Grass-roots activism derailed U.S. immigration bill
The undoing of the U.S. immigration bill in the Senate last week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.
Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.
"These people came in the wrong way, so they don't belong here, period," Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of the 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.
"In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country," she said of the measure.
Supporters of the legislation defended it as an imperfect but pragmatic solution to the difficult problem of illegal immigration.
What happened to taking care of our own people first?"
Rosemary Jenks, a policy advocate at NumbersUSA, which calls for curbing immigration, said that 7,000 new members signed up for the organization in a single day last week. Other groups reported a similar outpouring as proponents of the Senate bill claimed to be gaining momentum.
"We had way more response than we could handle," said Stephen Elliott, president of Grassfire.org, a conservative Internet group that called for volunteers for a petition drive and instructed people how to barrage lawmakers with telephone calls and e-mail.
The group gathered more than 700,000 signatures on petitions opposing the bill, delivering them this week to senators in Washington and in their home states.
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