An editorial in Sunday’s New York Times welcomed Republicans arriving in town for the party’s national convention with some free advice on the immigration issue for GOP campaign strategists.

“If the Republicans want to court moderates and appeal to minority voters like Hispanics,” counseled the Times, the party must embrace an amnesty for illegal aliens, or, as the editorial put it, Republicans must promise “a reasonable way to allow some illegal immigrants a path toward permanent residence and even citizenship.”

In other words, the New York Times recommends Republicans campaign on a position opposed by three out of four Americans (CNN/Gallup/USA Today Poll, January 2004).

Some Republicans might reasonably question the wisdom of campaigning
on an issue voters oppose, but the Times’ editors have an answer for skeptical Republicans: just don’t call the amnesty an amnesty.

“The word amnesty is anathema to Mr. Bush’s conservative Republican base,” the editorial explains.

Of course, a Republican Party that can count Rep. Chris Cannon of
Utah in its ranks doesn’t need the New York Times to teach it how to mislead voters on immigration policy.

What the Republican Party does need, however, is the good sense to recognize that the “conservative Republican base” that
the New York Times hopes Republicans ignore is more accurately described as the American people.

A November 2003 poll found that 76 percent of both Independents and Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans support tighter immigration (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Nevertheless, against all evidence,
the New York Times argues that President Bush will actually gain support in the “wider middle ground if he sticks with his original proposal” to grant amnest…er…”mend the immigration system.”

The New York Times wants Republicans to believe that the party is split between “Republican moderates who realize that the system is ‘broken’ — as Mr.Bush put it in January — and ideologues like Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who has not only opposed” amnest…um…”easing rules for undocumented workers but has even favored a [gasp] ‘time out’ on legal immigration.”

This is utter nonsense, of course.

Congressman Tancredo advocates a position squarely in line with both the overwhelming majority of the American people and with the immigration tradition of the United States, making him the quintessential moderate.

President Bush’s call to match any willing worker anywhere in the world with a willing employer in the United States, however, represents the ideology of libertarian extremists and the (literally) anti-borders radicals of the Wall Street Journal wing of the party.

About a year ago, a group of three university students from a large university in the Pacific northwest stopped by the ProjectUSA office while visiting DC. They were members of their university’s College Republican Club, and were interested in learning more about immigration. During our conversation, they told me the College Republicans on their campus hold an annual poll asking members to name their favorite politician. The poll they’d just completed found the most popular politician for the College Republican Club was not their party’s president, George W. Bush, nor was it Colin Powell, or John McCain, or any other national figure.

The most popular politician for the College Republicans was a congressman from another state: Tom Tancredo of Colorado.

My advice to the Republicans meeting in New York City this week: listen to the advice from the New York Times, then do exactly the opposite. Your future lies with young Republicans–not Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, Chris Cannon and the New York Times.

+== TAKE POSITIVE ACTION ==+

The New York Times has been on a decades-long crusade to maintain record-breaking levels of mass immigration and weaken enforcement, and the paper’s endorsement every four years of the Democratic presidential nominee is nearly automatic.

You have to wonder whether the Times, now that the Democrats have promised at their convention a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens within their first one hundred days in office, is mostly concerned that the Republicans might actually recognize the enormous political slam dunk staring them in the face and crush John Kerry this fall by running against amnesties of any sort — including temporary guest worker amnesties.

Delegates in New York need to be smart on the immigration issue; the issue is going to be a major factor in this fall’s elections, it appears, and the party needs to side with the people on the issue and against the ideologues and the corporate profiteers.

If at all possible, the delegates should have a chance, I’ll be bold enough to write, to read this ezine. Please take a minute and call your state’s GOP and ask the person answering the phone how you can get the email addresses of the party’s delegates from your state so you can send them a link to this issue. The person answering the phone probably won’t give you the addresses, so ask him or her whether you can forward the link to them and would they promise to forward it to the delegates.

As a last resort, you can send the link to this ezine to any state GOP officers whose email addresses are listed on the state party’s website.

Here is a link to the 50 state parties: http://projectusa.org/activism/gop/state_map.html

By taking a few minutes and doing this now, who knows? You may trigger an outbreak of common sense at the GOP convention in New York, and make a big difference in the direction the country will take.

+== QUOTE OF THE WEEK ==+

“Hispanic voters are Americans. They don’t have to worry about immigration and the driver’s license issues…the things that are important to them are the things that are important to all Americans.”

Ricardo Velasquez, president
Hispanic Democrats of North Carolina

+== EMAIL OF THE WEEK ==+

Standing astride the fracture where the voters and the lobbyists collide will be Rep. Melissa Hart (R-PA), recently named chair of the convention’s immigration subcommittee. While she’s no Tom Tancredo, Rep. Hart’s immigration voting record in Congress indicates she is much more inclined to support the tighter immigration policies favored by the overwhelming majority of the American people than she is to support the complete elimination of the nation’s borders the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been demanding for nearly two decades.

The John and Ken Show
KFI Radio, Los Angeles
(from a linked article)

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