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.
