MSNBC.com

Bush's Spanish Lessons
For President Bush, immigration isn't a dry policy debate. It's personal. Start with the Mexican-born American citizen who tends his house and helped raise his kids.

By Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas
Newsweek


May 29, 2006 issue - President George W. Bush seemed unusually heartfelt when he addressed the nation last week on immigration reform. For the president, immigration is not just a matter of politics or policy, it's personal. Bush has always been drawn to stories of Latino immigrants who came up by their bootstraps. In an interview with Hispanic Magazine in 2004, he described Paula Rendón, "who came up from Mexico to work in our house" when Bush was a boy growing up in Midland, Texas. "She loved me. She chewed me out. She tried to shape me up," said Bush. "And I have grown to love her like a second mom." Bush recalled Rendón's pride in seeing "her grandkids go to college for the first time."

Bush has another inspiring example close to home. For more than a decade, Maria Galvan, 53, has worked for Bush, looked after his daughters, befriended his wife and won the affection of the First Family for her loyalty, decency and hard work. As governor of Texas, Bush encouraged his housekeeper to become a U.S. citizen. Bush's own brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, married a Latino, and Jeb's eldest son, George P. Bush, is seen as a candidate to go into the family business.

Bush has a history of promoting Latinos, most notably Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who recently told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "it's unclear" whether his grandparents emigrated legally from Mexico. Bush has always spoken emotionally about Gonzales, the son of hard-working but uneducated migrant workers. Bush recognized early on that inspiring Latino family stories could be a boon to the Republican Party. "He appreciates how close Latino families are with each other," says Israel Hernandez, an early campaign aide whom Bush hired after hearing his family story. "For a long time, he's talked about how these are the qualities he thinks the party represents. He has always talked about immigration in a very compassionate way." But the president's willingness to help illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship sets him apart from many vocal conservatives in the GOP. The divide could paralyze the effort to bring much-needed reform to the nation's immigration laws. The issue has become, in a way, too personal: a source of more heat than light in the body politic.

There is general agreement in Congress over the need to get control of the borders and enforce existing immigration laws. Last week Bush proposed a plan that could position up to 6,000 National Guard troops along the Mexican border for a year or so while beefing up the Border Patrol (from about 12,000 to 18,000 by 200. The troops would not be sent to "militarize" the border with Mexico, Bush hastened to add, or even to arrest illegals coming over the border, but rather to provide logistical support, monitor surveillance cameras and do construction. Bush proposed building high-tech fences in urban corridors to help staunch the flow, as well as deploying a host of new gizmos like motion sensors and unmanned aerial drones.

Bush also put forth a "temporary-worker program" to "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers for jobs Americans are not doing." Such a program would probably be acceptable to House conservatives, according to a GOP leadership aide who declined to be identified discussing politically sensitive matters. But any plan that "smacks of amnesty"—that offers a way for the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants now in the United States to become citizens—is a nonstarter, according to this aide. The aide said that House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner would block a plan, proposed by Bush, that would let illegals apply for citizenship after spending five years in the United States, learning English and paying a fine and back taxes. (As a sop to conservatives, the Senate last week passed a bill making English the national language of the United States.)


"We must honor the great American tradition of the melting pot," Bush said last week. He has been dipping into it ever since he got into politics. His first campaign aide, when he was a managing partner of the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team and thinking about a run for governor, was Hernandez. Born in a tiny border town, son of a Mexican immigrant, Hernandez was the first in his family to go to college. Driving around the state, "we would joke around and talk and sometimes switch into Spanish," recalls Hernandez, who is now assistant secretary of Commerce for trade promotion. As co-chairman of the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Bush was dismayed by the anti-immigration rhetoric of Pete Wilson, California's governor at the time, according to Hernandez. Bush saw that Hispanics shared the family values pushed by the Republican Party—and represented a growing voting bloc that Republicans ignored at their peril. During the 2000 election, Bush's catchphrase was "Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande."

Bush had his own housekeeper as an example. Emigrating from a small village in Mexico with her daughter sometime in the mid-'80s, Galvan worked as a domestic for several families in Austin, Texas, before getting a job at the Governor's Mansion just as Bush moved in with his family in 1995, when the twins were 12 years old. According to Anne DeBois, who was the mansion's chief administrator, Galvan taught herself English and how to read. Bush "encouraged her heavily to get her citizenship," says DeBois, who says that Galvan was a legal immigrant with a green card when she started work there. (The White House last week refused to comment on Galvan, except to say that she is a U.S. citizen; White House aides were silent on how she entered the country and what her legal status was at the time.) The Bushes liked Galvan so much that they brought her to Washington in 2001. She lives in the White House, travels with the First Family and looks after their beloved dogs. She has advised the White House chefs on the Bushes' favorite Mexican foods and is said by White House insiders, who refuse to be identified discussing First Family matters, to be "part of the family," which is unusual for staff in the formal, institutionalized Executive Mansion. Laura Bush has included Galvan as a guest at some of her social lunches.

Though the needs of Latinos have always been part of Bush's portfolio as a self-proclaimed "compassionate conservative," immigration reform took a back seat to education and national security during the first five years of the Bush presidency. Meanwhile, as illegal immigrants overwhelmed social services and drove up crime, not just in border states but across the country, a backlash was setting in. Last winter the House of Representatives passed a bill to make illegal immigration a felony, though how the House proposed to arrest and deport 12 million people was left unclear.

At the time, the Bush administration apparently figured that the Senate would "fix" any immigration bill by adding pro-visions for guest workers and a plan to allow illegals to become citizens after paying their dues. But public anger at illegals is peaking. Radio-show host Rush Limbaugh is saying he has never seen his followers so riled up. And when Bush's political adviser Karl Rove met privately with House Republicans after the president's speech, the lawmakers were still in a rebellious mood. On two major occasions—the No Child Left Behind education law in 2002 and Medicare reform in 2003—Bush pressed the House to work with Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Never again, says GOP Rep. Ric Keller of Florida, who pungently told Rove: "If you get into bed with Ted Kennedy, you're going to get more than sleep."


Bush is trying to take the high road. "We cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger, or playing on anyone's fears or exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain," Bush said from the Oval Office. But at least half the House Republicans see a hard line on immigration as smart politics in an election year when the Democrats are threatening to win back control of Congress. With his approval ratings sagging into the mid-30s, Bush probably lacks the clout to force the House GOP to accept a Senate bill that includes steps for illegals to become citizens. The result would be no reforms at all, though it is possible that something could be salvaged in a lame-duck session after the November elections, when political passions have cooled a bit.

Meanwhile, angry citizens continue to take matters into their own hands. Five hours after Bush took off from Yuma, Ariz., where he had staged a photo op driving a dune buggy around the Mexican border, David (Flash) Sharrar stood in a dusty farmyard to brief a circle of so-called Yuma Patriots. They were preparing to go off on a nocturnal search for illegals coming across the border. Sharrar went over the rules and the checklist. No weapons, no altercations. The Patriots are armed only with bright flashlights, which they beam on the illegals as they radio the Border Patrol for help, and with Mace, in the unlikely event one of the intruders attacks them.

"I don't think the president is going to do a damn thing about Yuma," said Sharrar, 51, part owner of an auto-transmission shop. He launched the Yuma Patriots a year ago with his business partner after some illegals carjacked his 21-year-old son's Ford Explorer at gunpoint. The thieves also stole a cell phone and $700 in combat pay—Sharrar's son had just returned from serving as a soldier in Iraq.

Sharrar led the Patriots in prayer ("Lord, these great men and women are here to stop an epidemic that is destroying our country ... "). Then the group, which claims to have caught and turned over 1,500 illegal migrants in the past year, went out and caught nine more. Until the borders are closed and the laws reformed, most of them will try to come back.

With Andrew Murr in Yuma and Eleanor Clift


© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12892962/site/newsweek/