Analysis: Rivals hide immigration similarities
By DAVID ESPO – 6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to immigration, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agree. It's just that they don't want to say so.

Instead, the White House rivals accuse one another of flinching when it mattered most, during and after last year's Senate debate on a bill that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

McCain "was a champion of comprehensive reform, and I admired him for it," Obama said Saturday in an appearance before The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "But when he was running for his party's nomination, he walked away from that commitment and he's said he wouldn't even support his own legislation if it came up for a vote."

McCain had spoken earlier in the day to the same group, and his campaign swiftly countered his rival's charge. "Obama put politics first and supported 'poison pill' efforts to kill the immigration reform compromise last year," it said in a written rebuttal.

If the disagreement seems somewhat forced, the motives behind it are straight forward.

The issue is important to Hispanics, who make up a large and growing minority of the electorate, and may hold the balance of power this fall in the potential battleground states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico as well as Florida.

Obama is out to win over as many as possible of the 75 percent of Democratic primary voters who chose Hillary Rodham Clinton over him, and then begin attracting Latino voters who went for President Bush in 2004.

As a Republican, McCain has a somewhat more complicated challenge. He can't afford to have conservatives who view immigration legislation as amnesty sit out the election. But he also can't allow his share of the Hispanic vote to recede to pre-Bush levels.

Based on McCain's words and Obama's voting record, there is a measure of truth in what both sides say, even though the two men supported the bill with provisions to secure borders, crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, expand guest worker programs and provide a path to citizenship for millions in the country illegally.

McCain and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., were leading advocates of the measure, which died in the Senate amid criticism that it offered amnesty to illegal immigrants.

It was a claim that contributed to the near collapse of McCain's presidential candidacy last summer, as he frequently acknowledged. Over and over, the Arizona senator told campaign audiences he had gotten the message, and border security would henceforth come first.

On Saturday, addressing a group of influential Latino officials with the presidential nomination in hand, there was no explicit mention of a path to legal status for those in the country illegally. Yet he sounded resolute wanting to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.

"It will be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow," he said. "We have to secure our borders ... but we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary. We must also understand that 12 million people are here, and they are here illegally, and they are God's children," he said.

Nor does his campaign Web Site offer much guidance.

"John McCain has always believed that our border must be secure and that the federal government has utterly failed in its responsibility to ensure that it is secure," says the beginning of a section on immigration.

It also stresses the importance of "assimilation of our immigrant population, which includes learning English, American history and civics, and respecting the values of a democratic society."

The closest it comes to addressing the thorny issue of citizenship for illegal immigrants is when it stresses the importance of making sure that "America will always be that 'shining city upon a hill,' a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life built on hard work and optimism."

In his remarks to NALEO on Saturday, Obama said he supports "reform that finally brings the 12 million people who are here illegally out of the shadows by requiring them to take steps to become legal citizens."

His campaign Web Site — clearer than McCain's on the issue — says Obama supports a system that "allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens."

Obama, too, supported the immigration measure in the Senate last year, and participated in the bipartisan negotiations that produced it.

His votes on the amendments cited by McCain's campaign aligned him with organized labor — as powerful a force in the Democratic primaries as conservative voters are in the Republican contests — despite protests that their approval would doom the overall bill.

In one instance, Obama sided with other lawmakers favoring a five-year limit on a new program providing visas for guest workers. Key labor unions opposed the guest worker program, arguing it would depress wages and subject immigrants to exploitation by their employers.

The amendment failed, 49-48. McCain and Kennedy opposed it.

A second proposal would have cut the size of the guest worker program from 400,000 to 200,000 a year. It also failed. Kennedy opposed it, while McCain did not vote.
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