Liberal New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer joined a special conference call with fellow advocates of liberalized immigration among evangelical elites to rally support for his Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) legislation.
“The bad news is that the immigration system is broken and causing pain to many in your congregations,” Senator Schumer declared. “The good news is that we know how to fix the system.” He warned: “We know that recent public discourse reflects an increasing hostility toward immigrants. I think the fact that we now have support from Baptists, Catholics and others shows this is not just a Latino issue and that CIR is possible.” Schumer appealed for the evangelicals to help persuade Republicans to support CIR.
The conference call preceded an ad for CIR from the evangelical groups in Roll Call, a congressional news publication popular on Capitol Hill. Led by National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) President Samuel Rodriguez and National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) President Leith Andersen, this group has over the last several weeks sought to build support for CIR among Christian conservatives. These endeavors have included lobbying members of Congress as well as several conference calls with prominent religious and political leaders.
According to Galen Carey, Director of Government Affairs for the NAE, the Roll Call ad supports establishing “a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents.” In addition to the usual support from Rodriguez, Andersen, and the NAE, the ad includes endorsements from other Christian heavyweights, including President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission Richard Land and Liberty University Law School Dean Matthew Staver.
The ad’s signatories joined the conference call on Wednesday and explained their support for CIR. Arguing that illegal immigrants are “people who come here to participate in the American dream,” Land criticized the Arizona law as being “a symptom” of the immigration problem and not a solution. Noting that the law “faces severe challenges,” Land said that it “may never become law.” It isn’t clear why Land believes that the legislation, already passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor, will not “become law.” Pushing back against the criticism that CIR entails amnesty, Land asserted, “Amnesty is what Jimmy Carter gave the [Vietnam War] draft dodgers…This is not amnesty.”
Concurring with Land, Matthew Staver said: “There’s a misconception among people at the grass roots that the pathway to citizenship is amnesty, and it’s not, but we have to overcome that.” On the call he identified a three-tiered way to treat undocumented immigrants: earned legal citizenship or residency, legal guest worker status, and deportation. Such a model would, Staver believes, result in a “just assimilation.”
In the conference call, Senator Shumer bemoaned the lack of Republican support: “You cannot pass an immigration bill without bipartisan support…We need someone [a Republican] because I want to work in a bipartisan way.” He noted that Republicans have made securing the border a prerequisite for entering negotiations about a wider reform bill. Democrats, on the other hand, are not interested in incremental reform. Hence Shumer’s evaluation of CIR’s legislative prospects: “No piecemeal bill can pass in either the House or the Senate. Only comprehensive reform can pass.”
Later in the call, Leith Andersen seconded Shumer’s argument for comprehensive reform, saying, “Just doing one piece is going to unbalance the issue.” For support, he invoked another issue that President Obama and Congress handled comprehensively: health care. Apparently realizing the unpopularity of the year-long health care saga and the legislation it produced, Andersen struggled for a moment to think of a better example before moving on.
Anderson said NAE had “surveyed our churches and found support for CIR,” though some polls show strong evangelical majorities opposing liberalized immigration. And most of NAE’s own member communions and board members have yet to endorse NAE’s own official resolution for CIR. Anderson opined that the Roll Call “will help show that framing the discussion as amnesty versus deportation is a fake choice.”
A strong undercurrent in the NAE/NHCLC push for immigration reform has been a political argument, namely that opposing CIR could alienate Hispanic voters. Giving voice to this line of reasoning, Rodriguez asked, “Do Republicans desire to alienate Hispanics in the same way they’ve disconnected the African Americans?” He then reminded listeners on the call that the Hispanic community is strongly conservative on social issues and, consequently, is a political constituency that should be courted rather than snubbed.
Rodriguez, who’s also a prominent NAE board member, said that widespread American support for Arizona’s new tough immigration law did not surprise him. But he was surprised that most Americans’ “understand it will lead to racial profiling,” a claim that the law’s supporters reject. “Is conservatism a movement just for white people?” Rodriguez asked. “Does conservatism want to disenfranchise Hispanics like it did Black people?” He insisted that the “future of the conservative movement” depends on Latinos and “immigration reform.”
In the weeks ahead, the evangelical elites on the call will target Republican senators with the hope of building support for immigration reform within the GOP. However, with no Republican co-sponsor for the Shumer bill and widespread opposition to CIR among Republicans, they may have a tough row to hoe.
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