Immigration Hard-Liners and John McCain: Strange Bedfellows or Forever Star-Crossed?

Jim Gilchrist, head of the anti-immigration militia group the Minutemen, predicted in February, "If [John] McCain wins the nomination, most Americans will move to Australia." Indeed, the anti-immigration movement as a whole is unanimous in its disdain for the Republican presidential nominee, who as a senator has sponsored legislation -- with the right's liberal bogeyman Sen. Ted Kennedy, no less -- offering undocumented immigrants a "path to citizenship."

McCain, however, locked up the nomination a few months ago, and Sydney has not yet been invaded by a horde of disgruntled restrictionists. This leaves the anti-immigration movement facing a difficult choice in the upcoming presidential election: do they vote Republican and hope to influence a McCain presidency from inside the GOP tent? Or do they walk away and punish their party for abandoning one of its core constituencies?

In part, the anti-immigration movement's disarray is a function of McCain's unexpected path to the nomination, which left them without much time to counter-strategize. Back in the summer of 2007, McCain's campaign was crumbling because it lacked both money and supporters. One of McCain's biggest problems was immigration. His past positions on the issue infuriated the Republican base and unsettled primary voters. Americans for Better Immigration, a lobby group calling for reduced immigration, ranked McCain as having the worst policy on immigration of all the major candidates (from both parties). He was famously booed by at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February of 2008 when he mentioned immigration in a speech.

Last autumn, some even thought his stance on immigration might prevent him from winning his home state of Arizona in the general election, given that its politics are influenced to some of the most vociferous immigration hardliners in the country. "It looks to me like Arizona will be in play," Randy Pullen, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, told a reporter from the London Times. "The immigration issue is clearly hurting him with the base of the party." Dan Schnur, McCain's communications director during his 2000 presidential campaign, speculated to the Times reporter that the issue of immigration might cause McCain to drop out.

For their part, immigration hardliners disappointed with George W. Bush were excited at the possibility of nominating a Republican who took a tough stance on immigration. "Fred Thompson explicitly promoted attrition through enforcement and, along with Huckabee, actually proposed significant reductions in legal immigration, marking the first time in generations that such has happened in a presidential campaign," gushed Mark Kirkorian, executive director of the anti-immigration think-tank the Center for Immigration Studies.

At a Republican debate in November, the candidates with the exception of McCain competed to be the most hostile to immigrants, so much so that notoriously anti-immigrant Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo smiled that the candidates were trying to "out-Tancredo Tancredo." But in the end, it was the un-Tancredo who triumphed. Huckabee, Romney, Giuliani and Thompson all fell by the wayside in the Republican primaries, leaving McCain the presumptive nominee. "I just don't understand it," a disappointed Gilchrist says.

Now that McCain is the presumptive nominee, some anti-immigration activists are threatening to withhold their votes from the Republican Party in November. Glenn Spencer, founder of the American Border Patrol, a group that uses radio-controlled aircraft and ground-sensing equipment to track people coming over the border, says he may support the Democratic nominee. "We basically have a Democrat in the White House now, so it wouldn't be any different."