http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/colu...y/16488275.htm
The governor is making sense on immigration


BUD KENNEDY
In My Opinion
Posted on Thu, Jan. 18, 2007

Gov. Rick Perry is beginning his 30th year in politics.

If nothing else, he has proved that he has read American history.

Our history books praise leaders who unite races and solve problems. They revile leaders who segregate and divide.

Perry must want to be remembered for mending fences between Anglos and Tejanos in a time of tornadic population change.

Not for building a wall.

Of all the wide-ranging comments in his third inaugural speech -- which castigated selfish teenagers and called for concern over AIDS in Africa -- the most telling were his conciliatory words on immigration.

Taking the same position as President Bush and both of Texas' senators, he called for a guest worker program that acknowledges "economic contributions" of foreign workers -- worth $17 billion a year, if you believe a study by outgoing Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn.

He described Texas as a "tapestry of diversity." He said immigrants "enrich us." He called for human border security, not "unmanned walls."

He did everything but call in an order to Pizza Patron.

More importantly, he criticized the bitter tone of immigrant-bashing and hostile responses both inside and outside the Capitol.

Advocates for stricter immigration law enforcement should sit down with opponents and "be a part of the solution," he said, something that seems as far away as Washington, D.C.

"We are of many faiths, traditions, heritages, but we are all Texans," he said. He didn't say it, but he could have added: "even those babies born to illegal immigrants in county hospitals." Under the 14th Amendment and two decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, those babies are our fellow Texans, and Perry recently said he opposes any state law that might challenge that decision.

"We can engage our differences in a discussion that unifies rather than divides," he said, "that lifts up the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all people."

Sure. We could do that.

If we could only get Texans to quit listening to the fuming fools on radio talk shows.

Perry has generally taken a gentler tone on immigration since the election, although he hasn't really changed his position at all.

Before the election, he called the idea of a border wall "ludicrous" in a campaign interview in McAllen. After the election, he called it "preposterous."

But his tough-on-crime TV campaign ads were easily mistaken for a tough-on-Mexico campaign.

Perry's campaign ads promised to secure the border against "drug-dealing gangs" and "terrorists," not noncriminal immigrant workers.

Jerry Polinard, who teaches political science at the University of Texas-Pan American, said the governor's path is not particularly surprising.

"He doesn't have to worry about being re-elected in Texas again," he said by phone Wednesday from Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley.

Not for four more years, that is.

"He's on the same side as President Bush in how they view immigration," Polinard said. "They don't take a hard line compared to the right wing of the party. After what happened in California" -- where Republicans have struggled since a 1994 immigration enforcement campaign -- "you won't see him immigrant-bashing."

Perry's deft touch with the immigration issue won him an estimated 30 percent of the vote in South Texas, not far off his statewide percentage of 39.

In a bolt of political lightning, he narrowly carried Cameron County -- Brownsville, the southernmost county -- along with Nueces County, around Corpus Christi.

Perry lost only McAllen and Hidalgo County to Democrat Chris Bell by a 43-34 percentage.

"You don't hear anybody down here advocating building a high wall," Polinard said. "Particularly not if it would keep people from Mexico and their money out of border towns. This is one part of the country where absolutely nobody wants a wall."

When Perry was sworn in, he took the oath on a Bible that once belonged to former Republic of Texas President Sam Houston.

As the Civil War approached in 1859, then-Gov. Houston argued to keep Texas in the Union and away from the South and the Confederacy.

If anything, Texas should reassert its independence, he said, arguing that leaving the Union over the issues of race and slavery would cost Texas "countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives."

In 1924, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan capitalized on anti-immigrant fervor to take over the Tarrant and Dallas county courthouses, and a Dallas Klan leader made a strong run for the governor's mansion.

Surely Perry must have read those chapters in his Texas history class back in the Paint Creek school near where he grew up.

Houston is regarded as a hero.

Race-haters, immigrant-bashers and the Klan are not.

Perry is not only shaping today's debate in Texas.

He is also shaping his own political future, and writing his own chapter in what someday inevitably will become Texans' and Tejanos' shared history.

Maybe some fellow Texans -- hello, Farmers Branch -- should think about how they will look in that history.


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Bud Kennedy's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. 817-390-7538 bud@budkennedy.com
Bud Kennedy and Rick Perry BOTH make me want to puke.