Conventional political wisdom says the collapse of talks over immigration reform legislation in Washington this week won't hurt Republicans at the ballot box until at least the presidential election in 2016. Miguel Valenzuela is on a mission to prove the conventional wisdom wrong.  Valenzuela, a 27-year-old former US marine, lives in Colorado, one of a handful of battleground states where a booming Latino population means the issue of immigration reform could play a major role in this November's midterm elections. In 2008, the Latino vote helped push Democrat Mark Udall to victory in the Senate, in a good year for his party. This November, in what’s widely expected to be a bad year for Democrats, Udall will almost certainly need the community to turn out for him once again if he is to hold on to his seat.  Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner is doing what he can to neutralise the backlash from those who blame his party for blocking legislation, proposed with the intent to provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country – even suggesting that military veterans should receive automatic citizenship in recognition of their service.  But Valenzuela, a US citizen already, is not concerned about his own immigration status; he's worried about his mother.  After 25 years living in Colorado and fighting what seemed an interminable immigration battle, Celia Novak was told in front of her stunned son that she would be deported back to Mexico after a messy divorce resulted in the loss of her green card.  Much had changed in her absence. Novak was dropped off in the border city of Juarez, now one of the most violent places in the world, and left to fend without relatives amid drive-by shootings and drug gangs that Valenzuela compares unfavourably to his time with the US marines.  “My family has a lot of warriors: I did my thing and my mom is definitely doing hers. She's seen a lot more violence than I saw when I was in Iraq,” he says.  But Valenzuela's military service has left a particularly bitter taste when it comes to assessing the response of Republicans like Gardner, currently serving as his local congressman in the House of Representatives, and now the subject of regular protests by the former marine.  Though Gardner is more in favour of immigration reform than most in his party, local campaign groups such as the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition have lost patience with the congressional stalemate, and begun picketing his office and encouraging Valenzuela to pursue him at meetings with awkward questions.  “I went out and fought for the rights and privileges of everybody in this country except for my family; we have been totally disregarded,” says Valenzuela. “It's not just the veteran that serves for the US military; the family is also doing their part: sending care packages, worrying about them.”  It is not only close relatives of deported immigrants who say that Republican opposition to immigration reform will play a decisive factor in how they vote.  A recent national survey conducted by specialist opinion pollsters Latino Decisions found 89% of registered Latino voters claim the issue was important to their voting intentions, and 74% said they would be less favourably disposed to Republicans if they continued to block reform.  Not all opinion polls agree on how big a factor immigration reform alone will prove for a community that, like many Americans, also worries about jobs, education and health, but for the Republicans to lose any more support from this booming demographic group could be a disaster.  The GOP's own post-mortem of its 2012 presidential campaign found the lack of support from Latinos to be a major factor in Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama – which is what led Republican leaders in the Senate and House to resume exploring bipartisan reform legislation after the election.  Ultimately, a suspicion among conservatives and Tea Party activists that providing a path to citizenship would merely enfranchise yet more Democratic voters helped override this desire to rebrand the party, and forced speaker John Boehner and Obama to call off the attempt this week. As a surge of unaccompanied children from Central America causes a fresh crisis on the US border this month, many Republicans have grave practical concerns about the impact of liberalising rules too.  But assuming this is a long-term political challenge that can be postponed for another day misses the fact that, in the swing state of Colorado, Hispanics already account for a fifth of the population and 14% of its existing eligible electorate.  “While lots of people are focused on 11m undocumented immigrants and which way they will vote in 15 or 30 years time, they should be more focused on that fact that every month 65,000 more Latinos become eligible to vote,” says Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration campaign group.  “If the Republican party continues to be branded as anti-immigrant and hostile to Latinos, that burgeoning vote will make them pay a price of historic proportions.”  And while it is true that most races for House and Senate seats this year are not as competitive, and not as likely to be affected by the Latino vote, as the 2016 presidential election will be, a few close-fought exceptions such as Colorado could make all the difference.  “Immigration is not going to affect most Senate and House races,” concedes Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions. “The issue is whether it is going to affect those on the margin, in particular on the Senate side races in Colorado and North Carolina, may be even Georgia.”  “It may not be an issue in all 30 plus Senate races but if it affects the margin in three or four or five Senate races that could decide the control of the Senate.”  Unsurprisingly, many Republicans vigorously reject such analysis. Opponents of immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship say it rewards those who broke the law by entering the country illegally in the first place, and point to a growing influx of unaccompanied child immigrants as evidence Obama cannot be trusted to secure the border in future.  Even those in favour of reform are reluctant to discuss it in partisan terms, couching their support as way to help businesses find talented new employees and stimulate the economy.  “I don't want to even put it in party terms, because I don't think that's the best way to talk about the need,” Gardner told the Guardian in an interview. “The reason [for immigration reform] is the future of this country: it's the kid who goes to school with my daughter in eastern Colorado, the people I go to the grocery store with when I am at home. What's good for the future of the country, the people of the US, is good for the Republican party.”  Instead, he argues the biggest difference between him and Udall is that it is Democrats who have been seeking to get political capital out of taking an uncompromising approach with House Republicans.  “The difference is I am serious about immigration reform and Senator Udall is serious about politics,” Gardner says. “He wants an issue, not a solution. I have long said that we should move forward with immigration reform and trying to find ways to push the House of Representatives down the path of immigration reform, while coming up with something that the Senate and president can agree to.”  The dozen or so polls in Colorado carried out before the collapse of immigration talks showed the two virtually neck-and-neck, with Udall even slipping behind in one recent survey, but Gardner is under pressure to clarify what his support for immigration reform means in practice.  And national Republican figures are flocking to Colorado to help bolster what many see as a test case for how they might fare on the issue of immigration in 2016.  With financial help from the pro-immigration US Chamber of Commerce, potential GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio even recorded a television advert in which he endorsed Gardner in Spanish.  Meanwhile, Udall is stepping up his attacks on Gardner over the issue, appearing recently on a Denver Spanish-language radio show to call for Obama to take executive action over deportations if legislation couldn’t happen.  It is far from the only thing being fought over between the two candidates. Udall's spokesman Chris Harris says his boss is most focused on attacking Gardner's record on abortion and women's rights. Gardner is targeting Udall on his environmentalism and support for Obamacare.  Yet few issues pack as much emotional punch as deciding what to do about the thousands of local families ripped apart by current immigration laws, or left living in legal shadows, constantly fearing a knock at the door.  As Gardner suggests, these are the neighbours and school friends of many in the state.  Leticia Zavala of Fort Morgan, Colorado, is another local figure gaining attention across the community after her husband Guillermo was forced to return to Mexico this Christmas, leaving her to bring up two traumatised American citizens, aged nine and six, alone.  The family lived in fear of Guillermo being pulled over by police, especially after the dairy farm where he worked was raided by immigration authorities, and reluctantly decided he should try to square his immigration status by returning across the border and applying for a visa there.  Such cases would be addressed rapidly by the proposed immigration reforms now stalled in Congress, and the irony is that many such Latino families are natural Republican electoral targets: often socially conservative and desperate to integrate into economic and legal fabric of American life.  “It was a heartbreaking decision but he wants to be legal,” says Zavala. “He's a good person, we want to be good, we want to buy a home, to live a normal life.”
As families are torn by deportations and growing border crisis, Republicans try to overcome party rifts to win booming voter bloc