WASHINGTON — President Bush calls America "the nation of the open door" and promotes immigration reform, a theme with great appeal for Latino voters. But immigrant and labor organizers said Friday that Bush showed himself to be all talk and no action when he recently helped quash a Republican-sponsored bill to provide farm laborers legal status.
Last week, the White House asked Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) not to offer an amendment that would pave the way for half a million undocumented farm laborers to earn the right to legal status by working in the fields, according to Craig spokesman Dan Whiting.
"They had a real opportunity to make that rhetoric real ... and they actively worked to deny immigrants an opportunity to come out of the shadows," said Maria Echaveste, Washington representative for the United Farm Workers of America.
Craig ignored the White House appeal and tried to offer the amendment, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) blocked all amendments from being added to the underlying bill, which was designed to restrict class-action lawsuits.
In private negotiations with Democrats, Frist offered to allow debate on other unrelated amendments, including one to raise the minimum wage, Senate aides said. But he would not allow Craig's amendment, they said. The class-action bill was tabled when no agreement was reached.
Republican and Democratic congressional aides said the White House applied pressure to prevent a vote on Craig's bill, which was supported by 63 senators -- including 27 Republicans. They said White House officials were trying to avoid antagonizing the anti-immigrant faction of the Republican base, which was outraged when Bush announced his own immigration reform plan in January.
"When they came out with their immigration proposal at the beginning of this year, they seemed to take a lot of heat from members of our caucus, so they were a little gun-shy about this particular piece of legislation," said one Republican aide who spoke on the condition that he not be named.
A couple of Republican senators who ardently opposed the bill had vowed to slow debate on the class-action bill if the immigration amendment were offered, Republican Senate aides said.
Craig said he was "extremely disappointed" by the way he said he was steamrolled by the leaders of his party. "This is a bill whose time has come," he said. "It deals with immigration and it deals with a near-crisis in American agriculture."
