John McCain’s Immigration Double Talk

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) set off the anti-immigrant conservatives into another rage over his continuously changing position on immigration reform. Earlier this week, Senator McCain held secretive, closed door town halls with Latinos in Chicago. Invited to the event was Rosanna Pulido, State Director for the Illinois Minutemen Project, and she was not pleased with what she heard.

“I have friends in Washington, DC, on this issue,” she says. “We’ve had conversations on this issue.” After comprehensive immigration reform was killed in the Senate and McCain changed his rhetoric on the subject on the campaign trail, Pulido says, “we were hopeful after John McCain started saying, ‘I understand where the American people are coming from, there’s gotta be enforcement first,’ we thought great, he’s had a change of heart.”

So she went to the meeting, a room full of 150-200 people. “Sure enough,” Pulido says, “his mantra at the meeting was comprehensive immigration reform.’ And there were cheers and applause whenever he mentioned comprehensive immigration reform.”

“Then he said, ‘I bet some of you don’t know this — did you know Spanish was spoken in Arizona before English?’ And the crowd roared. I was appalled,” Pulido said. “He was pandering to these people — that’s what they wanted to hear.”

A few years ago, McCain drew the ire of the right-wing in the Republican Party because of his support for comprehensive immigration reform, but when his presidential campaign was floundering in the summer of 2007, he quickly changed his tune to curry favor with the base.

“I got the message,” McCain would tell crowds of conservatives in Iowa, South Carolina and other primary states. Asked if he would support the comprehensive immigration reform package he sponsored with Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Senator McCain said he would not. In May, McCain reverted back to comprehensive immigration reform while speaking to business leaders that sent the right-wing blogs into a tizzy. In response, the McCain campaign attempted to put out the fires.

It appears that McCain is determined to sell his position on immigration as a two-for-one deal: tell the immigrant-bashing conservatives that you “got the message” and tell potential Latino voters silly, grade school-level anecdotes about Spanish being spoken in Arizona before English. (Duh.)

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