Keep The Faith—McCain (and Amnesty) Will Fail

Let’s start with the good news. John McCain, the likely (but not absolutely certain) Republican nominee, will never be president.

(What are my credentials for such a bold statement? Wait until the last paragraph of this article!)

Coming after eight years of the disastrous George W. Bush administration and its legacy of war, lunatic immigration enthusiasm, indifference to the middle class and the crushing mortgage crisis, McCain would have a tough climb even if he were the ideal GOP candidate.

But in most ways, McCain is the worst possible candidate. He’s Bush all over again—maybe worse. Open those borders! Let’s stay a hundred more years in Iraq! (See McCain’s speech on YouTube here).

Good luck to McCain campaigning on a platform that echoes Bush and his 30 percent favorable poll rating.

Now for the bad news. If McCain doesn’t become president, then a Democrat will—most likely Hillary Clinton but there’s still plenty of time for Barack Obama to maneuver his way to the nomination.

Both are proud of their amnesty stances. And each insists, wrongly and hurtfully, that more non-immigrant worker visas are essential for the American economy to thrive.

To be sure, it’s a bummer that Republicans don’t have a solid patriotic immigration reform candidate that we can count on at the forefront of the race.

But have faith! Don’t panic! Amnesty will not come automatically regardless of who is elected. History and momentum are on our side.

Have readers totally forgotten how far we’ve come and the magnitude of our 2007 victories?

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Throughout Clinton and Obama’s campaigning and especially since McCain’s resurgence, my in-box has filled up with the direst messages—“ It’s all over now,” “This is the end!” and “Amnesty is inevitable!”

Rightly outraged correspondents are aghast that Obama endorses driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. To them, it is beyond the pale.

And I agree that, after watching N.Y. governor Eliot Spitzer get put through the sausage grinder on alien licensing, it is astonishing that any candidate would touch the subject, especially when it is so easily dodged by merely saying that states—not the federal government—regulate driving.

But that’s my point: who really cares what Obama thinks about licenses? He has no control over it. Any governor foolish enough to plunge into that rough and icy water will do so at his own risk.

And the same can be said about presidential opinions on amnesty: that issue is determined in Congress, not the White House.

To better understand the strength of our position, let’s review what’s happened in the amnesty wars since Bush took office.

Bush, at the outset, blindsided many (not all) of us. We didn’t foresee his fanatical devotion to open borders.

As hard as this still may be for some Republicans to swallow, it is impossible—as a practical matter—to be a bigger open borders advocate than Bush.

Remember that Bush’s first out-of-the country trip was to Mexico and the first foreign leader he invited to the White House was Vicente Fox. And Bush had barely survived the dangling chad vote count before he floated an amnesty trial balloon in the spring of 2001.

Then, after his 2004 re-election, Bush vowed to use what he perceived as his accumulated “political capital” to push for amnesty. Result: nothing!

And yet again after the 2006 mid-term election and as Bush worked non-stop with the pro-open border Democrats who controlled Congress, he still couldn’t push through an amnesty despite a series of passionate pleas he made in Arizona and during a rare (for a president) personal visit to Capitol Hill.

In short, for eight years Bush was repeatedly embarrassed on the immigration issue by both Republican- and Democratic-controlled Congresses.

Since Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain were all present and close-up witnesses to the series of beatings Bush took, is it realistic to expect that the first matter of business for whoever is elected will be amnesty?

Not very likely…and that’s not just my opinion either.

During a trip to Washington D.C. in December I attended separate meetings with immigration reform leaders that included NumbersUSA Executive Director Roy Beck, Mark Krikorian and Steve Camarota of Center for Immigration Studies, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow John Fonte and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The overwhelming consensus is that amnesty is “too toxic” a subject and that it will not rear its ugly head until 2010 at the earliest.

This is a huge change. Remember that in January 2007, when the 110^th U.S. Congress was sworn in, nearly every immigration reform advocate on Capitol Hill assumed that the Senate would pass an amnesty again after a tough fight (as it did in 2006), and that we would ultimately have to stop it in the House of Representatives.

Beating it back in the Senate was seen as requiring something of a political miracle, given the odds against us.

For a solid six months, newspaper editorial boards, the majority of columnists and reporters as well as the leadership of businesses, unions, civil rights groups, universities, religions (most visibly the Roman Catholic Church) and ethnocentric lobbyists predicted that “comprehensive immigration” legislation was inevitable.

They were all wrong. Instead, the bill was stopped in the Senate without ever getting to the House.

Here’s what happened instead: