Borderline Republicans
The internal GOP battle over immigration gets ugly.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

For the most part, President Bush's calls for immigration reform seem to have fallen on deaf Congressional ears. And one of the main reasons is the anti-immigrant groups on the political left that have been making inroads with Republicans. It behooves GOP restrictionists to better understand their new bedfellows.

The cool reaction to Mr. Bush's guest-worker proposals is the most prominent example of party division on immigration. But it's not the only example. The phenomenon has also manifested itself in a number of House and Senate GOP primary races, where some Republicans have teamed up with radical greens and zero-population-growth-niks to intimidate and defeat other Republicans willing to defend immigration.

In Congress, Republicans invite population-control advocates posing as conservatives to committee hearings to denounce the Administration's initiatives. Republican Tom Tancredo of Colorado has gone so far as to set up Team America, a political action committee and Web site that bashes members of his own GOP House caucus who aren't sufficiently anti-immigrant.

To date at least, restrictionism hasn't been a political winner. Earlier this year in California, GOP state Senator Rico Oller ran for Congress by passing out fliers depicting Mexican aliens as turbaned terrorists. He lost the March primary to Dan Lungren, the pro-immigrant opponent he was attacking in the fliers. Nor did immigrant-bashing help Jim Oberweis of Illinois in his recent Senate bid. In radio spots Mr. Oberweis suggested that the immigrants not here to steal U.S. jobs are only here to collect welfare. Voters rejected such rhetoric and awarded the primary to Jack Ryan, a vocal supporter of the President's immigration reform.

However, the border brigades are unbowed. Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Numbers-USA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), ProjectUSA and the Coalition for the Future American Worker (CFAW) continue to use direct mail, television, radio and other media to target pro-immigration lawmakers throughout the country.

Among others, they've mobilized against Arizona Republican Congressmen Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake, as well as Representative Jim Leach (R., Iowa) and Senator Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.). The crime? Support for legislation that would streamline the process for hiring foreign workers and allow certain illegal aliens to apply for temporary visas and U.S. citizenship if they pay fines and meet various work requirements.

Extra special attention is being paid to a GOP House primary in Utah, where incumbent Chris Cannon is facing a June 22 runoff against Matt Throckmorton. Mr. Cannon, now serving his fourth term, hasn't had a primary challenger since 1998. This one comes courtesy of deep-pocketed restrictionists campaigning on behalf of his opponent, who is running hard on xenophobia. CFAW and ProjectUSA have used billboards in Mr. Cannon's district to denounce him as a supporter of blanket amnesty for illegals.

Mr. Cannon tops the restrictionists' target list because he's been one of the few politicians in either party to expose the extreme nature of their underlying agendas, which has less to do with immigration per se and more to do with environmental extremism and population-growth concerns influenced by the discredited claims of the 19th-century British economist Thomas Malthus.

During a immigration subcommittee hearing in March, Mr. Cannon had the gumption to question the executive director of CIS, Mark Krikorian, as well as to challenge Roy Beck, who heads NumbersUSA and serves as "spokesman" for CFAW. After first denying it, Mr. Krikorian was forced to admit that CIS is a spin-off of FAIR.

In fact, CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA, Project-USA and more than a half-dozen similar groups that Republicans have become disturbingly comfy with, were founded or funded (or both) by John Tanton, a retired doctor in Michigan. In addition to trying to stop immigration to the U.S., appropriate population-control measures for Dr. Tanton and his network include promoting China's one-child policy, sterilizing Third World women and wider use of RU-486.

FAIR, where Mr. Krikorian once worked, is run by Dan Stein and shares advisers and personnel with CIS and other members of the Tanton nexus. As our Jason Riley noted in a March op-ed, "By Dr. Tanton's own reckoning, FAIR has received more than $1.5 million from the Pioneer Fund, a white-supremacist outfit devoted to racial purity through eugenics."

Representative Cannon says, "Tanton set up groups like CIS and FAIR to take an analytical approach to immigration from a Republican point of view so that they can give cover to Republicans who oppose immigration for other reasons." It seems to be working. Messrs. Stein and Krikorian regularly appear before Congress at the invitation of Republicans, who don't seem nearly as interested in people who can speak with authority about, say, the importance of flexible labor markets.

Representative John Hostettler of Indiana, one of the most pro-life Republicans in Washington, chairs the immigration subcommittee that featured representatives of CIS and NumbersUSA as the Republican witnesses. The third GOP witness at the hearing, if you can believe it, was Frank Morris, who at the time was running for a seat on the Sierra Club board and actively campaigning for the defeat of President Bush. Apparently, unless you're a certified Malthusian, dedicated restrictionist or someone who knows next to nothing about economics, the Republican Congress isn't interested in what you have to say about immigration reform.

Mr. Cannon says most GOP Members believe that the vast majority of aliens, documented or not, are productive and that our economy needs them. But he is concerned about a "bunch of Members who are demagoging the issue--some to raise money, some for attention" and "want this to become a litmus test" for Republicanism. "If I get defeated or if Kolbe or Flake get defeated, that would be significant because some Republicans might conclude that it's not worth fiddling with immigration," he says. Maybe it's time for Mr. Bush, who raised this subject, to show where the GOP still stands on immigration.