Levy's illegal-immigration stance could haunt campaign

Now that Steve Levy seeks a Republican path to the governorship, prominent Democrats - some with ambitions of their own - have begun to hammer away at the Suffolk executive's past statements, policies and positions on illegal immigration.

Sean Coffey, 53, a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, said Tuesday that as a first-generation Irish-American, he takes personal offense at Levy having once described foreign women who move to the U.S. as having "anchor babies."

For those unfamiliar with the term: "Anchor babies" are said to be a way for foreign families to establish a legal grounding in the U.S., since anyone born here gets to be a citizen.

"I must be an anchor baby," Coffey said - explaining he was born years before his parents became citizens. When asked their documentation status at the time, Coffey said: " . . . I am not intimately familiar with the means by which they became citizens. They were certainly assisted by the fact they had seven citizens as children." His mother became a citizen in the 1960s; his father, in the 1980s, said Coffey.

For his part, Levy has insisted through the first three weeks of his campaign that he sharply distinguishes between legal and undocumented immigrants. He told reporters March 19: "I share the same view as 90 percent of the public out there. . . . This country has it backwards. It makes it too hard to get into our country legally and it makes it too easy to get in here illegally. I want to reverse that."

But Coffey, who was raised in Nassau, said: "When you use pejorative terms like 'anchor baby,' you don't get to define the scope of insult." Coffey also cites last year's report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, ticking off what locally has been a well-known series of controversies on the subject. The report blasted Levy as an "enabler-in-chief" in a "climate of fear" for Latino immigrants.

For many years, critics of Levy's immigration postures compared him unfavorably to Nassau Executive Thomas Suozzi as both wrestled with what is generally agreed to be the legitimate safety issue of overcrowded housing. For the first time since Levy announced a run for governor, Democrat Suozzi Tuesday reiterated his view of the effort.

"Everything Levy's saying regarding the financial problems of the state and the dysfunction of the state, I agree with 100 percent," Suozzi said. "But I have always said publicly - and in my personal conversations with Steve have told him - I disagree 100 percent with the way he has treated the newcomers from Central and South America."

That view seems mainstream within New York's Democratic Party - perhaps underscoring the tactical logic of Levy's recent party switch. State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan), another candidate for attorney general, hails from a district that includes part of Washington Heights, with many Dominican immigrants.

Said Schneiderman: "I think that for whatever reason, he [Levy] appears to have made a choice to repeatedly embrace destructive, divisive rhetoric . . . that does harm to our state."

With immigration laws back on the Washington radar, related issues are bound to come up in the New York campaign. The topic last grew red-hot in Albany in 2007 with Gov. Eliot Spitzer's attempt to enable undocumented immigrants to drive legally. Although Levy focuses on the fiscal crisis as rationale for his candidacy, his new statewide presence could serve as an anchor - for a new regional round of immigration debate, either on his terms or someone else's.