that he provided immigrants access to public schools and other government facilities to protect the overall health and safety of the city. He has taunted Mr. Romney, in turn, about reports that he has allowed undocumented immigrants to do lawn work at his home.
Congressional Debate
Meanwhile, Mr. Huckabee has exercised caution since the November debate in voicing support for extending public benefits to illegal immigrants on a broader scale. Last week he told ABC News that he was “not sure” that he would support extending eligibility for Pell Grants and federally subsidized student loans to illegal immigrants who had attended high schools in the United States.
A measure, known as the Dream Act, containing some of those education benefits was included in the sweeping immigration bill that Congress debated this year. Another Republican contender, John McCain, a U.S. senator from Arizona, helped craft that legislation.
Many political observers have pointed to Mr. McCain’s backing of the bill, which died in the Senate, as a factor in his decline in political polls. On the campaign trail, Mr. McCain has shifted his rhetoric. He now talks about how the nation needs to improve border security first, before turning to other issues, such as providing federal education benefits to some illegal immigrants.
Among Democrats, debates over immigration generally have not been as heated, in part because the candidates’ views are largely similar.
The highest-profile scuffle over the matter involved Hillary Rodham Clinton’s waffling this fall over a proposal in New York State to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Her indecision about her views (first she was for it, and now she’s against it) indicates that Democrats, too, are tiptoeing around immigration topics.
Nevertheless, Ms. Clinton and many of the other Democrats, including Barack Obama, have supported the Dream Act and advocated a path to citizenship for many immigrants.
Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, has signed legislation that allows some illegal immigrants living in his state to pay in-state tuition and receive state scholarships.
Mr. Richardson, who spent his childhood in Mexico, said he was “disgusted” by the way Republican candidates have been “trying to outdo each other on demonizing immigrants.”
In an interview with Bloomberg Television last month, he argued that attacking immigrants “is not only wrong, it’s bad for the economy.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 54, Issue 16, Page A25