America's voters just sent us a much more challenging Congress to persuade ... or block

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DEAR FRIENDS OF REDUCTIONS IN ILLEGAL & LEGAL IMMIGRATION,

Here are the eight most important first things you need to know about Tuesday's elections and how they affect the desires and efforts of all of us to get control of our borders and overall immigration numbers:

No. 1: Nearly everything about our cause got more difficult.

We lost a lot of really good allies, and a few true champions. The shift in control of the U.S. House means we go from a Speaker Hastert (R-IL) with a 96% immigration grade to a Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) with a 2% grade, the lowest of all 535 Members of Congress!

The chances of improving our quality of life by starting to limit immigration over the next two years are extremely slim. We have been thrown into even more of a defensive mode than before.

No. 2: Our allies did NOT lose because they were tough on immigration issues.

And House Republicans were not turned out of the majority because they stood against Pres. Bush and Democrats to stop their giant amnesty plans.

We can be sure of that because of scientific polling in more than a dozen battleground districts and states this fall. The surveys by The Polling Company found that in competitive races, large majorities of Democrats and Independents, and even larger majorities of Republicans, agreed with our positions on combatting illegal immigration and on reducing overall numbers.

I already started to hear a little bit of toxic spin in the TV commentary over the night. I am sure that Tamar Jacoby, the Wall Street Journal and other ubiquitous open-borders commentators will try to say that the losses of immigration-restriction candidates like Randy Graf and J.D. Hayworth in Arizona and John Hostettler in Indiana prove that hard-line positions against illegal immigration are losers.

But there is no logic in that. The polls showed that voters in the competitive districts, including in Arizona, agreed with us on immigration. If they agreed with us, why would they punish a candidate for also agreeing with us? They wouldn't. Obviously, other factors (the war & scandal) were the driving forces behind the big Party shift.

No. 3: Rather than weakening Pres. Bush's resolve and ability to enact horrible expansions of immigration and rewards for illegal immigration, the Republicans' loss of the House seems to have emboldened the President.

The White House already sees a silver lining in having caused Republicans to lose control of the House: It was the House Republicans who blocked Pres. Bush's immigration plans. White House aides were saying through the late evening that one good thing for the President is that, without a Republican majority, Pres. Bush may be able to push through his massive foreign labor importation plan with Democratic Speaker Pelosi's help.

You could almost hear the glee in those White House reports that Republican Hastert will no longer be in the Speaker's chair.

No. 4: Now is the time for our Democratic (and Independent) faxer activists to step forward with your best influence.

For the last six years, our most important efforts were in trying to influence the Republican leaders of the House and the Senate, while secondarily working to build up a sizeable minority of Democratic supporters in Congress.

Now, our most immediate concern will be in persuading Democratic leaders that it is not in their best political intersests to bring to a vote the radical open-borders legislation they have been pushing the last several years.

All of you with any form at all of credibility with Democratic leaders are going to need to do all you can to reach them and help them see how it not only is politically foolhardy to push the open-borders agenda but bad for principles they hold most dear.

No. 5: NumbersUSA is ready to carry the battle forward with a special emphasis on a Democratic strategy.

When every part of government was controlled by Republicans, we were sometimes questioned about why we were spending so much time building up a Democratic membership and Democratic staff.

Well, aren't we all glad that we did.

We already have a Democratic Team working on the Hill, as well as our Republican Team, each with experience working in congressional offices of their respective Parties.

For three or four months now, some of our closest Republican allies have confided quite confidentially to us that everything they saw and all information from behind the scenes that they received suggested to them that the Democrats were going to take control of the House this fall.

Because of that, we have worked up a general strategy for how we proceed. We were not caught off guard by the election results. And we are not thrown off balance. We are ready to work with you in this new political environment to do the best we can for our country, for ourselves and family, for our fellow citizens in this national community and for our posterity.

No. 6: Republican activists will still have a crucial role to play.

On nearly every winning vote we are able to achieve the next two years, a large majority of the votes on our side will have to come from Republicans.

It will be the special task of Republican faxers and all voters who are represented by Republicans to persuade them to vote as a nearly monolithic bloc against any form of amnesty, mass guestworker programs or increases in legal immigration.

We are going to need to keep about 90% of Republican House Members voting with us most of the time to block the bad legislation and amnesties (with Blue Dog and other more independent minded Democrats providing the rest of the votes to equal 218).

No. 7: Over the next few days, we will be giving you some things to do to start influencing the new power structure here in Washington.

There is no reason for despair although there are plenty of temptations to yield to it.

We cannot throw up our hands and say "all is lost, things can't get much worse." Well, out-of-control immigration IS making things worse every year and will continue to do so until we start rolling back the annual settlement of some 2 million -- both illegal and legal immigrants.

All of us citizen groups together over the past year pulled off a political miracle and stopped all forms of an amnesty that was supported by nearly all the powerful institutions of the country.

The evidence is clear that the majority of voters are with us -- it's just that they made decisions Tuesday that send to us a particularly difficult Congress to deal with. As citizen activists, we have to deal with the Congress that the voters send to us.

No. 8: The Democratic takeover may finally enable vigorous oversight over the Bush Administration's failure to secure our borders, secure our greencard and visa system and to provide robust interior enforcement of our immigration laws.

We had some great Republicans in the House trying to prod, push and plead with the Administration for better enforcement.

But the GOP leadership would never allow the oversight to be strong enough to embarrass the Administration to be forced to enforce the laws.

The Democrats may appreciate the chance to embarrass the Bush Administration.

Many of you may not be all that aware of the extent to which NumbersUSA is building a department of professionals to assist with congressional oversight of the Administration. The majority of news reports this past year that have questioned the Administration's handling of immigration have been generated by our NumbersUSA team.

We look forward to helping the Democrats expose the Bush Administration's weaknesses in protecting the physical and economic security of the American people through its lax handling of immigration matters.

CONTINUING THE FIGHT,

-- ROY