An Unlikely Immigration Champion
Ten weeks after President Bush unveiled his historic immigration reform package, the word is out on the street that it is already dead. But in fact, the battle over the plan is far from over -- and even if no law is passed soon, the initiative has forever changed the immigration debate, making an overhaul of the kind the White House has proposed all but inevitable in a few years, if not earlier.
Radical as they seemed to some, Bush's principles, announced with great fanfare in January, were a calculated compromise. The goal was to eliminate the vast black market for unskilled labor created by our current, unrealistically stingy immigration quotas. But the president knew that political pressure from both sides -- from Democratic immigrant advocates and the heavily anti-immigrant Republican right -- would be intense. So he chose a relatively cautious middle course: a guest worker program that would admit many more legal immigrants than current laws do, but which stopped short of granting participating laborers the right to remain permanently in the country.
It was a clever political gambit, but it didn't work -- at least not in the short term. And the opposition from both flanks has been unrelenting.
The Democratic reaction was predictable enough: "too little, too late." But the outcry from the right -- from conservative activists and their grass-roots base -- was even more virulent and far more damaging for Bush. Within days of the announcement, the Washington grapevine reported that negative mail was pouring into the White House. Even now, several Republican congressional offices say their correspondence is running as much as 400 -- or even 1,000 -- to 1 against the initiative. Opponents have taken to the Internet and the airwaves, angry crowds have turned out for demonstrations in Arizona and other border states and, according to insiders, there may even have been some fall-off in contributions to the Bush reelection campaign. No wonder the president has done little since January to advance the proposal.
Of course, this is an election year, and the situation could change in a news cycle. John Kerry could choose a Latino like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as his running mate, or he could simply give a major speech endorsing immigration reform. Either of these steps could persuade the president to resuscitate his proposal to appeal to much-prized Latino swing voters. And reform advocates on Bush's left know that their political leverage with him will never be greater.
