The crowd of 125 or so in Newport Beach booed and hissed the president when Tancredo recounted Bush's condemnation of the Minuteman Project. The same day that Bush had criticized the citizen patrol, Tancredo was on the Arizona-Mexico border praising its heroism.
"Needless to say, I am not on the guest list at the White House," he said merrily.
Tancredo dates his interest in immigration to his years as a teacher dealing with bilingual education. "It was far more political than educational," says Tancredo, the grandson of Italian immigrants. He suggests that today's newcomers are more likely to segregate themselves as "some hyphenated something or other" than try to assimilate.
He sees his work on immigration as part of a larger fight to save Western civilization from a "cult of multiculturalism" that threatens to cleave the country into ethnic fiefs.
"It's of no consequence to me where you're from," he says, shouting over the roar of the Orange County crowd. "All that I ask of you is that when you get here, you become an American!"
To some, that talk is not just ugly but wrong, suggesting that the aspirations of today's immigrants are somehow different and less noble than, say, those of Tancredo's grandparents.
Nobody likes illegality or wants to hurt the economy or "undermine the American way of life," says Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But Tancredo's punitive approach is not a solution, she says; it hurts Republicans by casting the party "as unrealistic and anti-immigrant."
Tancredo's stance on border security is all stick, no carrot. He favors tougher policing, stiffer penalties for employers hiring illegal workers, and changes in federal law so the children of illegal immigrants are not automatic U.S. citizens.
He says a guest-worker program, the heart of Bush's approach, should be considered -- skeptically -- only after the borders are sealed and the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the country have been sent home. Anything less amounts to amnesty for criminals, Tancredo says.
His foes may wish to marginalize him; most willing to be quoted for this article insist that Tancredo is irrelevant to the immigration debate. Still, he has forced Congress to move his way. The immigration bill that recently passed the House was stripped of language supporting a guest-worker program, after a Tancredo-led revolt.
