Candidate profile: Frank Hurley

Frank Hurley (standing) speaks at a candidate forum at NC A&T University earlier this month.

Frank Hurley, a 69-year-old retired Army Research Office manager from Chapel Hill, stood before the Guilford County Republicans in Jamestown in mid-March, and told them immigration was the key to unseating Democrat Brad Miller in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.

“We’re going to have to find at least one issue, which is a real grabber, which will rouse the Jessecrats to rise up and for once to vote for a Republican and retire this guy from public life and get a real for the first time in his life,” Hurley said. “I think that issue is the amnesty that the Democrats are getting ready to grant for about 12 million illegal immigrants. That would be an enormous mistake with a tremendous cost in jobs, a tremendous cost in medical services, a tremendous cost in law enforcement resources and a tremendous cost for our national culture.”

Hurley is one of four conservative candidates contending hoping to emerge at the top of the Republican heap on May 4, and move on to challenge Miller in the November general election.

When Hurley gave his speech, the healthcare reform bill signed into law by President Obama was less than a week old, and most Republican candidates were focusing their attention on repeal. Immigration appeared to be on the backburner, and a possible loser considering that Republicans unsuccessfully tried to use it to take control of the NC General Assembly in 2006. Since that night in Jamestown, the governor of Arizona has signed a landmark bill giving local law enforcement the authority to demand identification from any person suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Immigration has come roaring back to the forefront of the national discourse.

“So this is the issue I think we ought to really pound home against Brad Miller,” Hurley said in Jamestown. “I’m willing to do that. I’m going to take punishment for that. It’s going to be controversial. I’ve got to be controversial if I get the nomination. I’m the Republican conservative with the attitude in this primary.”

Hurley said in an interview today that there are two basic reasons that he favors blocking any attempt to put undocumented residents on a pathway to citizenship, tightening up security on the border and deporting those who are here illegally.

First is jobs and the economy.

“Many, many jobs that Americans could hold are being given to illegal immigrants, which is extremely foolish, in my opinion,” Hurley said. “Tax burdens at the state and county level are higher because of illegal immigration. I would call out such things as law enforcement and schools. We’ve spent a lot of money on bricks and mortar to put up schools fast enough to accommodate the children of illegal immigrants. That prevents us from spending money on teachers. It’s costing us a lot in medical expenses…. We see in emergency rooms, they hardly ever pay anyone. The hospitals will cheerfully pass along those costs to those who are paying customers.”

The second reason has to do with what Hurley calls “the national character.”

“In my opinion, the United States has the perfect right to remain the United States,” Hurley said. “The world has a surplus of Latin American countries, and it doesn’t need another one. It should reflect the national population profile.”

Hurley said he favors a return to the policy of national quotas on immigration that was in place before 1965.

“What occasioned it is alarm at the second big wave of immigrants from China,” he said. “The government looked at that and said, ‘There’s a lot of Chinese over there and not so many of us Americans, and we’re going to have to limit them.’ A few years later they made it systematic by saying how many people from each country we would accept.”

As the descendent of German and Irish immigrants, Hurley said he believes previous generations of immigrants made more of an effort to assimilate and demonstrate patriotism towards their adopted country.

“Today, the illegal Mexican immigrants are showing very limited enthusiasm for assimilating, and learning English,” he said. “If you go to a soccer game between a Mexican team and an American team you’ll see a lot of illegals, and they’ll root for Mexico.”

Hurley’s view of the immigration debate envisions political stakes for both major parties.

If undocumented residents were to be automatically accorded citizenship, the candidate said, “you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll be offered a voter registration card with Democrat pre-checked when they become a brand new shiny citizen. There may be some hyperbole there but not much.”

The strategy undertaken by President George W. Bush and his advisor, Karl Rove, to try to woo Hispanics over to the GOP was a mistake, in Hurley’s view.

“I think it was a roaring failure,” he said. “Claims were made that we got a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote in 2004. I don’t think there was much of that. When we were counting hanging chads in Florida in the 2000 vote, I distinctly remember how happy the Bush administration was that most of the precincts being looked at did not have a lot of immigrants from Latin America.”

A political gunfight between Gov. Jan Brewer and the Republicans on one side and the federal government and the Democrats on the other side in Arizona favors the former side, Hurley said.

“Besides the matter of what’s best for the country’s economy and culture, there’s gold in them thar hills politically,” the candidate said. “The pro-amnesty position is very risky and will be very costly for the Democrats. To the extent that Republicans emulate Tom Tancredo and put aside the silliness of W. and John McCain, the better off the Republican Party will be.”

Hurley said he also favors legislation that “challenges citizenship at birth” to remove the incentive for pregnant women to enter the United States to bear a child on American soil, which the candidate said, “is going to right into the courts and right up to the Supreme Court.”

That would seem a safe prediction, considering that the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed immediately after the Civil War, reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens of the United States.”

Hurley said he’s “probably pounded the daylights out of” the issue of illegal immigration.

“Anybody can argue that we ought to do this or that for the economy,” he said. “When you argue that America’s identity is good and shouldn’t be changed, now you become somewhat politically incorrect. I say America is better than Latin America. I say America is better than the Third World. I say America is better than the Islamic world.”

Hurley touts himself as the candidate with the strongest national security credentials, as a career civil servant who managed weapons development research for the Army, and served two years in National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a political appointee during the Reagan administration. He was at NASA when unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as predator drones, were being developed.

“I was a very early cheerleader for NASA and the Air Force doing work n that area,” he said. “That certainly has borne fruit. One of the things we’ve seen frequently in the newspaper are stories about al-Qaida and Taliban kingpins [being assassinated] from missile launches off of predator war craft.”

Hurley said he supports President Bush’s preemptive strike policy, but faults the former president for being too timid in the prosecution of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“One thing I would say is perhaps we should have fewer troops on the ground and more troops in the air, by which I mean more reliance on air power,” Hurley said. “We should have used our air power much more efficiently and not worried about collateral casualties, and similarly we should have been more ruthless in the use of our ground forces. The contrast that I always make on that is, let’s compare the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Russian experience in Chechnya: By and large, Russia has won its war in Chechnya while we’re fooling around in Iraq and Afghanistan. The way the Russians did it was being relentless, ruthless and remorseless, and leveling areas that are hotbeds for insurgents. Much of Grozny is rubble.”

The candidate discussed the prospect of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons with a sense of calm.

“If and when they obtain nuclear weapons it shouldn’t ruin our day,” he said. “That just means that Plan B goes into effect. Plan B is probably going to involve a lot of smoke and dust and fire.” The candidate added that one option is waiting to see if internal tensions cause the current leadership in Iran to get pushed aside.

Hurley said he would apply his experience in military contracting to argue for making General Electric a second supplier of engines for the F-35 jetfighter under development by Lockheed Martin. The main engine is currently being supplied by Pratt & Whitney. Hurley said adding General Electric to the mix would allow the Defense Department to set up competitive bidding, and also potentially help North Carolina workers.

“If I were in Congress, I would be a solid advocate for General Electric as a second source,” Hurley said. “It’s also a constituency issue for us. Off of Miami Boulevard [in Durham], there’s a General Electric plant. The company would be more prosperous if it got to be the second source.”

On one jobs and economy issue, Hurley parts ways with some of his more anti-taxation and regulation cohorts in the conservative movement. Singling out IBM and Hanesbrands, the candidate said companies should be penalized for shipping North Carolina jobs overseas.

“I believe that companies should not get off penalty free if they transfer a product assembly line to Malaysia in search of coolie labor rates,” Hurley said. “I believe companies should have to pay a higher tax rate. That product was conceived and developed in the United States, and the assembly line was set up and prototyped in the United States. While this was being done, the company had the protection of US law enforcement authorities. The company also had the advantage of research and development tax breaks courtesy of the taxpayers of the United States. I believe there is a shared stake between the company’s interests and those of the people of the United States.

“I would say that if you want to move your company out of the United States, we won’t forbid you from doing it, but we’re going to tax you for it,” he continued. “Maybe you’ll pay not just one half of Social Security and Medicare, but both halves so that we can compensate the workers who lost their jobs.”

With exactly a week to go until the primary, Hurley said he assumes all four candidates start out with 25 percent of the vote, but he has no idea which one will prevail or whether one will clear 40 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.

“I think we’ve got some very different styles in campaigning,” he said. “I don’t know how successful at harvesting Republican votes the considerable amount of paid advertising in Bernie Reeves’ campaign versus Bill Randall’s being on the campaign trail for a year versus Frank Hurley’s crusade against illegal immigration. I just don’t know what the relative effectiveness of these will be.”

Triad Elections ’10