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When I interviewed likely Republican candidate Sen. John McCain last week, I was left with the distinct impression that he is moving steadily backward from his once progressive stand on immigration.
In a 15-minute telephone interview during his April 28 visit to Florida, I asked McCain whether, if elected, he would launch a new immigration reform plan providing for an earned path to legalization to many of the 12 million undocumented workers who could prove they have paid taxes and would be willing to learn English.
McCain indicated he would propose that only at the end of a three-step process.
"I would first of all make sure that our borders are secure," he said. "That's the lesson that we got from this last campaign, that Americans want secure borders. We can do that in a relatively short period of time."
"I would have the border state governors certify that the borders are secure, and then I would move on with a temporary worker program that has biometric, tamper-proof documents," McCain went on. "And then, I would address the issue of the 12 million people who are in this country illegally."
Hmmm. I smelled a significant shift in McCain's position. From what I recalled, McCain's 2005 immigration reform bill, which he sponsored alongside Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., called for simultaneous measures to secure the border with Mexico and an earned path to legalization for millions of undocumented workers who are already in the United States.
Later, when he was running for the Republican nomination and faced an outcry from the anti-immigration wing of his party, he backpedalled to a two-step immigration approach: He said we must first secure the border, and only then deal with undocumented workers.
Now, it seems, he has retreated even further from his original stand and is proposing a three-step process, in which providing for a path to legalization of millions of undocumented workers would come at the very end.
McCain's original 2005 comprehensive immigration plan and his White House-backed 2007 version correctly assumed that "securing the border" alone would do little to stem illegal migration to the United States, not the least because nearly half of all undocumented workers don't enter the country through the Mexican border, but arrive at U.S. airports and overstay their visas.
Unless you took several measures at the same time, including getting tough on U.S. employers who hire undocumented workers and increasing legal visas to cover the demands of the U.S. labor, the flow of undocumented workers will continue. The thinking was, "If we build a 10-foot border fence, they will build an 11-foot ladder."
"Senator McCain, who had been a true champion on this issue, has backtracked," says Frank Sharry, director of America's Voice, an immigration reform advocacy group. "Your interview confirms that he is going to maintain a harder-edge position in order to placate anti-immigration voters in the Republican Party."
My opinion: To his credit, McCain has been much better on immigration than his Republican rivals for the party's nomination. But his new stand in support of securing the border without simultaneous measures to, among other things, provide a path to legalization of undocumented workers is economically stupid, politically unwise and, from a security standpoint, dangerous.
Economically, these millions of workers perform jobs that Americans don't want to do, help reduce the rising cost of food and most services and, according to several studies -- including a 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service -- don't take jobs away from American-born workers but from other foreign-born, unskilled workers.
Politically, McCain is alienating 45 million Hispanics, the biggest U.S. minority group. Polls show that Hispanics have flocked to vote for the Democratic Party in this year's primaries, in part because most of them see the Republicans' anti-immigration rhetoric as anti-Hispanic.
From a national security point of view, you can't deport 12 million undocumented foreigners, and failing to legalize them is dangerous, among other things, because people fearing deportation will never step forward to denounce a crime or a terrorist plot they heard about.
McCain will be making a historic mistake if he continues caving in to immigration hawks in his party: He will never convince them that he is one of them, and he will lose the Hispanic vote that he needs to get to the White House. Worse, he will undermine his own claim that he is a straight-talk candidate and a true leader.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. This column was distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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