McCain completed the trifecta of Hispanic events today by speaking to the National Council of La Raza, after having addressed in earlier weeks the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed officials (NALEO) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).

McCain’s message to all three was the same – that he is the true champion of amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens in the United States, not the pretender Obama. As he told NALEO, “comprehensive immigration reform” (the preferred euphemism for amnesty) “would be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

It would be smart for Obama to keep goading McCain, as he did when speaking to La Raza Sunday, by accusing him of having walked away from the immigration bill he sponsored last summer with Ted Kennedy. McCain is an honor politician, and he considers his honor to have been challenged by Obama’s claims; as McCain told La Raza, “He [Obama] suggested in his speeches…that I turned my back on comprehensive reform out of political necessity. I feel I must, as they say, correct the record.” The result of all this record-correcting is that he keeps reminding voters that he’s “Amnesty John” with an unshakable commitment to legalizing illegal aliens.

In fact, it’s clear from McCain’s comments that amnesty is the real goal for him, and that promises of enforcement are simply a means to that end, a way to make amnesty more palatable to voters – not just Republican primary voters, by the way, but also the very independents and blue-collar Democrats that he’s targeting for November.

And McCain’s “border security first” rhetoric is transparently insincere. First of all, the border is only one part of the immigration problem; a quarter to a half of the illegal population entered legally and then didn’t leave when they were supposed to; any claim that our immigration system is fixed that doesn’t include, for instance, full implementation of the check-in/check-out system at our borders (called US-VISIT) is simply false.

Second, though he didn’t spell it out in the La Raza speech, McCain has repeatedly said that his yardstick for determining whether the border is secure will be “certification” by the four southwest border governors. This is laughable – pro-amnesty governors giving McCain the green light to proceed with amnesty? Any besides, how would Ahnold, for instance, know whether the border is secure? It’s not like the California state police patrol the border.

As I point out in my new book, The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, it’s mass immigration overall, not just illegal immigration, which is the problem facing us. But it’s clear that McCain doesn’t even get the illegal part right.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Politics, Campaign, Presidential Campaign .