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Posted on Tue, Mar. 21, 2006

Brownback's stance on immigration soft, conservatives say

BY MATT STEARNS
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - It's a rare day when Sam Brownback is denounced as a radical left-winger.

But that's what happened Tuesday on an issue that has riven the Republican Party and threatens to remain controversial through the 2008 presidential campaign: illegal immigration.

Brownback, the senior senator from Kansas and putative presidential hopeful, is considered among the Senate's most conservative Republicans. His hopes for the GOP presidential nod rest largely on uniting conservative activists around his candidacy.

Nevertheless, he was the subject of a withering attack from the right leveled by Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

Tancredo, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, slammed Brownback as "an extreme opponent of getting tough on illegal immigration" with a "miserable record."

A Tancredo spokesman later upped the ante by calling Brownback "as left as they come on this issue."

The source of Tancredo's ire: Brownback's support of a bill that would provide a years-long path to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and create a guest worker program. The bill's chief sponsors are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Tancredo also criticized what he called Brownback's past support for other, more targeted amnesty programs for some illegal immigrants.

Tancredo and his allies launched the attack on Brownback and others because they fear a bipartisan immigration reform plan being put together by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Brownback is a member of the committee, and its immigration proposal would adopt much of the McCain-Kennedy bill, gutting a tough House-passed reform bill. The House bill has no guest worker program, offers no amnesty and is focused on securing U.S. borders.

"People in Kansas, very conservative people, tend to be on our side on this," said Will Adams, a Tancredo spokesman.

Brian Hart, a Brownback spokesman, dismissed Tancredo's attack as a hand grenade of half-truths.

"The Senate Judiciary Committee has been hard at work for over a month on comprehensive immigration reform," Brownback said in a prepared response. "No bill before the committee proposes blanket amnesty. ... Border security is our main priority. We are working to merge the best of several proposals, and hopefully we can all agree that we must protect our borders, enforce the law, provide legal means for people to work in the United States, and fix a broken system."

Brownback was the lead Republican sponsor of a post-Sept. 11 bill that enhanced border security by increasing the number of agents on the border and streamlining border agent hiring, Hart noted.

Even so, the issue of illegal immigration puts potential Republican presidential candidates like Brownback in an uncomfortable box.

The conservative base generally applauds Tancredo's hard-line approach.

"It's probably the biggest issue at the grass-roots level right now," said William Greene, president of Rightmarch.com, a popular conservative Web site. "It ties in with the war on terror. I think it's very underestimated among the leadership in the Republican Party."

The more business-oriented wing of the party generally supports a guest worker program, as do President Bush and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And the GOP has worked hard in recent years to attract Hispanic voters.

Michele Waslin, spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza, a leading Latino organization, pointed to a 1994 effort in California to deny social services to illegal immigrants and their families.

"It really isolated Latinos from the Republican Party for a long time in California, and it still hasn't recovered," Waslin said. "Some of the rhetoric gets very ugly."

Brownback is a devout Roman Catholic who frequently tries to meld his religious faith with his policy decisions. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the House bill and urged Catholics to oppose it. The conference supports the McCain-Kennedy bill.

Hart said that Brownback had not met with anyone from the bishops' conference and had not commented on the House bill.