Washington: Give Michigan Sen. Spencer Abraham a robe and a torch. And send him your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The Republican leadership of Congress was poised 10 cut existing immigration quotas a step that would have blocked entry to tens of thousands of foreign-born relatives of U.S. citizens.
But then Abraham, a Republican with less than two years’ experience in the Senate, performed a miracle. He fought Wyoming Sen, Alan Simpson, one of his party’s leaders, to block cuts in immigration quotas. He helped engineer a similar maneuver in the House. And then he convinced his GOP colleagues to buck the public opinion polls showing that Americans want the borders, effectively, to be closed.
Today, the long battle nears an end as the Senate moves to approve a bill keeping legal immigration at current levels. In an interview in his Capitol Hill office, Abraham, the grandson of
Lebanese immigrants described the fight as a battle to protect Michigan’s ethnic communities from Dutch families in western Michigan to one of the nation’s largest populations of Arab Americans in Detroit. But it was also an effort to champion open borders and ethnic diversity at a time when “I watched at least some of the Republic Party moving in a different direction,” Abraham said, a reference to GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who called for building an enormous security fence along the border with Mexico. “I felt it was important for the party to be out front on this side of the issue rather than to be seen as a nativist party that was hostile to people who came from diverse ethnic backgrounds.”
“If Spencer Abraham hadn’t been elected to the U.S. Senate, we would have seen cuts to legal immigration this year and we would have & American Citizens not being ab. sponsor their own children to come to this country,” said Stuart Anderson, a policy analyst at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 12, 1996
