The roar from the grassroots on immigration bill

NY Times:

The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.

Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.

“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.

“In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,” she said of the measure.

Supporters of the legislation defended it as an imperfect but pragmatic solution to the difficult problem of illegal immigration. Public opinion polls, including a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last month, showed broad support among Americans for the bill’s major provisions.

But the legislation sparked a furious rebellion among many Republican and even some Democratic voters, who were linked by the Internet and encouraged by radio talk show hosts. Their outrage and activism surged to full force after Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who was an author of the bill, suggested early this week that support for the measure seemed to be growing. The assault on lawmakers in Washington was relentless. In a crucial vote Thursday night, the bill’s supporters, including President Bush, fell short by 15 votes. While there is a possibility the legislation could be revived later this year, there was a glow of victory among opponents on Friday.

“Technologically enhanced grass-roots activism is what turned this around, people empowered by the Internet and talk radio,” said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group.

Mr. Hanna suggested the passion and commitment were on the side of the opponents.

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In the end, supporters conceded that they were outmaneuvered by opponents who boiled down their complaints to that single hot-button word, repeated often and viscerally on talk radio programs and blogs.

“It’s a lot easier to yell one word, ‘amnesty,’ and it takes a little more to explain, ‘No, it’s not, and if you don’t do anything you have a silent amnesty,’ ” said Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat who backed the measure.

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Napolitano's weak attempt at political jujitsu did not work. In fact the very suggestion angered opponents even more because it suggested a continuing lack of effort on enforcing the border and work restrictions. It was evidence of the bad faith of many of the proponents of the legislation when it came to enforcement. The NY times polling data was also very misleading. Opposition continue to grow against the Senate bill and Rasmussen surveys showed opponents outnumbered supporters by a wide margin, particularly among those who knew anything about the bill. His big finding was a lack of trust in the government to enforce the new law when they had not made a sufficient effort to enforce the existing law.

On the issue of amnesty, the proponents were left to argue that the possible payment in the future for giving the aliens current legal status was not an amnesty. But if the people who are here illegally never apply for citizenship, they could then remain here legally without ever having to pay anything. Democrats would have probably still registered them to vote regardless of their citizenship status, then blamed Republicans for voter suppression for complaining. If that sounds cynical, it is because it is too much like what democrats are doing now.

This story suggest that the states will be more active in trying to find a solution as they lose confidence in the seriousness of federal legislators.