Slide 1:
Republican Rep. John Culberson held the seat of TX-07 for 16 years, since 2000, winning by rather large margins up until 2016. In 2018, he lost his seat to the challenger from the Democratic Party, Lizzie Fletcher, by 5% or roughly 12,000 votes. Fletcher is currently serving her first-term in the 115th Congress.
Slide 2:
Wong (2017) argues that in constituencies with high foreign born populations, policymakers—both Republicans and Democrats—are less likely to support restrictive immigration policy. Casellas and Leal (2013) show that large Latino populations imply less support by policymakers for restrictive proposals, however partisanship is a more important factor in deciding whether a policymaker will vote for measures. Wong (2014) claims that as the percentage of Latinos and Asians in states increases, the probability of voting “yes” for interior enforcement decreases.
Slide 3:
This research has some direct, visible effects on the TX-07 district, however recent changes in party control of the district make some findings difficult to interpret. 28.84% of the population is foreign born in the district, 30.5% is Latino, and 10.7% is Asian, however the district still has restrictive immigration policy. Immigrant organizations have urged an increase in immigrant legal services, the use of ID cards, language access for non-English speakers, stopping 287(g), and less restrictive immigration policies in general (de Graauw, Gleeson, Bada 2019).
Slide 4:
In terms of her congressional record, Rep. Fletcher’s voted “yea” on H.J. Res. 31 which provided funding for the Department of Homeland Security and included $12.2 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and $7.5 billion for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Feb. 14, 2019. She also cosponsored H. J. Res. 46 which repealed Trump’s emergency national declaration and passed on Feb. 26, 2019. She has cosponsored 3 bills and 1 (H.J. Res 46) was immigration-related; to say that 33% of bills she’s cosponsored have been immigration-related is a bit deceiving though, given the small sample size. Fletcher’s website is incredibly bare: under the category of “Other Issues” in which users would ideally be able to view her stances, for each of the nine issues, there is no information, only the message “More coming soon!” In 2019, on Twitter, Fletcher was vocal in January and February about the government shutdown and attacks with a standard, partisan tone from a Democrat. She tweeted 9 times about immigration (including one tweet of a picture of a border wall, one linking to a news article about wall funding, and one with the buzzword “borders“) out of 121 overall tweets within the January 1 to March 1 time period; 7.4% of Fletcher’s tweets were about immigration.
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