Playing Both Sides of the Fence - The President will try to end a year of mishaps with a victory on immigration reform. But his own party may revolt

Articles

By John Cloud, Mike Allen, TIME Magazine, December 5, 2005

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1134787,00.html

...If 2006 looks anything like 2005, George W. Bush will not only hasten his own lame-duck irrelevance; he will leave his party vulnerable in November's midterms.

Which is why it's curious and even a little dangerous for the White House to have picked immigration as the issue to planish a presidency's rough edges. Few issues divide Bush's party so much, yet this week the President plans to launch an extensive bully-pulpit campaign on immigration....

Like any good politician, Bush will try to play both sides....

But now he's repackaging his views. As recently as January 2004, Bush used his first policy announcement of that re-election year to unveil a guest-worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain legal status for at least six years if they have a job and their employer vouches for them. The plan incensed conservatives. Talk-radio hosts and bloggers fanned resentment over "Press 1 for English" phone menus and borders porous to drugs and terrorists. In June, two months after a citizens' group called the Minuteman Project began vigilante [sovereign citizen activist] patrols of the Mexican border, Bush told lawmakers he had not understood how important border security was to his base.

That's why Bush is calling this week for a series of border-security measures that will make his guest-worker plan look like an afterthought in his immigration policy....

..."This is the kind of issue that the Silent Majority talks about in private but doesn't mention to pollsters," says Frank Luntz, the political strategist who is advising G.O.P. lawmakers on immigration. "It has the same kind of feel that affirmative action had in the late '60s and early '70s. There is a deep-seated anger toward the government for not stopping this."

But since "the government" in this case is run by the Republican Party, the immigration issue also holds some peril for Bush. If his big effort on immigration ends in a stalemate--which is quite possible, since House Republicans lean more conservative on this issue and Senate Republicans, more liberal--Bush would yet again look weak. So far, he has not been able to bridge his party's business leaders, who need a steady supply of workers willing to do hard labor, and its cultural conservatives, who fear that something essential about the American character is vanishing under the crosscurrents of multilingualism and demographic change and ethnic pluralism....

And then, of course, there are the Democrats, who--as with Iraq--have so far been unable to capitalize on the immigration issue because of their inability to articulate a coherent alternative philosophy....

In the end, though, it's unlikely that Bush will ever consummate his flirtation with the anti-immigrant [anti-illegal immigration] right. It's too big a departure from his history, and too many Big Business G.O.P. donors need their cheap labor....

The U.S. has had to learn--repeatedly, with every [legal] immigrant wave--that it cannot immure itself behind a wall of immigration restrictions and cultural purity...

Read the complete article.