Bush Immigration Policy: Guest Worker Program on To-Do List

The Sunday Los Angeles Times has Immigration Rising on Bush’s To-Do List.

The White House wants to build a coalition to court Latinos and marginalize hard-liners.

Worried that the tone of the immigration debate is pushing Latinos away from the Republican Party, the White House is working with political strategists to create a broad coalition of business groups and immigrant advocates to back a plan President Bush could promote in Congress and to minority voters in the 2006 elections.

The strategists say Bush is planning to make immigration a top priority as soon as this fall, once the focus on a Supreme Court vacancy has passed. The push is being planned to coincide with next year’s campaigns for the House and Senate, in which Latino voters could be crucial in several states. It is part of a broader White House strategy to forge a long-lasting majority by drawing more minority voters.

Aiming for an air of bipartisanship, the White House-backed coalition, to be called Americans for Border and Economic Security, will be led by former U.S. Reps. Cal Dooley (D-Hanford) and Dick Armey (R-Texas). The chief organizer is one of the capital’s most important White House allies: former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who has hosted preliminary meetings at his Washington lobbying firm just blocks from the White House and has been advising the RNC on minority outreach.

This will never fly in California which is a blue state and will remain blue even with massive Latino voter recruitment for the Republicans (which would not happen for a few decades, in any case).

The President is a lame duck and this policy initiative will gather as much interest as his social security measures – NONE.

But, the President will succeed in one respect. He will force the Democrats to either put up (support his measures) or shut up (support a tighter border policy, like Hillary Clinton moaning about illegal immigration terrorist security).

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