Bush's Spanish Lessons

President George W. Bush seemed unusually heartfelt when he addressed the nation last week on immigration reform. For the president, immigration is not just a matter of politics or policy, it's personal. Bush has always been drawn to stories of Latino immigrants who came up by their bootstraps. In an interview with Hispanic Magazine in 2004, he described Paula Rendón, "who came up from Mexico to work in our house" when Bush was a boy growing up in Midland, Texas. "She loved me. She chewed me out. She tried to shape me up," said Bush. "And I have grown to love her like a second mom." Bush recalled Rendón's pride in seeing "her grandkids go to college for the first time."

Bush has another inspiring example close to home. For more than a decade, Maria Galvan, 53, has worked for Bush, looked after his daughters, befriended his wife and won the affection of the First Family for her loyalty, decency and hard work. As governor of Texas, Bush encouraged his housekeeper to become a U.S. citizen. Bush's own brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, married a Latino, and Jeb's eldest son, George P. Bush, is seen as a candidate to go into the family business.

Bush has a history of promoting Latinos, most notably Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who recently told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "it's unclear" whether his grandparents emigrated legally from Mexico. Bush has always spoken emotionally about Gonzales, the son of hard-working but uneducated migrant workers. Bush recognized early on that inspiring Latino family stories could be a boon to the Republican Party. "He appreciates how close Latino families are with each other," says Israel Hernandez, an early campaign aide whom Bush hired after hearing his family story. "For a long time, he's talked about how these are the qualities he thinks the party represents. He has always talked about immigration in a very compassionate way." But the president's willingness to help illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship sets him apart from many vocal conservatives in the GOP. The divide could paralyze the effort to bring much-needed reform to the nation's immigration laws. The issue has become, in a way, too personal: a source of more heat than light in the body politic.

There is general agreement in Congress over the need to get control of the borders and enforce existing immigration laws. Last week Bush proposed a plan that could position up to 6,000 National Guard troops along the Mexican border for a year or so while beefing up the Border Patrol (from about 12,000 to 18,000 by 2008). The troops would not be sent to "militarize" the border with Mexico, Bush hastened to add, or even to arrest illegals coming over the border, but rather to provide logistical support, monitor surveillance cameras and do construction. Bush proposed building high-tech fences in urban corridors to help staunch the flow, as well as deploying a host of new gizmos like motion sensors and unmanned aerial drones.

Bush also put forth a "temporary-worker program" to "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers for jobs Americans are not doing." Such a program would probably be acceptable to House conservatives, according to a GOP leadership aide who declined to be identified discussing politically sensitive matters. But any plan that "smacks of amnesty"--that offers a way for the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants now in the United States to become citizens--is a nonstarter, according to this aide. The aide said that House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner would block a plan, proposed by Bush, that would let illegals apply for citizenship after spending five years in the United States, learning English and paying a fine and back taxes. (As a sop to conservatives, the Senate last week passed a bill making English the national language of the United States.)

"We must honor the great American tradition of the melting pot," Bush said last week. He has been dipping into it ever since he got into politics. His first campaign aide, when he was a managing partner of the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team and thinking about a run for governor, was Hernandez. Born in a tiny border town, son of a Mexican immigrant, Hernandez was the first in his family to go to college. Driving around the state, "we would joke around and talk and sometimes switch into Spanish," recalls Hernandez, who is now assistant secretary of Commerce for trade promotion. As co-chairman of the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Bush was dismayed by the anti-immigration rhetoric of Pete Wilson, California's governor at the time, according to Hernandez. Bush saw that Hispanics shared the family values pushed by the Republican Party--and represented a growing voting bloc that Republicans ignored at their peril. During the 2000 election, Bush's catchphrase was "Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande."