Analysis: Immigration headache for GOP

WASHINGTON, May 15 (UPI) -- If there is one issue that threatens to split the president off from the activist base of the GOP, it's immigration.

George W. Bush has made outreach to the Latino community a central emphasis of his presidency. The first foreign head of state with whom he met was not, as recent tradition holds, the Canadian prime minister. Looking south, Bush met instead with Mexican President Vicente Fox, whom the current administration is working hard to support.

Sunbelt elements within the GOP are not at all comfortable with this strategy. Indeed, their efforts to address the issue go back farther then the current administration.

In recent years, they track back at least as far as former California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson's Proposition 187, a successful ballot initiative to stop illegal immigrants from receiving government benefits. In the years since its passage, and in spite of judicial injunctions delaying its enforcement, Prop. 187 has become political shorthand for portraying the Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner.

The president and his political advisers, seeing the enormous and growing Latino population in key Electoral College states like California, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado, want to embrace these newest of Americans and woo them into the Republican voter bloc. The effort to soften the party's image on immigration is a big part of that as are efforts to transform large numbers of illegal immigrants currently in the United States to quasi if not actually legal ones. This has some conservatives seeing red.

The e-mail magazine and Web site GOPUSA, which wants to be "the first source Republicans and conservatives turn to for information," recently ran headlong into the GOP anti-immigration juggernaut.

GOPUSA asks visitors to its Web site to participate in online polls that, while having no value as a scientific measure, provide a window onto what the conservative political community may be thinking.

During the last week of April, participants were asked to identify the "defining issue" in the 2002 mid-term elections. The question was posted on Sunday morning, April 28, and stayed up until the following Saturday morning.

As of Friday night May 3, "the economy" was leading the list at 32 percent, followed by the "war on terror" at 23 percent. "Immigration" was third at 22 percent.

Then, according to Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA's founder and editor, things began to change.

"From Friday night until Saturday morning when the polls closed, hundreds of votes came in for 'immigration' although the wave of votes was clearly not the trend followed throughout the entire rest of the week," Eberle said in a note to subscribers, "I thought it only right to mention that based on the e-mails I received, this issue is of the utmost importance to a great many people across the country."

The activities of other groups seem to independently confirm Eberle's assessment.

On Monday, a conservative grassroots groups called Council for Government Reform e-mailed an "Urgent Action Needed" memo to supporters. The House Appropriations Committee was scheduled to vote the next day on adding "245(i)", a White House-backed illegal immigrant amnesty measure, to the Fiscal Year 2002 supplemental spending bill to provide additional money for the war against terrorism.

"Permanently extending the 245(i) provision is contradictory to its underlying goal of national security," the group says. "It not only allows potentially dangerous illegal aliens permanent access to our country, it also encourages more of them to come take advantage of us, while being unfair to all the legal immigrants who have followed the rules and patiently waited their turn."

The campaign may have worked. The amendment, offered by Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., was defeated 32 to 27.

The complaints about the national GOP's move toward a more open immigration policy are not confined to the grassroots.

In mid-April, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., the leader of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, was quoted in the Denver Post saying, "The president is not on our side" on the immigration issue.

The second-term member of the House, a frequent critic of immigration expansion, complained that the president supports an "open door" policy that Tancredo believes could lead to another terrorist attack. "Then the blood of the people killed will be on this administration and this Congress," he was quoted as saying.

There are those within the GOP coalition who support a more open immigration policy. These activists, largely libertarian in their leanings or focused on economic rather than social issues, see increased immigration as beneficial to U.S. long-term economic growth and job creation. They do not, however, carry the same weight as the vocal and powerful anti-immigration bloc within the president's party -- at least among the body politic. The more immigration-friendly view usually dominates on Capitol Hill but, as the fight against 245(i) demonstrates, the president may soon face a political crisis that could badly damage his relations with the party's activist base.

If the article were correct, those who want to calcify the existing population mix will dominate conservatism until they destroy it and everything in terms of ideology which they claim to hold dear. This issue will be further evidence for the enemies of conservatism (not merely the GOP) that everything said in the name of conservatism is a thin veneer to cover an underlying racist ideology. That is not generally true but the weapon will be devastating.

We conservatives are the people who believe passionately that Americans have the right to keep and bear arms; that unborn children have an inalienable right to be born and to live so long as they live innocently of capital offenses; that what a man or woman may earn is his or her own property and an evidence that slavery has been abolished; that any government trying to take the earnings of the meekest citizen has the entire moral burden of proving that the tax in question is indispensible to constitutional functions of government; we are the people who believe that affirmative action is a racist scheme and that each person is a precious child of God, our brother or our sister, and entitled to be treated equally before the law; that The United States is and ought to be a sovereign nation, no matter what the UN or other countries or domestic traitors may think and that goal is best served by being armed to the teeth and ready to defend that sovereignty against any foe; That marriage is a contract between one man and one woman before God and that the marriage vows mean what they say; that our nation's ideas and ideals, in spite of liberal efforts, have led to our nation's prosperity and made us a magnet for every person of character everywhere who has been deprived of our freedoms. Those common principles will do, for starters.

How many of those who whine about Mexicans coming across the border legally or illegally (as to the latter, if you were making only $300 per year to support your family, would you want to stay in Mexico?) have ever gone into a Mexican neighborhood at any time of the year to just talk with these folks (with an interpreter if necessary) and get to know them or politely ask for their votes, for that matter?

Racist pro-abortion ignorami like Planned Parenthood Wilson of California are proof positive why "progressive" on social issues is not a desirable description for Republican nominees. Their polo club, yacht club, country club form of genteel bigotry may win one election but after the rhetoric quiets down and the reality sets in, when you brush the foam off the beer, their posturing has everything to do with snobbery and bigotry and very little to do with the well-being of the party much less of the nation.

These people are not conservative at all. Theirs is a prescription for long-term or even mid-term permanent political loss. These people do not want large families of their own. It is too much trouble and might interfere with their perfect lives to make room in their hearts for as many children as God may see fit to send them. So they chemically kill the "excess" children and, if that fails, they kill them surgically, enriching the likes of radical lawyer Gloria Allred and her abortionist husband. The abortion rate will never be high enough nor the birth rate low enough among the Mexicans to satisfy Muffy and Skipper so now they want the army to bar the door. My ancestors emigrated from England and Ireland, Scotland and Ulster (Ireland irredenta), Germany and Canada. Nobody barred the door and they entered so long ago that few, if any, had to go through immigration procedures such as Ellis Island had to offer. They certainly suffered under no quota systems.

America is nevertheless not a mere government, however corrupted, but an idea and an ideal and a dream and an all-inclusive people who are tough and resilient and can accommodate people from anywhere in the world, not only from Catholic lands like Mexico but, yes, even from Muslim lands like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the so-called Palestinian Authority (the actual Arab Palestine being Jordan, but never mind). No, Islam, as practiced and distorted by many of our nation's enemies is not a religion of peace as evidenced by 9/11, but that does not mean that all of Islam is thereby tainted. There are also many good people who are Muslims.

The cramped, xenophobic, racist, snobby, elitist nonsense being perpetrated by the likes of the Federation of American Immigration Reform whose acronym is ironically FAIR (Quick, slam the door, Muffy, there are already enough here to clean our bathrooms and wash our windows) and despicable racist cretins like Peter Brimelow, the British immigrant married to his Canadian immigrant wife by whom he apparently has apparently honored the obligatory Zero Population Growth limit of one child and who wants his new country, ours, to look like little Brimelow fifty years from now, is certainly soimething but that something is not conservative unless you believe the leftist lie that the racist dictators of the dismal states of central and eastern Europe in the 1930s were conservatives when they were not communists.

I would far prefer the inherent decency of Jack Kemp to the racist and elitist bigotry of Pete Wilson. If Pete Wilson or (let's give him the benefit of the doubt here) the misinformed or ignorant Congressman Tancredo are going to become a standard for either the GOP or conservatism or both, people on the cutting edge will begin to restore the genuinely conservative movement under any name necessary because, if dominated by those who theorize a future free of all those different people who wnt to come here, the existing GOP is dead and so is what may pass for conservatism. Fortunately, National Review is now considerably less enamored of the ideas of racist Brittania since (be not fooled by the name) Brit John O'Sullivan is no longer editor. I have met him and he seems like a thoroughly decent fellow in most respects but quite addicted to the British notion shared with Margaret Sanger and Pete Wilson and Planned Parenthood of the superiority of all things British. They are welcome here too but ought to have a decent respect for all of the millions of non-Brits who have contributed so much to our country.

If, instead of No Irish Need Apply (for jobs) we substitute No Mexicans need apply, we have the same old bigotry with a slightly revised target. Immigration will not be a problem for the GOP if it grows up and forces its leaders to conform. happily, the Bush family (with whom I do not always agree) have once again proven an admirable level of understanding and defense of decency and set an admirable standard by not only welcoming these newest Americans but actually, (in several branches of the family) intermarrying which has a noble history in Mexico and means much more than Demonrat rhetoric or xenophobic fear-mongering. Flame away but you know it is true and that one day those who disagree will feel an appropriate sense of shame!

I think you have never lived with the problem or you wouldn't sound like a bleeding heart liberal. Do you really think taxpayers should be providing:

1. free education for illegal aliens 2. free medical care for illegal aliens 3. various state welfare benefits.

Do you like your property taxes being increased while the employers of illegal aliens enjoy the benefits of hiring illegals? (not paying the high wages they used to pay American workers, not providing health insurance that American workers demanded, thus dumping it on taxpayers)

Granted some Mexicans may be hard workers but it is also true that many are paying the coyote (guide) by hauling drugs on their backs as they enter this country illegally. Some never get an honest job, committing crimes instead. We taxpayers are paying to house a considerable number of illegals in our jails and prisons. In California, they are near 25% of the incarcerated. It would be nice if Mexico would house their own criminal countrymen but the chances are too great that bribery of Mexican officials would result in freedom for many prisoners.

Those who think that giving legal status to some illegals will solve the illegal problem or gain Republican votes just doesn't know what is going on. Who do you think is competing with illegals for jobs? Ask many LEGAL HISPANICS!! Too bad that stupid Karl Rove can't figure that out.

Unlike Karl Rove, I have actually talked to Hispanics who deeply resent the competition! And they won't look favorably on Bush or the Democrats favoring illegals. And by the way, these are CITIZENS who vote, unlike the first and second generation Hispanics who have a poor voting record (many are not citizens!!)

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