President George Bush may feel he is “the decider” in policy but apparently not when it comes to putting in place an immigration plan. The biggest pocket of resistance: his own party, notes The Washington Times:
One hundred days into his all-out push to win an immigration bill President Bush has convinced House Republicans he is serious about enforcing the border, but he has failed to win their support for his plan to create a guest-worker program or a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with the president and I just try to make him understand that comprehensive is fine, but the first thing we have to do is protect the borders,” House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, told The Washington Times during a campaign stop for a fellow Republican in Arizona last week. “Until you protect the borders, any reform without protecting the borders is premature.”
He said that during a recent outing in his district, when he invited constituents to come see him in a park in the town of Geneseo, 150 people showed up and that with the exception of one woman, “every one of those people said secure the border first. It was amazing.”
In fact, House Republicans are “stauncher than ever” that a border security bill must come first, said Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, in a telephone interview.
“I think he’s convinced us he’s serious [about enforcement], but to me these are only first steps. Before we even consider any type of quote-unquote comprehensive legislation, we have to show we can control the border — not that we want to, but that we can,” Mr. King said. “Speaking for myself and, I believe, a great majority of House Republicans, we have to see results before we consider going any further. And I can’t see that happening in less than a year or 18 months.”
At this point, it seems unlikely that an immigration proposal that won’t have to be quickly amended after the elections will be a in place before the November elections.
When politicos say “let’s do border security first” the unspoken part in the news media is this: it’s more likely than not that little or nothing will be done to adjust the status of those (or some of those) already here if only border security is tackled first. Would the nightly news then feature stories and video of deportions of families without any stories showing even part of the illegal population here working to establish some kind of guest worker or residency adjustment?
Again, though, it’s unlikely that only one part of immigration reform will be enacted before the election. And, if so:
Will this anger most voters or will some voters on both sides be relieved that there’s no action before the elections?
If the present situation holds, when the votes are counted will pundits that opposing the Bush plan was a masterstroke on the part of GOP Congressional leaders or that opposition to the Bush plan not only rallied the Republican base but also rallied irate Hispanic voters and other voters who want to have the status of some of those who are here dealt with at the same time that border security is beefed up?
Will Hispanic voters prove to be as monolithic as many assume, or will they be all over the place on immigration?
And will the immigration debate — and the emotions it arouses on both sides — impact close races? And what’s the long range impact? People on both sides see the nation at a turning point on this issue.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.