The Immigration Minefield

Immigration reform is a predicament wrapped in a dilemma.

While it is common for issues to separate Republicans and Democrats, immigration is an issue that opens yawning divides within each group.

"We are engaged in a struggle for the soul of the party," Mel Martinez, the general chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me.

Martinez said Republicans must back more than border security if they are to survive politically. The party, he believes, must back legislation that will lead to the "regularization" of illegal immigrants already in this country.

Alex Castellanos, media strategist for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, sees it differently.

"Of primary importance to Republican voters is that we are at war, and our borders are porous, and it is petrifying," Castellanos told me. "How do we not lock our borders at night?"

Both Castellanos and Martinez are loyal Republicans, both are Cuban-Americans, and both came to this country as children. But they divide over immigration.

Martinez, who is also the junior senator from Florida and the first Cuban-American to serve in the Senate, said the issue is unifying in one respect: It is uniting Hispanic voters against the Republican Party.

"Hispanics share a language, but not much else," he said. "But I believe this issue has galvanized the Hispanic community like no other issue has. This is a moment in history, a moment in time. An emerging class of Americans view it personally and passionately, and the political outcome will be very long-lasting."

There is another wrinkle: A number of big businesses depend on the cheap labor that illegal immigration provides, and the Republican Party risks a lot when it risks crossing big business.

"We need guest workers because the business community depends on workers from other countries because they can't get the workers here," California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, told me recently.

Democrats have their own problems with immigration. They not only risk (once again) being portrayed as weak on security and soft on crime, but there is also a split within the union base of the party: Younger unions with Hispanic memberships that are likely to gain from a guest-worker program oppose older unions that believe illegal immigrants are taking jobs from American workers.

But the Democratic uproar has been drowned out by the roar emanating from the Republicans, some of whom feel the party is at a historic crossroads on the immigration issue.

Matthew Dowd, who was a senior strategist to George W. Bush in 2000 and his chief strategist in 2004, has said that if Republicans are to win national elections in the future, they must increase their share of the minority vote.

And the Hispanic vote is the most fertile ground.

"Hispanics are more like European immigrants of the early 1900s or late 1800s," Dowd said. "They are like the Irish: They start out Democratic, but as they become part of the economic mainstream, they become much more valuable to Republicans."

President Bush, a former border-state governor who speaks Spanish and campaigned on creating a more sympathetic immigration system when he ran in 2000, favors a law that includes a guest-worker provision instead of a law that just addresses border security.

In 2006, Republican Sen. John McCain joined with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy to sponsor such a bill. It failed, but the two will soon introduce another version.

The greatest political implications are for McCain, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination against Romney, who is pushing border security, and Rudy Giuliani, who has been sympathetic to immigration in the past but is not taking a high-profile role on the issue at the moment.

Monday, I interviewed top strategists for all three campaigns.

Castellanos, working for Romney, said America had to make its borders less vulnerable to illegal aliens. "This is not a slap at Hispanics — that does not mean you put the torch out on the Statue of Liberty," he said. "People come here and are productive. But there is a legal way to do that."

Rick Davis, CEO of the McCain campaign, said, "If you are a Hispanic today, you are registering Democratic. The outcome of the debate on immigration is very important to the future of the Republican Party."

Davis said that in 2004, Bush got more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. But in 2006, after the controversy over immigration, Republicans running for Congress got only about 30 percent.

"There is a message there, and it isn't good," Davis said.

Michael DuHaime, executive director of the Giuliani campaign, tried to wend his way through the minefield. "I think this is an issue that is going to be talked about, but in a much larger, broader context," he said. "It is a key issue, but there are other much larger and broader issues, like cutting taxes and cutting spending."

Democrats may face considerable and conflicting pressure from organized labor if immigration reform comes up for a vote in Congress.

The fast-growing Service Employees International Union endorsed the Kennedy-McCain bill last time around. The AFL-CIO and Teamsters opposed it.

The possibility exists of a Democratic Congress and a Republican president joining forces to pass immigration reform and sign it into law before the November elections next year. If that happens, both parties are likely to seek credit from Hispanic voters.

"We need to secure the borders, and we need a guest-worker program that works," Schwarzenegger said. "It all depends on how you present the thing."

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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