The Wall Street Journal-20080116-Adman to Pitch Immigrants- Story
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Adman to Pitch Immigrants' Story
Las Vegas -- The nation's heated debate over immigration is headed to television advertising, in the form of a business-funded campaign that will tout the benefits of legalizing illegal workers and try to counter hardening rhetoric on immigration.
The campaign is spearheaded by Lionel Sosa, a media strategist who is credited with delivering nearly half of the Hispanic vote to President Bush in the previous presidential race.
Yesterday, Mr. Sosa gathered here representatives from the construction, lodging, agricultural and banking sectors, as well as from churches, grass-roots groups and both political parties, to review the ads and finalize their strategy.
Mr. Sosa says he has raised $25 million for the campaign from one group he didn't identify. His independent nonprofit organization -- Mexicans and Americans Thinking Together, or Matt.org -- plans to match that with other contributions from business interests that benefit from immigrant labor, he says. His long-term goal is to invest $100 million in a national ad campaign, though he acknowledges that is a tall order in a presidential election year.
"The anti-immigrant groups have smashed all of us who back immigration reform. It's time to respond," Mr. Sosa said in an interview. "Americans have to see why it's in our interest to make these workers legal."
Taking the group's immigration message to the airwaves has risks, however -- particularly if it sets off a well-funded, anti-illegal- immigration TV campaign from the other side of the issue. Indeed, on hearing of Mr. Sosa's initiative, Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which calls for restricting all immigration, said that his group and its partners plan a campaign of their own. FAIR, which has 100,000 paid members, lobbied fiercely to defeat the Senate immigration bill this past spring.
"We are in the process of developing ads to try to educate Americans about the negative impacts that immigration has on wages and working conditions for certain segments of the American labor force," Mr. Stein said. He declined to disclose the timetable or funding sources for such an effort.
Anti-illegal-immigration groups argue that undocumented immigrants are a burden on U.S. social services, education and health care and contend that they undermine U.S. wages and culture.
Mr. Sosa, 68 years old, in 1980 founded the agency Sosa Bromley Aguilar, which specialized in advertising to Hispanic consumers, selling it in 1990. Matt.org -- based in Mr. Sosa's hometown of San Antonio -- employs three advertising strategists who worked with him at the agency. Among them is Cesar Martinez, who in 2002 created ad campaigns targeting Hispanics for Jeb Bush's Florida gubernatorial campaign and Rick Perry's Texas governor's race.
Mr. Sosa said he plans to launch the immigration ads on TV nationally after the presidential conventions this summer.
Among those at the Las Vegas gathering was J. Allen Carnes, president of the Texas Vegetable Association, who has testified before Congress on immigration issues. In the past two seasons, Mr. Carnes has lost more than $600,000 worth of crops, he says, because he couldn't secure enough workers. "Every year the shortage becomes worse and worse. If we continue down this path the agricultural industry in Texas as we know it will no longer exist," he said. According to the Texas Produce Association, half of the fruits and vegetables being shipped in Texas are already being grown across the border.
Until now, business interests have mainly lobbied legislators and their staffs in Washington to press for legalizing undocumented workers. But some businesses are reshaping their strategies, responding to the collapse of a Senate bill last spring, the introduction of state ordinances to punish businesses that hire undocumented workers, and emotive rhetoric on immigration during the presidential campaign.
"There's a lot of anxiety in the business community, and we have come to the point of realizing that something big has to be done," said Eddie Aldrete, a senior vice president of the International Bank of Commerce, a Laredo, Texas, bank that also operates in Oklahoma. The bank has pledged an undisclosed sum to Mr. Sosa's campaign, he added.
Craig Silvertooth, director of federal affairs at the National Roofers Contracting Association, said he would encourage his members to fund Mr. Sosa's effort. "The business community was largely missing in action when the bill went through the Senate," he says. "We were outgunned financially and at the grass-roots level by anti-immigrant groups. We will continue to lose until we get our story out there."
Potential donors for Mr. Sosa's effort include trade groups, such as Western Growers, whose 3,000 members grow, pack and ship half the nation's fresh produce. "It's important to communicate to the American public the importance of providing a legal, stable work force for agriculture," says Paul Simonds, communications manager for Western Growers. "We have a work force that is predominantly falsely documented or undocumented. Anything that would further our efforts we will definitely look into."
In the $1.2 trillion construction industry, at least one-third of the work force is undocumented, according to an estimate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry experts believe the actual figure is much higher: In 2006 alone, nearly half of new construction workers were Hispanics who had arrived in the U.S. since 2000. In agriculture, about 70% of all workers are illegal immigrants, according to independent estimates, and an existing guest-worker program supplies less than 2% of the work force required each year.
Mr. Sosa's team has created a series of 30-second pilot TV spots that highlight the work of immigrants in several industries and warn of the consequences of losing that labor force. One of the spots, entitled "Drive Them Out," focuses on the New Jersey town of Riverside, which fell on hard times after it passed an anti-illegal- immigrant ordinance last year that prompted thousands of undocumented residents to leave. The spot's closing statement: "Let's be careful what we wish for."
Another ad shows "Help Wanted" signs for jobs such as orange-picking and roofing, followed by signs that read "Can't Hire Immigrants" or "Immigrants Need Not Apply." In the end, a voiceover states: "Today's immigrants do the work Americans need done. Can't we find a way to make them legal?"
The ads consciously avoid the term "illegal" because it "connotes a negative," Mr. Martinez says. "We want to concentrate on the positives."
Mr. Sosa, who has worked on several presidential campaigns, says he began thinking about a national ad campaign after the Senate defeated a bipartisan immigration bill last spring. In Mr. Sosa's view, Senate leaders were cowed by a deluge of calls, emails and faxes from a vocal minority that opposed the bill and, more broadly, promoted negative images of Hispanic immigrants. By contrast, the pro-immigrant proponents didn't communicate a clear message, Mr. Sosa says.
