Harry Reid’s All or Nothing Gamble

By Joe Guzzardi
September 23, 2010

Earlier this week Republican senators used their slim 41-vote plurality to block passage of a military appropriations bill to which Senator Harry Reid had attached the highly unpopular DREAM Act. How can a politician like Reid with nearly 30 years of Congressional service be so obtuse?

Disingenuously presented to Americans for more than ten years as a bill that would help illegal immigrant “children” by providing them with in state university tuition fees, the DREAM Act is instead thinly disguised legislation that will lead to an amnesty for millions of aliens.

Where, I wonder, does the DREAM Act truly rank on Reid’s personal priority list? My guess is that the DREAM Act lands toward the bottom but represents a potential reelection tool for the embattled majority leader. Reid has pushed the DREAM Act for months in spite of ample evidence that Americans overwhelmingly reject it. His support of it may doom his November bid against challenger Sharron Angle.

The truth, which Reid knows as well as his name, is that the DREAM Act is only popular with students who will financially benefit from it, the Beltway Hispanic lobbyists who have promoted it for years and some but not all Senate Democrats.

From that group, no one can vote for Reid. The lobbyists live in Washington, D.C., Reid’s Congressional peers have their own election problems and those students who may live in Nevada will not be citizens and therefore are ineligible to vote.

Reid’s huge and statistically improbably gamble is that Nevada Hispanics will applaud his DREAM Act efforts and race to the polls to vote for him. But while Nevada’s Hispanic population is 25 percent, illegal aliens represent a large portion of that total. Presumably, they will not be voting.

That leaves Reid to court Nevada’s legal Hispanic residents and native-born Americans. Historically, Hispanic voter turn out is low. Furthermore, many legal immigrants favor immigration enforcement and not more rewards for law breakers.

Assuming my analysis is correct, that makes the other 75 percent of Nevada’s population, African Americans and whites, the “swing vote.” Reid would be better off to take a page from his Senate colleague John McCain and promote enforcing immigration laws. McCain, you may recall, trailed his primary challenger J.D. Hayworth when, out of the blue and inconsistent with his previous immigration advocacy, he ran television ads from the border demanding a crack down on illegal immigration.

By the time the Arizona primary ended, Reid trounced Hayworth by 20 points.

For Reid to switch sides on the immigration debate is not as far fetched as you may think. Early in his Congressional career, Reid staunchly advocated ending illegal immigration. In 1993, for example, Reid introduced S. 1351 to end automatic American citizenship for children born in the United States to foreign mothers. Reid’s provision mandated that in order for the children to be citizens, their mothers must be citizens or legal permanent residents.

During this summer’s primaries and special elections, Republican candidates who favored lower levels of immigration like Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and Alaska’s Joe Miller won while those who ran on a platform that included support for the DREAM Act like New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter lost.

Even though Reid watched the trend against more illegal immigration favoritism unfold before his eyes, he nevertheless presses on with his promise that somehow, someway, someday, the DREAM Act will become law.

In the meantime, Angle seized the moment. In her latest ad, Angle called Reid “the best friend an illegal alien ever had.”

Reid has passed the point of no return. He’s wagered his future and perhaps his legacy on illegal immigration. Five weeks from now, we’ll know if Reid made the right choice.

Joe Guzzardi has written editorial columns—mostly about immigration and related social issues – since 1990. He is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and his columns have frequently been syndicated in various U.S. newspapers and websites. He can be reached at [email protected].