Immigration Debate Roils GOP Presidential Contest : Politics: Ideas range from halting all new arrivals to increasing them. Prop. 187 brought issue to forefront.

Texas Sen. Phil Gramm thinks Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole isn’t tough enough on denying social welfare benefits to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens. But Gramm thinks California Gov. Pete Wilson is too tough when he proposes a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan thinks Gramm, Dole and Wilson are all ducking the core question of whether the United States can absorb the large flow of legal immigrants arriving every year.

In these exchanges are the opening notes of an internal debate that could become one of the most illuminating conflicts in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Immigration, like foreign trade and military engagement abroad, is dividing the GOP between the internationalist consensus that has dominated the party since World War II and a rapidly growing economic-nationalist wing symbolized by Buchanan.

“We are seeing very different visions about where America’s future is,” said Linda Chavez, a former aide to then-President Ronald Reagan who runs the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank in Washington. “What I see developing is a renaissance in the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.”

The debate is just taking form, with most of the candidates still defining their positions, but already important differences are emerging. The sharpest exchanges have come between Dole and Gramm--with the two men trading pointed press releases in the last few days about Gramm’s support for denying legal immigrants access to welfare.

An even more significant spur to debate may be Buchanan’s recent announcement of a comprehensive program to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. The cornerstone of Buchanan’s plan is a five-year moratorium on most forms of legal immigration.

In a signal of the divisions that the immigration issue is likely to cause in the GOP, the second-ranking Republican in the House, Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, staked out the very opposite pole of the debate the day after Buchanan issued his proposal. In a speech to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, Armey issued a ringing defense of legal immigration and suggested it should be expanded.

“Should we reduce legal immigration?” Armey asked. “Well, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single problem that would be solved by shutting off the supply of willing and eager new Americans. If anything . . . we should be thinking about increasing legal immigration.”

Those diametrical views herald the opening of a new front in the immigration struggle. Since immigration surged into public attention through the passage of California’s Proposition 187 last year, politicians have focused primarily on reducing the level of illegal immigration.

But while some policy disputes continue over illegal immigration--for example, an unusual alliance of conservatives and civil libertarians oppose President Clinton’s plan to test a national registry that would allow employers to check the validity of Social Security cards presented by job applicants--a broad policy consensus exists on many other proposals, such as beefing up the Border Patrol and experimenting with new means of reducing document fraud. That consensus in both parties could dampen the political impact of the debate over illegal immigration.

The proposals on that front that could generate more sparks in the GOP presidential race have dimmer legislative prospects, although they offer revealing insights on how far candidates are willing to take the crusade against illegal immigration.

Wilson and Buchanan are urging a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children born on U.S. soil. The Constitution currently provides that all people born in the United States are citizens, regardless of their parents’ status. Gramm, who wants to tighten enforcement along the border, has denounced an amendment to deny citizenship, arguing that it could increase social unrest by creating a large class of disaffected residents. Gramm also opposes Wilson’s call for a national version of Proposition 187, which denies all social services except emergency medical care to illegal immigrants.

On legal immigration, in contrast, Buchanan’s call for a moratorium could have the same effect as Wilson’s call for a national Proposition 187. Although the immediate legislative prospects for a moratorium proposal are negligible, Buchanan’s forceful advocacy of the idea likely will compel the other GOP presidential hopefuls to clarify their views on legal immigration--an issue that could ultimately evoke even stronger passions than illegal immigration.

“This move by Buchanan really heralds a new era of immigration debate for presidential politics,” says Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that supports tighter restrictions on immigration.

In his moratorium proposal, Buchanan says he would still allow entry to the spouses and children of immigrants already here, and he has not yet called for new limits on admission of political refugees. At first, those exemptions would mean the flow of legal immigrants would remain substantial--Stein estimates as many as 400,000 annually, compared to almost 900,000 in 1993--but over time, the numbers would steadily decline.

In an interview, Buchanan likened the moratorium proposal to the 1924 legislation that virtually closed off the nation after the great wave of immigrants who washed into America from Europe around the turn of the 20th Century. Those barriers remained in place until 1965, when Congress reopened the doors and shifted the locus of immigration from Europe to Asia and South America.

“If you go back in American history, you have had periods of very high immigration and then lulls, and the lulls have come about because social tensions have increased and (because of) economic problems,” Buchanan said. “The country has got to regain a measure of social cohesion and assimilation of the 25 million who have come in here in the past 20 years. To do that, people have to be acculturated and assimilated, just as they were when we had a 40-year hiatus from 1924 to 1965.”

Although polls show substantial public support for reducing the level of legal immigration, support for an open door remains high among opinion leaders. The issue is extremely divisive in both parties; if anything, the fissures are deeper among Republicans than Democrats.

Within the GOP, resistance to immigration is rising as part of a post-Cold War turn inward among conservatives that also has increased opposition on the right to free trade and military engagement abroad. That growing economic-nationalist wing already has clashed with conservatives holding more traditional internationalist views on such questions as the U.S. loan guarantee package for Mexico.

Both Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who are taking the lead on drafting Republican immigration proposals, are working on bills to reduce the level of legal immigration--although not nearly as severely as Buchanan proposes. Even so, any reduction is likely to draw intense opposition from well-placed conservatives such as Armey and former Cabinet secretary Jack Kemp, who consider entrepreneurial, family-oriented new arrivals both a boon to the economy and a potential bloc of support for the GOP.

Most of the leading Republican presidential candidates are maneuvering cautiously on the issue of legal immigration, although they seem to be bending more toward Armey and Kemp than Buchanan.

Wilson, who faced accusations of fomenting nativism with his support for Proposition 187, worries “that limits on legal immigration can very easily become nativist,” said Dan Schnur, his campaign spokesman.

Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, the candidate who most reflects the traditional GOP internationalist perspective on foreign policy, says he backs greater efforts against illegal immigration but is skeptical of new steps to restrict legal immigration.

“Simply mandating that legal immigration be curtailed will do nothing to solve the real problem, which is our ability to enforce our current laws related to illegal immigration,” Lugar said in a statement.

Dole has suggested that “maybe there are too many . . . legal immigrants coming in.” But Stein considers him likely to follow the lead of Simpson, a longtime ally, in supporting relatively modest reductions.

In a recent interview, Gramm also appeared cool to calls for substantial reductions. “I think we ought to put a premium on people who can bring new skills, new energy,” he said. “But I’m not ready to tear down the Statue of Liberty.”

Gramm has tried to draw a different line, criticizing not new arrivals en masse, but immigrants who move onto the welfare system soon after they arrive. About 6.6% of all foreign-born residents receive welfare benefits, compared to about 4.9% of native-born citizens, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. The figures for immigrants are inflated by two subgroups with high levels of dependency--refugees and elderly immigrants. A substantial number of elderly immigrants retire on Supplemental Security Income soon after arriving in the United States. Among working-age, non-refugee immigrants, only 5.1% receive welfare.

To reduce the welfare numbers, Gramm has aggressively touted provisions in the House-approved welfare reform bill that would deny access to social programs such as SSI, Medicaid and welfare to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens. Indeed, in a television interview several weeks ago, Gramm appeared to move significantly beyond the House bill when he said that immigrants should not be eligible “in their lifetime for public welfare.”

That rhetoric earned Gramm a favorable editorial in the conservative Manchester Union Leader--the dominant newspaper in the critical first-primary state of New Hampshire. But it also attracted a rare direct slap from Dole, who issued a statement saying that Gramm’s call for a “lifetime” ban amounted to a “kind of second-class citizenship” for immigrants who become citizens.

Gramm now says he did not mean to suggest that immigrants who became citizens would still be ineligible for welfare; that would be unconstitutional, he noted in an interview last week. Gramm said he would only seek to deny immigrants social welfare benefits until they gain citizenship--the same provision that passed the House.

Dole’s position on that benefit cutoff--which is passionately opposed by immigrant advocates, including many Cuban American Republicans--isn’t entirely clear. In a January television interview, Dole suggested that “we have some obligation” to provide a safety net for immigrants legally admitted to the country. But later he said the decision might be left to the states’ governors.

The invective that Dole and Gramm mustered for this relatively arcane issue suggests the intensity of emotion that immigration issues could generate in the coming months--especially as Buchanan and Wilson drive the debate toward the right. “The mistake that some people make is thinking that it can play well only in the border states,” said Steven P. Lombardo, a pollster working with Wilson. “It really is a hot-button issue in all parts of the country.”