Critics pounce on Clinton after immigration comments
By MOLLY BALL
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Posted: Jan. 12, 2008 | 10:00 p.m.
Updated: Apr. 9, 2012 | 2:48 p.m.
An off-the-cuff comment Hillary Clinton made in Las Vegas on Thursday has ignited a national firestorm.
Answering a shout from a man in the crowd who said, "I'm married to an illegal woman," Clinton shot back,
"No woman is illegal," grinning as the packed Mexican restaurant at which she was speaking exploded in cheers.
That comment, reported in Friday's Review-Journal, caught the attention of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and the Drudge Report and led to nearly 1,000 angry comments on the newspaper's Web site.
To put the remark into context, Clinton did add, after a pause, "... and no man, either." She then explained her position on immigration.
But anti-illegal immigration activists weren't upset because of sexism, but because of the implication that those who cross the border illegally aren't lawbreakers. Many demanded an explanation.
Clinton, a spokeswoman said, meant that she "believes you can be tough on the issue of illegal immigration without being mean-spirited about the human beings involved."
The spokeswoman, Hilarie Grey, noted that Clinton's position is to secure the border in addition to treating current illegal immigrants humanely.
"It simply isn't true" that there aren't illegal immigrants, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-illegal immigration group. "We have immigration laws, and yet we have government officials who have sworn to uphold the laws of this country saying if somebody violates them, they make an exception to the rule of law."
Mehlman's group was one of the main forces in derailing a bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate but was killed in the House of Representatives in 2006. The measure failed after a massive grass-roots campaign fueled by talk radio jammed congressional phone lines and e-mail in-boxes.
The group is nonpartisan and has targeted Republicans who fall out of line with its message just as harshly as it has Democrats.
"Illegal alien is a legal term," he said. "It describes somebody who violates our immigration laws. You can apply the law to people without showing disrespect to them as human beings. Illegal immigrants should be treated with human decency, but we still need to enforce immigration laws."
Politicians, Mehlman said, don't understand the anger of average Americans on the immigration issue, anger that crosses party lines.
"On a gut level, we have millions of people getting away with not playing by the rules while we are expected to play by the rules, so there is a sense of unfairness," he said. "But this also directly affects a lot of people who work for a living, or have kids in school, or rely on social services."
He added, "I'm sure the children of people Hillary Clinton hangs around with, their kids aren't sitting in classrooms where half the kids don't speak English and nobody's learning anything."
The episode illustrates the inflammatory nature of the immigration debate as well as the degree to which it hinges on issues of semantics.
Though immigration is a red-hot issue nationally, it will be spotlighted in the run-up to Nevada's Jan. 19 caucuses, established partly to give Hispanics a voice in the presidential nominating process.
Las Vegas Democratic activist Tony Sanchez, head of the IMPACTO political action committee of the Latin Chamber of Commerce, said of Clinton's comment, "Good for her."
Sanchez said he doesn't like it when people are referred to as illegal. "A person can't be illegal," he said. "You can be undocumented. You can not have your papers. You can be noncompliant. But to call people 'illegals' is meanness."
Sanchez said Clinton shouldn't be portrayed as a radical illegal immigrant-coddler for a few compassionate words. "She didn't say to open up the borders," he said. "She was responding to a crowd that wanted to hear that, and I happen to agree with her."
Originally Posted by C&CDean
