Gee, maybe because I see NO CITATION or MENTION of such an award prior to NR's article?
Go ahead, Google "Defender of the Melting Pot" - see how few mentions come up. And all either tied to the NR article or after the NR article.
Also note that La Raza DOES have an award for Congresscritters - by a very different name.
San Francisco Chronicle,
Tuesday, July 8, 1997
Louis Freedberg, Chronicle
It is rare that a conservative Republican is hailed as ``a guardian of the melting pot.” At a banquet this spring, the fiercely pro-immigrant National Council of La Raza lavished that accolade, and more, on Senator Spencer Abraham, a first-term senator from Michigan who has emerged as an unlikely champion of legal immigration. In accepting the award, Abraham, 45, talked emotionally about how one of his grandfathers worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania after arriving from Lebanon, and how the other opened a mom-and-pop store in Detroit. ``I believe immigration is good for this country, and will keep fighting to keep the doors open,’’ Abraham told the cheering crowd as he held aloft an etched-glass trophy.
The award was noteworthy for more than just the fact that it went to someone with Abraham’s conservative credentials. As the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is one of the most powerful lawmakers on the immigration issue. In a radical departure from his predecessor on the committee, he is on a mission to change the image of the Republican Party as a party hostile to immigrants.