Going After the Anti Immigrants

“Last week, the Service Employees International Union spent $200,000 on a week-long, Spanish-language radio campaign in 10 congressional districts held by Republicans that have relatively large Latino populations (listen to the ads here). It was the latest in a multi-million dollar campaign supporting immigration reform.

Eliseo Medina, the SEIU’s secretary-treasurer, says the response to the ads from both constituents and lawmakers “makes us feel pretty good they’re going to be on the right side of this issue.” Medina points to two congressmen in California—Jeff Denham, whose district is 40 percent Latino, and David Valadao, whose parents immigrated from Portugal’s Azores Islands in 1969—as two Republicans he thinks were particularly responsive to the ads. Valadao already supports a path to citizenship, his office says, but most of his colleagues will be harder sells: His district is 72 percent Latino, which among Republicans is second only to that of Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Congress’s first Cuban American.

Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rolled out Spanish-language radio ads targeting House members who voted for an amendment authored by anti-immigrant hardliner Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) to deport undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children. They went after several of the same lawmakers as the SEIU, including Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.), one of just 15 House Republicans representing a district that voted for Obama in 2012. “He’s been ‘Heck no,'” Medina says. “He’s going to be ‘Heck yes.'”

And finally!  Go after these guys…