Texas Monthly Jasmin Sun interviews Nate Blakeslee about grassroot efforts, tea party champions, and why immigration has become one of the most important issues facing Texas.
What are the chances of the Texas Legislature passing something similar to Arizona’s controversial illegal immigration law when lawmakers convene this spring? Such a bill will definitely be introduced in both the House and the Senate, along with a host of other punitive measures dealing with undocumented immigrants. The Democratic caucus will fight most of these measures, of course, but the more interesting question will be how the Republican leadership deals with these bills. An Arizona bill is poison to some of the party’s biggest campaign funders—the homebuilders, the restaurant and hotel industry, and the big growers—who use a lot of immigrant labor, which is why tough immigration measures have always had an uphill climb in the Legislature. But this time around grassroots Republicans want something done, and the ascendancy of the tea party wing of the GOP means it will be very difficult to quietly kill these bills. The tea partiers have a champion in the Senate—Houston’s Dan Patrick—whose star is also rising and who will make life very hard for Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst and Governor Rick Perry.
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What will this do to the upcoming legislative session? To the Republican Party?
In the story you observe that the fight over immigration in a place like Tyler is about race, whereas in the Legislature the subtext of the debate is wages.
What do you want readers to take away from your story? I hope readers will see the complexity of the issue and the nuances that often get lost in some of the less thoughtful commentary, especially on cable news. The fight within the Republican Party mirrors the dilemma that the nation as a whole faces with respect to immigration. We are welcoming undocumented immigrants with one hand and doing our best to keep them out with the other.
Business as Usual by Nate Blakeslee