Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who got in some trouble over his basic indifference to the civil rights struggles raging around him as a young person in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s, has another race problem. He's a moderate on immigration.
Michael Scherer points out that Barbour left Mexico out of his lobbying resume, likely because he once lobbied on their behalf for a kind of policy restrictionists on the right referred to as "mini-amnesty." (via Oliver Willis)
At the time of Barbour's lobbying, the 245(i) effort was referred to as “mini-amnesty” in conservative circles.“This amnesty loophole allowed aliens who broke our laws to pay a $1,000 fine and go to the head of the line in front of prospective immigrants who complied with our laws,” opined Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, in a 2002 column. Among the other supporters of extending 245(i) was President George W. Bush, who had called for an extension of thze provision before meeting with then-Mexican President Vincent Fox in 2002. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted out the extension, but in the post-September 11 atmosphere, the extension failed to win approval in the Senate. The late Sen. Robert Bryd, D-WV, led the charge to sink the measure. “Reviving the 245(i) provision reopens another crack in the system through which a potential terrorist can crawl,” Bryd said, in a speech on the Senate floor on March 18, 2002. “It is lunacy—sheer lunacy—that the president would request, and the House would pass, such an amnesty at this time.”
Byrd's remarks are a reminder that Democrats didn't exactly cover themselves in glory during the debates over immigration policy in the mid-2000s. But Barbour's water colored memories of segregation are much less of a liability to a potential GOP presidential run than his moderate positions on immigration. The rest of the party has decided to pretend that the U.S. is someday going to force out 11 million people, and Barbour is one of the few left that doesn't.
That leaves him with two options--an implausible shift to the right or a stance on principle that'll doom his candidacy in the now overwhelmingly restrictionist Republican Party. Despite the fact that Mississippi has a relatively low population of undocumented immigrants, the state legislature has passed a bill modeled after Arizona's SB 1070. If Barbour wants to take a swift turn to the right in anticipation of a presidential run, signing that bill is the most likely choice.
Sort of ironic, but having anger the left for appearing indifferent to the suffering of the Jim Crow South, Barbour's biggest problem with the GOP base is that he doesn't subscribe to the same demographic panic over the U.S.' rising Latino population that has gripped the rest of the party.
