Online, grass-roots groups take credit for immigration bill's death

DES MOINES, Iowa — Online groups took credit Friday for leading the grass-roots opposition against an immigration reform bill, saying they persuaded Americans to flood Congress with hundreds of thousands of phone calls, faxes and e-mails.

"We think it was a rising tide of citizen response that forced the senators to stop and consider what the American people were saying, and what the American people were saying was they didn't like this bill," said Steve Elliott, president of Grassfire.org, headquartered in tiny Maxwell, Iowa.

The proposal, backed by President Bush, would have created a path to legal residency for illegal immigrants.

The conservative Grassfire group's Web site has more than a million contacts nationwide that led to more than 300,000 "citizen contacts" with senators offices over the past few days, Elliott said.

The contacts included phone calls, visits to lawmakers' offices and faxes marked with a giant letter "A" — which the group dubbed the "scarlet letter of amnesty." More than 725,000 people signed a Grassfire online petition, sent to President Bush and congressional members, against what they were calling the Bush-Kennedy Amnesty Bill, organizers said. Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, was his party's lead negotiator on the bill.

Another group, Eagle Forum, led a coalition of about a dozen groups including NumbersUSA, Let Freedom Ring and Concerned Women for America, said Jessica Echard, Eagle Forum's executive director. They combined Internet activism with bloggers and others in Washington who alerted group members if a lawmaker appeared to be wavering on his or her vote.

Echard, whose group dates to the early 1970s, said it was regular citizens, not lobbyists, who grabbed senators' attention.

"The fast-paced ability to generate calls; I think that was very key in this defeat," she said. "This was a new day with the average citizen."

Brian Darling, a congressional analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, credited groups for using the Internet to oppose the legislation.

Grassfire.org in particular "did an excellent job using new media outlets in getting the word out as to how terrible this Senate amnesty bill was," he said.

Elliott formed Grassfire.org in the late 1990s to address issues ranging from abortion and traditional marriage to tax reform and border security. He lives in Virginia, but a brother-in-law in central Iowa tipped him off to Web developers in Maxwell, population 793, and it became home to the movement.