Playing Both Sides of the Fence

By John Cloud, Mike Allen

As the President's annus horribilis nears what must be a blessedly welcome end for him and his aides, they have just a month to try to salvage what had been a promising postvictory year. Instead, Social Security reform died; the U.S. death toll in Iraq passed 2,000; Katrina exposed the weakness of the Administration's bench players; a Supreme Court nominee fell; a White House aide resigned under indictment. Even Karl Rove's aura of imperturbability began to melt, not only because he is under investigation in the CIA-leak case but also--and more gravely for the G.O.P.--because for once he seemed unable to find a winning issue for his boss. 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. He is scheduled to travel with Senator John McCain, who with Senator Edward Kennedy has co-written a bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants the chance to earn citizenship. That would enrage G.O.P. conservatives who believe the U.S. should secure its borders and deport illegal aliens, not reward them.

Like any good politician, Bush will try to play both sides. True, he's consorting with McCain, and he has a long history on his party's pro-immigrant left--"Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande," Bush has long said, in one of his compassionate-conservative locutions. "[When] you're making 50-c-, and you look up north and see the chance to make $50, and your kids are hungry, you're going to come," he told Larry King in 1999.

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 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. Bush will call for the hiring of more border guards and the use of more technology like unmanned aircraft and ground sensors to better police the borders. He will also push for increased holding facilities for illegal immigrants who are picked up. Roughly 100,000 a year benefit from a de facto "catch and release" policy, since there aren't enough beds for them.

The President is expected to equate border security with national security, connecting the issue to that part of his image that until recently had been robust. He will also be setting up a potentially favorable issue for Republicans in '06. "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. Reached on Cape Cod, Mass., the day after Thanksgiving, Kennedy sounded not so different from pro-business Republicans. "We have found out that just more fences, more border guards--you know, chasing after gardeners out there" doesn't work, he said. "We've increased [border enforcement] by $20 billion in the last 10 years, and the problem is worse today." But the Democrats have had no more success than the Republicans at divining a policy that will reassure both Latino voters and those who worry that illegal immigrants are unfairly taking jobs and social services. Democrats want a guest-worker program, but Kennedy's bill would still require that workers who want legal status, in addition to passing background checks and taking English and civics lessons, pay a $2,000 fine plus back taxes, punitive measures opposed by some immigrant advocates on the left.

For their part, several Republican strategists said they are desperate to avoid irritating Latinos, many of whom are socially conservative and thus natural Republicans. Fighting for re-election in 1994, California Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, ran an ad keening that illegal immigrants "just keep coming." Wilson won, but Republicans in California say the damage to the party's standing among Hispanics persists to this day. Bush is already giving up some symbolic territory. When he announced his guest-worker plan in 2004, he did so before an audience of 200 Latinos. By contrast, his speech this week on "border security and immigration reform" was scheduled for an Air Force base in Arizona. He planned to meet with border patrollers in Texas the next day.

In the end, though, it's unlikely that Bush will ever consummate his flirtation with the anti-immigrant right. It's too big a departure from his history, and too many Big Business G.O.P. donors need their cheap labor. "Bush decided to give these guys"--the immigration hard-liners--"their rhetorical pound of flesh," says a Republican official close to the White House. "In return, he wants a comprehensive bill, which is what he has always wanted. He's just going to lead with a lot of noise about border security."

Intraparty pressure from corporate donors on the issue is intense. TIME surveyed business leaders in California, Colorado, Florida and Minnesota; nearly all said the conservative position on immigration ignores the reality that there is virtually no labor market for physically demanding, low-wage jobs in agriculture, construction and hospitality. "In fact, we have to compete for [illegal workers] now," says Jay Taylor, president of Taylor & Fulton Farms, a tomato concern based in Palmetto, Fla. "It used to be migrant workers were just vegetable-and-fruit pickers or housekeepers. But look at the incredible housing boom we've had in Florida in recent years. Now they're being sought out by roofing contractors, lawn-maintenance companies, the hotel and restaurant industry. The native-born American worker stopped coming to us several generations ago."

The Senate is considering an alternative to the McCain-Kennedy bill that tries to balance such business concerns with conservatives' priorities. In a nutshell, that bill would require illegal aliens to go home. Not immediately--they could continue on their jobs for as long as five years--but then they would have to go back to their homelands and, if they want to return to the U.S., file an application. "There's growing national consensus that in a post-9/11 world, we simply have to know who's coming into our country and why they're here," says Senator John Cornyn, who is sponsoring the bill with Jon Kyl of Arizona.

The U.S. has had to learn--repeatedly, with every immigrant wave--that it cannot immure itself behind a wall of immigration restrictions and cultural purity. But how do we do that while ensuring that Mohammed Atta isn't buying plane tickets online at Kinko's? Those distinctions are difficult to draw, and Bush may not have the eloquence or the political juice to figure out how to finesse them. Still, there is nothing more appropriate for a politician trying to redefine himself than to be asked to define what his country is.

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger/Washington, Matt Kettmann/Santa Barbara, Tim Padgett/Miami