http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 197b3.html

Don't expect tough immigration talk from Perry

He sometimes sounds like a Democrat when addressing the border


10:41 AM CST on Sunday, December 10, 2006
By MARK DAVIS

Like many who voted for Gov. Rick Perry, I had some questions following the Thursday Dallas Morning News article that described remarks he made at a meeting of public officials from the border region.

So I called him.

The story said he had "split with his base" on some immigration issues, so I thought I'd review things he had actually said during the campaign and over the years.

There was his refusal to endorse the Minutemen, the private-sector watchdog group that proved illegal crossings can be squelched by more eyes along the border.

Next I tried to remember if he had ever embraced the idea of the border wall favored by many of us in the get-tough wing of the immigration debate. He hasn't. He even called a wall proposal "ludicrous" at a campaign stop near McAllen in mid-October.

As for the wish list of the hard-line immigration reformers, Mr. Perry says the law simply does not permit those wishes to come true. "It's unconstitutional," he said of state Rep. Leo Berman's bill to deny birthright citizenship in Texas. "In a perfect world, you would like to see that." But he added: "Leo filed the bill so that we could talk about this."

This might come as a surprise to Leo, whose Thursday quotes reveal a man who felt genuinely stung by a rebuke from a governor from whom he expected support on a bill he filed to spark actual change, not just debate.

But I would suggest that Mr. Berman – or any Perry constituent who recoiled at the governor's comments – review his actual positions. They'll quickly realize that the governor is not a border warrior in the mold of congressmen Tom Tancredo of Colorado or Duncan Hunter of California, whose tough stances have earned them wide praise and even presidential buzz.

Mr. Tancredo, in particular, makes Mr. Perry's list of those who are "mean-spirited." Grouping him scornfully with House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin as examples of those who "have used immigration as an inflammatory issue," Mr. Perry concluded: "They're not interested in solutions. They're just interested in stirring people up."

While this is a colossal insult to those who approach the debate with philosophies that differ with his, the governor is 100 percent right that it is the federal government that has the responsibility to solve our immigration problems, not the states.

So I asked his thoughts about his constituents in Farmers Branch, who have responded to years of federal sloth on this issue with a few ordinances of their own. I received what I now call the Kay Bailey Hutchison response, containing neither an embrace of those good people nor the rebuke that would surely spawn countless angry calls and e-mails.

Energized by post-victory protection from such consequences, the governor shared a couple of sentences that did not quite make his campaign commercials: "Quit [saying] that people who come over here from another country ought to be banned from coming into America. ... If we don't have individuals who are willing to do a substantial amount of work, your hotels shut down, your agriculture shuts down and your building industry shuts down."

Actually, such sentences were easy to find on the campaign trail this past fall – but they were spoken by Democrats.

In fairness, there are a growing number of Republican officials who differ with their party's vocal base yearning for bold immigration reform that embraces the concept of a border wall and blanches at the amnesty of guest worker programs.

Our president is one. Our governor is another.

Republicans may lament this, but anyone paying attention is not surprised. That Rick Perry campaign ad featuring him dutifully surveying our border mentioned not one word about sharing a Farmers Branch-style passion about Texans reversing the ills of decades of lax immigration law.

Nor apparently will the four years of his final term.