Abandoned coal breakers are common features of Northeast Pennsylvania’s broken landscape. (Photo by Amy Crawford)

While national politicians are treating immigration as a non-issue, there are still places where it has the power to rile up a crowd. It makes sense in Arizona—that state borders Mexico—but immigration is also surprisingly hot in Pennsylvania.

News 21 has covered the Barletta-Kanjorski race in the state’s 11th Congressional district, but immigration is also an issue in the district to the north and west. Freshman Chris Carney, a Democrat, won the heavily Republican 10th district in 2006, largely because his opponent was rocked by a sex scandal. Carney’s challenger this year is Chris Hackett, a conservative Luzerne County businessman.

The most recent poll, conducted by Franklin and Marshall Colleges, showed Carney winning 39 percent to 25 percent with 36 percent undecided. With a little more than three weeks to go before the election, Carney is likely to win, but this remains a race to watch, if only because the Democrat will remain vulnerable in 2010.

Because his district is generally red (it went 60 percent for Bush in 2004), Carney has taken conservative stances on social issues, including immigration. Like Hackett, he supports English as a national language and opposes “amnesty.” Both candidates also support a path to citizenship, but say that illegal immigrants should have to leave the country first.

Hackett has been more successful at courting voters for whom immigration is a top issue. In May, Hackett sent a representative to an anti-illegal immigration rally in Hazleton which even Lou Barletta avoided.

Hackett knows which buttons to push when it comes to illegal immigration—when asked by local blogger Gort42 what he thought Carney had done to deserve ouster, Hackett cited Carney’s support of S-CHIP, or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, explaining that it “takes dollars out of Medicare and uses them to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants.”

But Carney, backed by advertising funds from the Democratic National Campaign Committee, has fought back hard with an ad pointing out that Hackett hired an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. (Hackett fired her when he learned of her immigration status, but he did not report her to federal authorities.)

For the white, working class voters in Northeast Pennsylvania, illegal immigration is a stand-in issue for anxiety about the long-term economic changes that have ravaged the state. It remains to be seen whether today’s more acute economic anxiety will deliver the district to the Democrat in November, but regardless, illegal immigration is sure to crop up again in the 10th district.