1. Republican changes outlook
2. Latino voter impact varied
3. Hispanic vote a wild card
4. NM Governor-elect says no
5. VA co. okay with Sec. Comm.

1.
Republican Resurgence Likely to Derail 'Immigration Reform'
FoxNews.com, November 6, 2010

As part of an 11th-hour appeal, President Obama warned Hispanic voters last month that the fate of "comprehensive immigration reform" would hinge largely on Tuesday's midterm elections.

Now that Republicans, through sweeping gains in those elections, have captured the House and diminished the Democratic majority in the Senate, the fate of that initiative is very much in doubt.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who is expected to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said "immigration reform" will be pushed aside for streamlined enforcement of current laws.

"The enforcement of our immigration laws is critical to both our national security and economic prosperity," he told the San Antonio Express. "We need to know who is entering our country, and why."

He told the newspaper that the committee under his leadership would "enact policies that will better secure our border and discourage illegal immigration, human smuggling and drug trafficking."

A Fox News national exit poll found that of the 8 percent of voters polled who identified illegal immigration as their top issue in the 2010 election, 68 percent were Republican while 27 percent were Democrat.

Another poll, conducted on Election Day by the anti-illegal immigration group FAIR, found that 69 percent of people surveyed consider immigration an important issue and 61 percent believe Obama "has not been aggressive enough in enforcing immigration law."

FAIR is pushing the new Congress to focus on border security.

"FAIR urges the leadership of the next Congress to embrace the agenda of the American people and transform our immigration policy to place their interests first," Dan Stein, president of FAIR, said. "The American people want our immigration laws enforced and overall levels of immigration reduced. They have clearly repudiated efforts to enact amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and increase foreign labor for business interests."

Republicans now have a record number of Latinos joining the next Congress, including Marco Rubio in the Senate and seven others in the House. They could prove a convincing force in the drive to shore up weak immigration laws.

Democrats tried to pounce on Republicans for their support of Arizona's controversial law that clamped down on illegal immigrants and their opposition to birthright citizenship and earned-citizenship proposals.

A week before Tuesday's election, Obama appealed to Hispanics in an interview on Univision Radio to vote for Democrats who would give him the support he needed to pass bills that overhaul the immigration system and provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in this country.

"And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's going to be harder – and that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on Nov. 2," he said.

Obama later said he should have used the word "opponents" instead of "enemies."

But not only did Republicans shake up Washington, they also captured a majority of governor's mansions across the country, which is also likely to affect the national debate on immigration reform.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/06/republican-resurgence-likely-...

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2.
Latino voters' impact varied by region
By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2010

With images of menacing, tattooed Latinos and beleaguered whites, the TV ad contended that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was too soft on illegal immigrants. "It's clear whose side he's on," the announcer said, "and it's not yours."

Sharron Angle, a "tea party" favorite and Reid's Republican challenger, had attempted to pummel Reid for his support for legalizing illegal immigrants. But Angle paid a price for her tough stance when Nevada's Latino voters came out in record numbers last week and helped Reid win a fifth term.

Across the country, Lou Barletta, the mayor of a small Pennsylvania city who is best known for backing a law forbidding property owners from renting to illegal immigrants, had little difficulty winning election to the House of Representatives.

A look at the electoral map shows that, outside selected parts of the Southwest, few Republican candidates this year paid a price for adopting a hard-line immigration stance.

The reason is that most of the historic wave that swept Democrats from office last week was in Midwestern or Rust Belt states, where Latinos make up only a fragment of the voting population. For example, Democrats lost five House seats, a Senate seat and the governorship in Pennsylvania, where only 3% of eligible voters are Latino.

Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the Cook report who tracks congressional races, has a message to activists who contend immigration is the Democrats' salvation: Don't hold your breath.

"You've got to have states where [immigration] matters, where that Latino vote is enough to tip races," Duffy said. "Those states are in the West."

Although Latinos have been moving to more remote parts of the country in recent years, many may be too young to vote or may lack citizenship status. That makes it even tougher to replicate the Western experience in places such as Pennsylvania, she said.

"Not only do they not have the Latino vote to help, they have an illegal immigrant problem," Duffy said of Democrats. "It's a double whammy."

Analysts agree that most voters do not choose candidates based solely on their immigration position. In exit polls this year, only 8% of voters nationwide said immigration was their top issue. Latino voters placed immigration well behind the economy and jobs.

Barletta, a Republican, said immigration never really factored into his successful race against veteran Democratic Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski. "The issue really took a back seat to jobs, the economy and healthcare," he said in a telephone interview.

Still, Barletta first came to wider fame because of his work on the immigration ordinance in the city of Hazleton, and said he was often approached by voters who favored his position.

A hard-line immigration stance has become almost standard for GOP candidates nationally, as an older generation that backed immigration reform is pushed out by conservative activists. Even though it wasn't the centerpiece of their agenda, GOP candidates weren't shy about talking about the need to secure the border or their backing of Arizona's controversial new immigration law.

The election pushed Congress sharply to the right on immigration matters. Numbers USA, which advocates tougher immigration restrictions, estimates that 40 congressional representatives and senators who favored some sort of legal residency for illegal immigrants were replaced by hardliners this election.

Some of those new Republican officeholders are themselves Latino. Raul Labrador, an immigration attorney of Puerto Rican descent, ousted Democrat Rep. Walt Minnick in Idaho while declaring in his formal immigration policy statement: "Illegal is illegal!"

Susana Martinez of New Mexico became the first Latina governor in the nation after criticizing her Democratic predecessor's decision to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Brian Sandoval won the governorship in Nevada and Marco Rubio a Senate seat in Florida.

"I think what you're seeing is that there is no longer the notion that if you have a Spanish surname, you must be a Democrat," said Javier Ortiz, an Atlanta-based GOP operative who has been working to get Republican Latinos elected.
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Steve Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which advocates for tougher immigration restrictions, said that it was obvious that enforcement was more popular politically than legalization because Democrats didn't push legalization when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D- San Francisco) was speaker of the House.

"If she thought it was a political winner, don't you think she'd have brought it up?" Camarota said.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-latino-vote-2010110...

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3.
Hispanic vote a 2012 wild card
By Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown
Politico (Washington, D.C.), November 7, 2010

Hispanic voters saved the Democratic Party Tuesday — buoying Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, keeping California blue, playing an outsize role in preserving the party’s Senate majority and demonstrating a partisan loyalty Democrats didn’t exactly earn in two years of inaction on immigration policy.

But that support is anything but certain for 2012, and both parties face difficult and immediate choices when it comes to the Latino vote as they position themselves for the presidential election. Democrats face open demands from Hispanic leaders for a reward for their votes. President Barack Obama could erect a Western bulwark for his reelection campaign by — as Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) suggested to POLITICO — pressing for broad immigration reform in the lame-duck session. But immigration could also prove, like health care, a polarizing, impolitic detour from the economic issues preoccupying voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, were carried to power by a conservative base that is, if anything, even less open to compromise on immigration — or anything else — than was the last Congress. And they head into the 2012 election cycle risking the same pattern that sunk Meg Whitman in California: a primary campaign that drags candidates to the right on immigration, only to find that they can’t plausibly return to ask for the support of Hispanics in November.

“If I was a Republican nationwide right now, I’d be thinking about that same kind of trap being set for 2012, where you can’t say one thing to the more conservative wing of your party and then say another thing to Latino voters,” said David Binder, a California-based Democratic pollster who works for the Democratic National Committee and advised the Service Employees International Union’s intensely successful campaign against Whitman among Hispanic voters.

“But it would be a mistake for Democrats to assume that the Latino vote is necessarily going to be strong on them for 2012,” Binder said. “If the Democrats expect Latino voters to come out in big numbers in 2012, they need to start moving on this issue.”

An election eve poll conducted by Latino Decisions, a Hispanic polling firm, found Hispanics weren’t nearly as motivated to vote Democratic as they were to show solidarity with the Latino community. Forty-seven percent of Latinos in eight key states told the pollsters they voted to “represent and support” Hispanics, 31 percent to support Democrats and 12 percent to back Republicans.

“I don’t think we can interpret this as Democratic enthusiasm among Latinos,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster with Latino Decisions.

But overall, the Democratic loyalty shown by Hispanics in the West, a region that will be critical to both Obama and his Republican challenger in 2012, was the only bright spot for the party — and daunting for the GOP.

Obama pleased his Hispanic supporters with one major symbolic gesture: He appointed the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor. But he also failed to deliver on a promise to move immigration reform in his first year, and it fell by the wayside again in his second as an exhausted Congress showed no interest in yet another polarizing fight.

The new Congress — with cowed Democrats and Republicans empowered by a grass roots hostile to any hint of “amnesty” — seems even less likely to act. Numbers USA, which favors lower immigration levels, estimates that the election wiped out about three dozen immigration reform supporters in the House and about a half-dozen in the Senate.

But some Democratic and Hispanic leaders say Obama must put more of his political capital behind immigration than he was willing to do in the past two years. Obama needs to start now in aggressively courting Hispanics for his reelection and not rely, as he did this year, on last-minute, high-profile media appearances, these leaders say.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44758.html

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4.
N.M. governor says 'no' to Arizona's immigration law
USA Today, November 8, 2010

New Mexico's newly elected governor, Susana Martinez, said this weekend that she doesn't want an Arizona-style immigration law in her state.

"No, no, I don't want that for New Mexico," Martinez, a Republican, said on Univision.

She went on to stress that she will try to repeal a state law that allows illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses. The driver's license law was a top issue in her campaign against Democrat Diane Denish.

"My plan is to ensure that the law that is giving drivers' licenses to people who are here legally doesn't exist. That's my plan, not bringing the Arizona law to New Mexico," Martinez said, according to an English translation of the Univision interview.

Under the controversial Arizona law, a law enforcement officer is required to determine someone's immigration status if that person is stopped, detained or arrested and there is "reasonable suspicion" they are in the U.S. illegally.
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http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2010/11/new-mexi...

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5.
Arlington, Va., drops effort to opt out of immigration enforcement program
By Elise Foley
The Washington Independent, November 8, 2010

After meeting with immigration enforcement officials, the county of Arlington, Va., is giving up on its push to remove itself from Secure Communities, a program that shares fingerprints collected for criminal background checks with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Arlington was one of three counties where officials said they would continue to try to opt out of the program — even after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed involvement is mandatory.

ICE officials previously laid out steps for opting out, which began with meetings like the one Arlington had with ICE representatives on Friday. But at the meeting, County Manager Barbara Donnellan said she was informed the county cannot be removed from Secure Communities because the state of Virginia agreed to participate in the program.

“ICE stated clearly — and with finality — that local activated communities do not have the option of withholding information from the program, although communities can opt not to learn the results of immigration queries,” Donnellan wrote in a memo to the county board after Friday’s meeting.
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http://washingtonindependent.com/102888/arlington-va-drops-effort-to-opt...