Immigration: The Hottest Issue

By Joe Klein

A few days after thanksgiving, I asked Mike Huckabee what had surprised him about voters over the past six months of campaigning. "The intensity of the immigration issue," he said immediately, and then added, "I honestly don't know why it's gotten so hot." Huckabee gets points for candor: most of the presidential candidates I've spoken with in recent months feel the same way but aren't about to say so. It is difficult to spend a day on the trail and not see the anger explode.

This is especially true in the Republican Party. John McCain, the sponsor of immigration-reform legislation, has been a target. During a recent town-hall meeting in Hopkinton, N.H., a heavily muscled young man with closely cropped hair began to shout about "open borders" as the issue "that will destroy this country ... You can't imagine the amount of anger your average European Christian American feels about the multicultural tower of Babel." He raised the possibility of "civil war." McCain usually turns warrior when confronted with such blatant racism, but sensing the heat in the room, he held his fire this time, calmly saying "I will do everything in my power to secure our borders... But on the larger issue you raise, I believe that people who have come here [legally] from other countries... are our greatest strength."

There are signs of festering intolerance even among Democratic audiences, noticeably in Iowa, which has seen a surge of Latino immigration in recent years. The Democratic candidates are uniformly in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for those who have entered the country illegally. But they receive sharp -- pointed -- applause when they say illegals should "have to speak English" before becoming citizens. When I asked Hillary Clinton about that, she said she'd noticed it too and added, "During the 1990s, I cannot remember being asked about immigration... Why? Because the economy was working... And average Americans didn't have to go around looking for someone to blame."

Huckabee, who is making gains among working-class conservatives, came to the same conclusion. "There's a lot of underlying [economic] anxiety," he told me. "People are working harder and not getting ahead. There is a disconnect between the insider establishment in the country -- and in my party -- and the middle class about this. There's a greater divide between the top and bottom than ever before. And worse, people on the bottom are not sure they can get out of the bottom. That's a recipe for real trouble. That's the stuff out of which revolutions are born."

Huckabee is likely to suffer for refusing to demagogue immigration. He is already in trouble for offering college scholarships to deserving children of illegal immigrants in Arkansas. "We never should grind our heel in the face of a child," he has said. But if a nativist revolt is brewing, his fellow Republicans are handing out the pitchforks. Peripheral candidates like Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter set the slime flowing in the presidential campaign. The theme was soon picked up by Mitt Romney, who seems incapable of finding an issue where integrity trumps expediency. Romney has made illegal immigration the target of recent campaign ads. He has used the issue as a cudgel against Rudy Giuliani (a passionately pro-immigrant mayor trying to sound like a tough guy now), even though Romney reportedly employed illegal workers to do his gardening and didn't seem concerned about the issue when he was Governor of Massachusetts -- until he decided to run for President.

Earlier in the year, I asked Romney if he thought illegal immigration was a net plus for the economy. He said, "I'm not sure." To which one can only say, Ha ha ha. A recent study of Arkansas, conducted by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, estimated that immigrants there pay more in Social Security and sales taxes than they cost in social services like health care and education. That doesn't begin to take into account the economic impact of the hard work and entrepreneurial energy that illegal immigrants bring to the society. To be sure, there is a need for greater border security in a time of terrorism. But any candidate who claims to be able to shut down the border simply isn't telling the truth. And any candidate who would run for the presidency by cynically exploiting fears born of economic anxiety, ignorance or plain old "European American" racism doesn't deserve to be elected.

Correction: I was wrong to write last week that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't. To read the disputed section of the bill, go to time.com/fisa.