Republicans mired in immigration battle

Republicans mired in immigration battle
By Edward Luce in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: May 24 2007 20:58 | Last updated: May 24 2007 20:58


If there were ever an instance where the primary election process could wreak havoc with a party’s broader electability, many believe US Republicans are demonstrating it in their increasingly bitter internal battle over immigration reform.

President George W. Bush on Thursday pleaded with his party to support a bipartisan compromise unveiled last week, which would offer a “pathway to citizenship” for America’s estimated 12m illegal immigrants but which Republican critics have dismissed as an “amnesty”.

Faced with an outpouring of rage from conservative talk radio hosts, many Republicans, including most of its leading presidential contenders, have attacked the immigration reform bill in harsh terms – often linking the country’s mostly Mexican illegal immigrant flow with the country’s broader “war on terror”.

Mr Bush sought to refute those charges, pointing out that under the proposal it would take up to 13 years for illegal immigrants to gain US citizenship after first having paid a $5,000 fine and having proved they had no criminal record, among other requirements.

“Amnesty means forgiveness without penalty,” Mr Bush said. “This bill does not provide an amnesty . . . I strongly believe this bipartisan bill addresses the reasons for past failures.”

One measure of how tough it will be for Mr Bush to push this bill through is the number of Republicans who are turning against it. Formerly strong pro-immigration Republicans, such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, two of the leading presidential contenders, have either abandoned or watered down their support for much more liberal immigration bills that were proposed and shot down in the past 18 months.

Earlier this week, John McCain, who stands alone among the presidential contenders in supporting the compromise but who nevertheless removed his name from the latest bill in the Senate, exchanged barbs with Mr Romney. The latter has attracted accusations of hypocrisy for allegedly hiring illegal Guatemalan gardeners and for having proclaimed himself to be a lifelong hunter when it turned out not to be the case.

“Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if Mr Romney’s position changes,” Mr McCain said. “And maybe his solution will be to get out his small varmint [vermin] gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard.”

Judging by the rising temperature among talk-radio conservatives, who have a critical influence on large sections of the primary-voting Republican base, Mr McCain’s remarks were an opening salvo in what looks like becoming a long and ugly debate.

“There is real Republican rage over this bill, and a rage against Mr Bush that I haven’t seen before,” says Brian Darling at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. “People see this bill as an amnesty that was agreed behind close doors and which rewards law-breakers.”

Frank Sharry, head of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group, says the debate could damage the Republicans’ electability among Hispanic voters, America’s fasting-growing electoral group. As governor of Texas and then president, Mr Bush succeeded in winning over a large section of Hispanic voters – 40 per cent of whom voted for him in the 2004 presidential election.

In last November’s mid-term congressional elections, which the Republicans lost, that share fell to 29 per cent after a strong anti-immigration campaign by many Republicans. Now presidential contenders are targeting their message at the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, which respectively hold the first primary and first caucus votes next January, but which are two of the whitest and least multicultural states.

“It is like watching a slow-motion car wreck,” says Mr Sharry. “It took 100 years for the Republicans to win back the Catholic vote [under Ronald Reagan] after its anti-Catholic campaigns of the late 19th century. And they looking like doing it again with the Hispanics. It is ironic because Hispanics are one of the most socially conservative, anti-abortion communities in America.”

More ironically, it was left to Tom Tancredo, the most hardline Republican presidential contender, to summarise best why his party was being dragged so sharply to the right.

Mr Tancredo, who said his response to a terrorist attack would be to “bomb Mecca”, said: “I see so many conversions [to anti-immigrant positions] around this room tonight . . . But I must tell you, I trust those conversions when they happen on the road to Damascus and not on the road to Des Moines [capital of Iowa].”