Convention to showcase Suozzi's immigration stance

CHICAGO — Democrat Tom Suozzi first took immigration head on this year on Long Island to win a special election. Then he rolled out bills with Republicans in Washington to fix the system. And on Wednesday, he will talk in Chicago about how Democrats can win on immigration.

Suozzi, 61, who represents New York’s 3rd Congressional District in Nassau and Queens, is scheduled to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention to discuss his immigration proposals and respond to one of Republicans’ most potent campaign issues.

The influx of a near-record number of migrants across the U.S. southwest border after President Joe Biden reversed many of former President Donald Trump’s immigration restrictions and policies has become a major and often successful attack line for Republican campaigns.

But when Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip in a Feb. 13 special election, he turned the heads of Democrats and aligned groups by not ducking the immigration issue as many Democrats did, and instead talked about order on the border and humane treatment of migrants.

He also backed a bipartisan Senate bill introduced a little more than a week before the special election that would impose much tougher asylum and border laws while easing some restrictions on children and other immigrants.

“Suozzi won running on it and suddenly Democrats felt, ‘OK, well, this is safe to embrace,’ " said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a national think tank based in Washington, D.C., that champions center-left ideas.

“And frankly, the immigration groups really changed their tune after the Suozzi win," Erickson said. "They were like, ‘Yeah, that's what we've been saying all along. You should embrace it.’ ”

Erickson evaluated the potency of the Suozzi message by polling 55 battleground House districts and found that it wiped out Republicans’ 15-point advantage on the issue of the border, asylum and immigration.

Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-Island Park), whose district is next to Suozzi's, disputed the assertion that Suozzi won on immigration and border security. He said the Senate bill was not for border security and that all it did was codify “the disasters that are already in place.”

But Suozzi seized this new role, which helped him come back from a political debacle when he left Congress after three terms in 2022 and ran for governor of New York against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and lost.

He has allied with business and immigration groups — and Republican co-sponsors — to push changes piece by piece in the immigration system.

In May, Suozzi teamed up with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and the American Business Immigration Coalition and Families United, and urged President Joe Biden to tighten the border but also to give more work permits to families with noncitizen members.

And in June, Biden announced executive actions to do just that.

Last month, Suozzi partnered with Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) to convene a new coalition of stakeholders in immigration policy to pull together bipartisan legislation to secure the border, fix the broken asylum system and modernize immigration law.

The new initiative launched by Suozzi and Luttrell drew praise and the participation of the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus, a 40-member group that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Immigration Forum and Catholic Charities.

On Wednesday night, Suozzi will seize the opportunity to deliver a three-minute speech to an arena filled with Democrats and a national television audience that will lay out his strategy to fix the border, humanely treat migrants and try to defuse the Republicans’ ownership of the immigration as a political issue.