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Immigration reform: The new campaign wave
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Columnist | December 13, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Jim Gilchrist, who started citizens' patrols to catch illegal immigrants along the Mexican border, struck an even bigger blow last week for his cause: Running for an open California seat in Congress on an anti-illegal immigrant platform, he picked up 25 percent of the vote as an independent, in a normally Republican district.

Gilchrist's big protest vote grabbed the attention of almost every politician in Washington, thereby guaranteeing that curbing illegal immigration will be a refrain in next year's congressional races.

Republican and Democratic officeholders in border states tend to agree that it's a complex issue, requiring numerous different strategies.

Among them: increasing the numbers of border agents; building more holding cells; enacting a guest-worker program to give agents a better chance of identifying drug dealers and terrorists; expanding an innovative plan to return illegal immigrants to their homes in the interior of Mexico, thereby discouraging them from immediately crossing over again.

Ultimately, finding ways to expand economic opportunities in border areas of Mexico would slow the flow enough to allow a greater crackdown on illegals entering the country.

President Bush, as a former governor of Texas, shares the sense that the best solution lies in some combination of the measures being discussed.

Unfortunately, illegal immigration also creates a mother lode of opportunities for demagoguery.

These include warlike rhetoric of the type that says, ''We must close every inch of the border and throw every illegal immigrant into prison" -- as if such a thing were possible on a border with Mexico, which is 1,952 miles long -- plus 5,514 miles with Canada.

Last year, 500,000 illegals were caught in Arizona alone.

Since terrorists might slip in to the United States from Mexico or Canada, the urgency of the rhetoric is justified, if not the simplicity.

But by framing a crackdown on illegal immigration as a values test, Gilchrist and others make practical attempts to tackle the problem sound like feckless accommodations: guest-worker plans, flights to central Mexico, and opportunities to obtain green cards all strike the average talk-radio audience as ways of coddling wrongdoers.

Gilchrist defined his campaign as a populist show of anger against both parties. Democrats, he argued, were too soft on illegals because of ''political correctness," while Republicans were beholden to business interests eager for cheap illegal-immigrant labor. But his campaign struck more of a chord with grass-roots conservatives, and some Republican advisers are urging the party to adopt a harsher tone on illegal immigration.

Thus, William F. Buckley's National Review, whose subscriber base is in the Northeast, has criticized not only such southwestern Republicans as Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain, but right-wing stalwarts such as Texas Senator John Cornyn and Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for, they say, being insufficiently tough on illegals.

Grass-roots conservatives seem to be craving outrage rather than policy proposals of any type.

''This is the kind of thing that the Silent Majority talks about in private but doesn't mention to pollsters," a GOP pollster, Frank Luntz, recently told Time magazine. ''There's a deep-seated anger at the government for not stopping this."

Right now, the Senate and the White House seem determined to enact a multifaceted border-security program next year.

Bush and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, have called for action, and McCain and Senator Edward M. Kennedy have already produced a bipartisan bill granting temporary work permits for illegals who can pay $2,000, take English lessons, and pass a criminal background check.

By allowing guest workers, the flow of illegals would presumably slow down enough that border guards could then concentrate on catching criminals and terrorists trying to slip into the country. But any Senate bill could run into a brick wall in the House, where members worried about reelection might be eager to channel Gilchrist's anger.

The last time the Republican party aligned itself with a harsh anti-illegal immgrant program -- in California in the early 1990s -- it eventually produced a backlash that contributed to a string of statewide Democratic victories.

So the Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, has warned candidates to avoid being seen as anti-immigrant.

Still, border security looms as a major political focus of 2006, connecting fears of terrorism, anger over job losses, and concerns about the decline of Anglo-American heritage.

Gilchrist will, of course, be leading the way: He has vowed to keep on running until he wins.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.