Lobbyist Silvertooth tries to take emotion out of immigration fight

When the Senate debated immigration, lobbyist R. Craig Silvertooth became a leading voice of comprehensive reform.

As head of government affairs for the National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) and co-chairman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), an umbrella group of employers that supported comprehensive reform, Silvertooth, 39, appeared on CNN, Fox News and PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” to defend a bill that would have provided a road to legal status for as many as 11 million illegal immigrants.

{mosads}After those appearances, Silvertooth found that opponents of the measure had a few choice words of their own, which they would leave on his office voice mail.

“People would leave profane messages,” he said. “They wanted to know why we hate America. Why we can’t hire Americans. How much I am getting from the Mexican government.”

The issue tends to bring out the “worst in people,” he said. “It’s overly emotional.”

Silvertooth blames the intense anger for scaring members off the bill, which he contends offered a reasonable response to a labor shortage his industry and other contractors face.

To critics, through, the bill offered amnesty to illegal immigrants. The three weeks between when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled the bill from the floor and when he brought it back up again “provided ample time for talk radio and other media opponents, including blogs, to mobilize,” according to Silvertooth. He estimates his side lost three or four votes during that time.

One consequence of the bill’s failure is that Silvertooth is off the hot seat. With comprehensive reform dead, he doesn’t appear on TV anymore. But the issue hasn’t gone away for his industry.

Silvertooth’s group is now part of an effort to block a Bush administration effort to go after employers that use illegal workers through a so-called “no-match” rule. His work for EWIC keeps him active in efforts to tweak immigration laws through less ambitious measures that, for example, target H-1B visas used by high-tech companies.

Contractor groups like the roofers’ association, though, still await comprehensive reform. The sector employs nearly 12 million people, with about a quarter of the workers having Hispanic roots. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2005 that nearly 30 percent of the roofing workforce was undocumented.

“This is life or death for the industry. We are not finding native-born Americans that are willing to go into our industry,” he said.

Given the stakes for contractors, various trade groups and companies banded together to form EWIC.

Lake Coulson, a lobbyist for the Plumbing, Heating and Cooling Contractors National Association, called EWIC the “biggest and most important” of all the immigration coalitions pushing reform.

“As one of the co-chairs of EWIC, he was front and center in the debate,” Coulson said of Silvertooth. “He’s been a terrific ally.” Coulson credited Silvertooth for keeping the coalition together and selling components of the compromise members didn’t support in hope of keeping the bill alive and moving it forward.

A native of Texas, Silvertooth was a former staff aide to Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) before working on Robert Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.

He then worked as a fundraiser for Georgetown University before becoming a lobbyist for a trade group of air conditioner manufacturers. Silvertooth has worked at the roofers’ association for the last five and a half years.

Founded in 1886, the association is one of the oldest trade groups in town. It now represents 4,200 companies, mostly small businesses with fewer than 35 employees each.

Those businesses are going to have a hard time complying with the no-match rule. The effort, led by the Department of Homeland Security, would create new responsibilities for employers to ensure their workers have proper documentation, and new penalties for failing to comply.

Government estimates are that there are 17.5 million errors in the Social Security database. An error occurs when information in the database doesn’t match the information sent by an employee or an employer. But there are only an estimated 11.6 million illegal immigrants.

The NRCA has joined the United Fresh Produce Association, the American Nursery and Landscape Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the International Franchise Association in an effort to block the implementation of the Bush plan in federal court.

“We’re playing defense. We used to have a game on both sides of the ball, but with the death of comprehensive reform in the Senate, our offensive game is out the window,” Silvertooth said.

“Hopefully, the 111th Congress will be more amenable to reform.”

By then, Silvertooth may play a less central role in the debate. He is soon to take over as executive director of a spin-off trade group that will focus on green-building standards. The group does not yet have a name.

While that debate promises to be less controversial than the one on immigration, roofers did have some concerns with efforts by Democrats to raise new energy standards for buildings. The NRCA was one of a dozen groups that wrote House members to express concern with a bill to promote energy efficiency standards. The measure would have imposed “aggressive efficiency benchmarks for building codes that may not be technically feasible or economically justified by the targeted dates,” the letter stated.

 In this instance, lawmakers heard the concerns and adopted an amendment to the bill giving the Energy Department the power to ensure new standards could be met without creating economic damage to the building industries.