"If you asked your typical soccer mom what she thought of an unauthorized immigrant, she says, 'Well, I think of Mexicans running across the border on Fox News,' " said Tamar Jacoby, who runs , a think tank that advocates for changes to immigration law. Back in the mid-aughts, that Jacoby said probably turned off lots of Republican voters.
(Jacoby is herself a Republican. "That's why I want them to fix it — not because we're going to get credit for fixing it, but because we want to be able to talk to [Latino voters] about other stuff," she says.)
Now, Jacoby says, many people think of undocumented young people much more sympathetically as hard-working, high-school-valedictorian types who can't get financial aid for college because of their lack of official status. Not coincidentally, she said, the push to overhaul immigration laws that was moribund just a decade ago has the kind of momentum that suggests some kind of reform might well happen.
