Margaret McHugh is executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella policy and advocacy organization representing about 150 local immigrant and refugee groups. She spoke last week with The New York Sun’s Daniela Gerson about shifting immigrant trends, federal reform, and what the newest New Yorkers want from a mayor.

Q. You’re a native New Yorker. What got you interested in immigration issues?

A. I think my father and his love for New York ignited my passion. Both of my parents were born in Brooklyn, and my father was a bricklayer, mason, and a contractor. He did a lot of small jobs all over the city and would drive me around and talk to me about boilers that he replaced in schools. We would drive by a school, and he’d say, “We re-bricked that boiler back in 1950.” I didn’t grow up with the sense, that many other people do, of the city as a big, glamorous, cosmopolitan place. I had a sense, from a very early age, of neighborhoods and the people who built them, and the lives of regular working-class people.

After working for Mayor Ed Koch and on the 1990 census, you joined the New York Immigration Coalition 15 years ago. How have you seen the political influence immigrants wield in New York shift?

We now have about 20 years of experience with this newest great wave of immigration. Many of these people who have come have become citizens and have begun to become engaged politically. … Literally with each passing moment the importance of immigrants to the outcome of elections in New York City increases. We’ve seen this through our work. Almost all of the first-time voters in last year’s election were immigrants. So we’ve got hundreds of thousands of new immigrants streaming into the electorate over the last several years. Their ability to shape city politics, and make our politics more accountable to working people living here, is one of the most exciting things happening right now in the political landscape of the city.

Have the mayoral candidates responded to this shift in courting the immigrant vote?

It has been surprising to us that a lot of the candidates still appear to talk to New York voters in the context of the national debate about immigration. They’re missing the opportunity to talk to them about their agenda as New Yorkers. That agenda has more to do with English classes, economic opportunity, education, health care, and housing issues. Immigrants, of course, want to hear what the candidates have to say about the legalization debate at the federal level, but that is not a proxy for all of the issues and all of the business they want to see transacted at the city level to improve their day-to-day life.

Are there any new immigrant groups that have surprised you in terms of the way in which they have grown or organized themselves?

Dominicans are the largest group by far, followed by Russians and folks from the former U.S.S.R., and then by immigrants from China and Jamaica. Those are the more established communities, and, as one would expect, there is more organization, more infrastructures, in those communities. … I think the interesting thing for the last maybe five years or so has been the influx of Mexican immigrants to the city and the growing number of organizations working with that community. Then there are the organizations working with African immigrants. We have a tremendous diversity of immigrants from the continent of Africa, and they’re just beginning to make their way and have their organizations evolve.

The other huge difference that we have seen since 9/11 is the pressure that Muslim, Arab, and South Asian leaders have been under to give voice to the concerns of those communities. And we have seen them rise to the challenge and navigate the fairly treacherous waters that they have had to swim in since 9/11.

The New York Immigration Coalition’s members range from Colombians in Jackson Heights to Russians in Brighton Beach and everything in between. While all immigrants, the members are very different. Are there any particularly divisive issues?

We worried in the post-9/11 context … that many groups might buy into the junk-security measures that were being proposed at the federal level, that they would be cowed into thinking some of these proposals that were targeting Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians were actually good for them. But very quickly leaders of our Dominican, Central and South American, African communities – all of them came together – and their analysis was these were junk security measures that weren’t making any of us safer, that they were making the backlogs at the immigration service much, much longer.

You describe the post-September 11 attack-immigration policies as “junk-security measures.” What do you think can make this country more secure?

It goes back to what people’s analysis is of what caused 9/11. Our analysis is it was a failure of intelligence. What we need are the sorts of systems that are going to help us find the needle in the haystack, and what we keep getting instead out of the federal government is proposals that add more hay to the haystack. Certainly we need better use of technology at the borders, better screening of people before they come into the country, better communication among databases.

Senators McCain and Kennedy have said they will present a comprehensive immigration reform legislation that will include a temporary worker program. The president has also outlined a similar program he supports. What do you think should be done to fix this country’s broken immigration system?

The thing we’re looking closely for in the McCain-Kennedy bill, that’s rumored to be coming out very shortly, is how the bill will bring in both skilled and unskilled workers to feed the legitimate needs of the economy, and, at the same time, make sure that whatever new system we establish doesn’t drive down wages or working conditions for workers already in the U.S.

A second key concern will be what is the mix of temporary and long-term – those who are on a path to long-term residency and full rights. I think that will be one of the most important tensions that we’ll see played out in the debate. And then, the third thing that I hope will be a major focus … is what are we going to do about integration issues? I think the American public is rightly concerned about the great transformation that our society is undergoing as a result of high rates of immigration. We should have more political leaders who are willing to tell the truth, which is [that] we must continue to have generous immigration policies in order for the baby-boom population to retire and to keep our economy growing. But, yes, at the same time, we also have to take proactive steps to make immigration work for local communities.

What type of steps should be happening to take care of immigrants already here?

The most obvious thing we need to be doing is invest in English-language classes. It’s the best immigration intervention program, it’s the best anti-poverty program for immigrants, and yet the federal government continues to turn a blind eye to this most obvious of issues and needs. In fact, at the same time that the president is pushing for an immigration reform bill, he’s gutting our existing adult ESL programs in the federal budget that he’s proposed. … What happens once people get here? It’s time for us to grow up and understand we can’t do immigration on the cheap.