GOP voters decry stances on illegal immigration

Last of a two-part series.

Pat Ricutti is a diehard Republican voter, but he laments what he's hearing from GOP presidential contenders about illegal immigration.

The Fresno fruit and grape farmer gave money to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani last February at a fundraiser. He said he won't be giving him or any other candidate a dime more at this point, though, until he starts hearing alternatives to calling for millions of illegal immigrants to be shipped off or pressured to leave voluntarily.

"We're what, the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world?" Ricutti said, referring to California. "Do they really know what it would be (like) to send all these people off? It will cause a major disruption in the American way of life."

Ricutti may be Republican, but he's also among tens of thousands of California business owners – farmers and landscapers, hotel and restaurant operators, nursing home managers and home builders – who hire immigrant laborers.

Immigration is a complicated issue, they say, and as balloting in the Feb. 5 state primary approaches many of them are dismayed that all the GOP front-runners – with the exception of Arizona Sen. John McCain – have abandoned moderate, nuanced stances.

In the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire and in televised ads and debates, candidates have made toughness against illegal immigrants centerpieces of their campaigns. They've declared they won't support "amnesty" for any illegal immigrants, or allowing them to stay to earn legal residency.

Business trade groups with many GOP-leaning members and U.S. labor unions support giving a chance to long-working illegal immigrants to try to earn legal residency. Businesses are also calling for a major overhaul of the nation's immigration rules so, as enforcement increases, they can be positive they're hiring legal immigrants and also sure there won't be labor shortages.

After a long stalemate in Congress over immigration reform, they say they don't want their next president to stick to uncompromising positions they believe are foolhardy.

"These candidates should really get some experts in and try to understand our industries before they start spouting off," said active Republican Cindy Mitchell, who runs Citadel Marble and Tile in West Sacramento. She said she always checks documents, but she's very concerned about future labor shortages and wants to be sure a way exists to hire legal foreign workers, if necessary.

It's enough to make her vote Democrat, she said, if she doesn't feel a Republican president is going to help the business community.

In a Nov. 29 CNN-YouTube debate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney rejected allowing undocumented workers a chance to stay and earn residency. He tried to soften his position by implying that illegal immigrants would be welcomed back if they went home and applied to return, out of fairness, just like others who are waiting in line to immigrate legally.

"If you're here illegally, then you ought to be able to return home or get in line with everybody else," said Romney.

One of the problems with Romney's idea, as some employers know from first-hand experience, is that most of those same people don't have a line to get into.

Most immigrants – other than refugees – gain legal entry to the United States because they have a close family member to sponsor them. Hundreds of thousands enter each year via family sponsorship.

But only 5,000 visas a year are available for U.S. businesses to compete for to try to sponsor workers to permanently immigrate to fill nonprofessional labor shortages in industries as diverse as food-processing to convalescent care.

Employers argue that as a result, labor shortages have essentially been filled for years by undocumented workers, who knew they could find jobs if they survived the border crossing and obtained fake documents.

During the same CNN-YouTube debate, Giuliani accused Romney of a "holier than thou" attitude toward illegal immigration and hypocrisy because Romney's landscaper was employing illegal immigrants.

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