'Illegals' issue will test GOP hopefuls in TV debate

BETH REINHARD
Miami Herald
Sunday December 9, 2007

Immigration has roiled the Republican presidential campaign for months, but when the candidates wrangle Sunday for the first time in front of a Spanish-speaking national audience, the debate will truly hit home.

The candidates have repeatedly condemned the granting of legal status to undocumented workers as ''amnesty'' -- but they have never done it smack in the face of millions of Hispanic viewers and a live Miami-area crowd.

They have rooted repeatedly for a fence along the Mexican border to keep ''illegals'' out -- but have never gone head-on with reproachful television newscasters who have staked out public positions on the issue.

The prime-time debate broadcast by Univisíon from the University of Miami will make history and test the candidates' mettle at the same time.

Sound like a pushover and alienate conservative voters who tend to dominate presidential primaries. Come across as hard-line and offend the fastest-growing part of the electorate.

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''Hispanics will accept someone who is strong, a man in charge, but the candidates have got to come across as sensible and compassionate,'' said Cuban-American political consultant David Custin of Miami. ``They don't want to hear that you're going to ship off their cousin who's been working here for 20 years.''

BAD NEWS FOR GOP

The alarms sounded for the Republican Party this week in a new national poll that shows Hispanic voters gravitating toward the Democratic Party amid the inflammatory debate over immigration in the past year and a half.

That's a reversal of the shift in favor of the GOP under President Bush, whose proposed immigration changes were thwarted by conservatives in Congress. In the survey of Hispanics by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center, more than 40 percent of the respondents said Democrats care more about their community and have a better grasp of illegal immigration than Republicans.

Full article here.

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