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Immigration proving a divisive issue for Republicans

February, 2006 – As the Senate gets ready to take up the thorny matter of immigration, a national gathering last week of conservative activists shows just how deeply the issue divides the Republican Party and separates President Bush from part of his political base.

Advocates for cracking down on illegal immigrants assailed corporate America for supporting "open borders" in its lust for "cheap labor."

"No matter how good (it is) for the restaurant industry, the ski resorts, the U.S. Chamber and Tyson Foods, cheap labor is cheap only for the employer, not for the taxpayer," U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

One business official shot back that shutting off the flow of foreign workers would destroy economic growth.

"If you're going to try to enforce your way out of the illegal immigration problem, what you're going to do is cripple the economy," said John Gay of the National Restaurant Association.

Tancredo's message was far more warmly received than Gay's by the few thousand activists who assembled here Thursday, Friday and Saturday, underscoring the split between conservative camps, the volatility of the issue and the frustration on the right over the president's position on immigration.

Bush supports giving some illegal immigrants temporary legal status as "guest workers," a policy critics dismiss as "amnesty."

At the CPAC conference Thursday, several speakers disdainfully lumped Bush in with the likes of Senate Democrat Ted Kennedy in his approach to immigration reform.

"They think he's not listening," David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said of grass-roots sentiment on the issue.

"Where the president makes a mistake, we should call him to account," Phyllis Schlafly, a doyenne of the social conservative movement, told the conference Thursday.

Immigration doesn't divide only Republicans, polls suggest; it also divides Democrats and independents. But the divisions within the party in power appear deeper and have had more impact on the congressional debate.

The House last year passed a get-tough bill authored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. It increases enforcement, security and criminal penalties and extends a wall on the Mexican border. But it's silent on the question of guest workers, reflecting the lack of consensus among House Republicans on the issue and the desire of House leaders to avoid a messy internal fight. When the Senate takes up the issue next month, it is expected to tackle the guest worker issue, and what to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.

Republican divisions also loom in the 2008 presidential race. Arizona Sen. John McCain has joined forces with Kennedy on a guest-worker plan that is anathema to some conservatives. Assuming he runs in '08, McCain is likely to face some GOP opponents who oppose guest workers and favor the so-called "enforcement first" approach.

Keene, an organizer of last week's conference, said the issue could hurt McCain's quest for the nomination, but he voiced doubt that immigration would be a defining issue in the GOP contest. The bigger threat for Republicans, said Keene, is that the nomination of someone such as McCain could inspire a Tancredo-style or "Ross Perot-like" third-party candidate who siphons off a small percentage of conservatives upset about immigration.

"I think that immigration is the most dangerous issue that's out there for Republicans and for the political society," Keene said. "I think it can get out of control, and you see that in some of the rhetoric. If mainline politicians don't talk about solving a problem, somebody (else) will. That's the nature of politics in the marketplace."

Immigration's likely role in the 2006 elections is much debated, with the get-tough camp arguing that politicians ignore the border crisis at their peril, and those on the other side of the issue saying politicians bash immigrants at their peril.

While not quite raucous, the debate at last week's conservative gathering was sharply drawn. When speakers such as former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore and Pedro Celis of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly argued for a guest-worker program, they were greeted with silence. When speakers such as Tancredo and Schlafly called for sealing off the border, they drew loud applause.

"It is an invasion," Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., told the gathering.

Tancredo, the member of Congress who has been the most vocal against immigration, said Republicans were "the party that should say absolutely no to this crazy idea that you can sneak into this country and just by crossing a line in the sand and having your baby, that baby can be an American citizen."

The business community, long a key part of the GOP coalition, was a particular target of some conservative speakers, who sounded at times like corporate critics on the left.

"If you increase the supply of cheap labor, you are going to depress the wages for everybody," said Schlafly, saying employers were creating a "serf class" of unassimilated immigrants.

To much applause, Tancredo said that the conservative movement can either be the voice of principles "or it can be the voice of the Chamber of Commerce, but it cannot be both."

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies said guest-worker plans treated immigrants as "labor inputs." And he told the crowd that immigration wasn't an argument between right and left but between the public and elites - "big business, big labor, big religion, big academia, big journalism" - that "don't see what the fuss is about defending America's borders."

In a question-and-answer session, one member of the audience accused the business community of undermining assimilation with corporate policies of diversity and multiculturalism.

Such arguments drew protests from the business speakers at the event.

Gay, of the National Restaurant Association, complained that his members were small businesses, not big businesses. He told his listeners that if the Sensenbrenner bill became law, cutting off the flow of foreign workers without opening the door to more legal workers, there won't be enough bodies to keep up with job growth.

"Sell your stock now if the House bill passes as is, because the economy is not going to grow anymore," Gay said.

Randel Johnson of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce complained to the gathering that business "all of a sudden becomes the bad guy in this debate."

In an interview, he termed Krikorian and others "a very small vocal minority," disputing the notion that there is a large groundswell in the public for a purely restrictive approach to immigration. He called the attacks on business an "odd juxtaposition."

"What's unusual is that there are a number of Republicans using the same arguments the unions used to throw at us, that we're just in it for the cheap labor," said Johnson, who told the audience that "we represent our members out there in the real world trying to produce jobs and make a profit."

In an interview Friday, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., termed such tensions between business conservatives and cultural conservatives nothing new for the GOP. He said CPAC, which bills itself as the largest gathering of conservatives in the country, tends to draw from the "more isolationist, protectionist, not pro-immigration" wing of the party.

Ryan voted for the Sensenbrenner bill but said he has reservations about it and favors a "comprehensive" approach that deals with the temporary worker question.

Coutesy:
Craig Gilbert
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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