Testing immigration as issue
N.Y. special congressional race may offer key points on topic
NEW YORK — In eastern Queens and suburban Long Island, a test of the potency of immigration as a political tool is playing out in a special congressional race that may offer lessons for both parties in the nationwide November general election.
Any takeaways may be limited to the particulars of a unique race: a battle between a savvy and wellknown centrist Democrat and a novice Republican nominee who has been evasive on the issues but has increasingly embraced Donald Trump. The shadow of George Santos, the unpopular truth-indifferent Republican who previously held the seat, hangs over the race, too.
But with both Democrats and Republicans starved for insight into what issues might tilt this year’s congressional races and the potential fall showdown between President Biden and Trump, the special election offers a salivating data point. The fate of the House may run through swing districts in New York in November.
The Democratic candidate, former Rep. Tom Suozzi, has acknowledged that immigration is a particularly pressing issue to voters in the district, New York’s 3rd, which covers a middle-class sliver of eastern Queens and tumbles east into swaths of Long Island’s tony north shore.
New York City’s cavernous, tentstyle migrant shelter at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village sits within the House district. The 1,000-bed complex, which opened in August in response to the city’s migrant crisis, remains at full capacity and has invited withering criticism from neighbors.
The Republican nominee, the Ethiopian-born Mazi Melesa Pilip, has used the immigration issue to hammer Suozzi, painting Democrats as weak on the border and soft in their so-called sanctuary city policies. She has tried to tie Suozzi to Democratic leadership during the ballooning crisis, branding it the “Tom Suozzi/ Joe Biden” border crisis.
“The migrant issue is a very big issue,” Suozzi said Wednesday. “It’s not only a border crisis at the southern border, it’s a Washington, D.C., crisis. We have to address this issue.”