GOP Fears Fallout Of Immigration Split

Fight May Weaken Party, Some Say

They monitor the same polls and national debate over immigration, yet House Republicans are reaching dramatically different conclusions from President Bush and Senate GOP leaders regarding which political and policy routes to take, a disagreement that may haunt their party in years to come.

House Republicans overwhelmingly favor a get-tough approach that deals only with tightening the U.S. border with Mexico and bolstering efforts to capture and deport illegal immigrants. With time growing short for a compromise, House members appear more wedded to their stand than ever and have held hearings that ridicule the approach taken by Bush and the Senate.

The Senate bill would tighten borders but also provide an expanded guest-worker program and opportunities for many of the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants to achieve legal status, possibly including citizenship.

House Republicans reject the approach as "amnesty" that rewards lawbreakers.

Both camps say they are right not only on the issue's substance but also on its politics. Each group claims to have the Republican Party's best interests at heart. By definition, both cannot be right, and if the party misplays its hand on the volatile issue, the consequences could be dire, according to a variety of politicians.

"If we lose a generation of Hispanic immigrants, the Republican Party will be a minority party for a long time," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a chief sponsor of the Senate bill. That is what will happen if the House approach prevails, he predicts, and things will not be much better if the House and Senate fail to reach a compromise before the November election.

Americans "want this problem resolved," Hagel said, and if it is not, "the Republicans, I believe, will be blamed, because we control the process."

House GOP leaders are equally convinced that they are the ones reading the political winds correctly and saving their party from a harsh voter backlash.

"I believe that the American people are much closer to where the House is," Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week. Asked how veteran, successful politicians from the same party could assess the situation so differently, Boehner replied: "I wish I knew."

It is not the first time the GOP-controlled House and Senate have clashed, but in most cases Bush has been aligned with the House. That was true during protracted debates over renewing the USA Patriot Act, curbing interrogation techniques allowed on military detainees, and limiting the number of pet projects added to a spending bill for the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina recovery. Bush also sided with the House in seeking constitutional bans on flag desecration and same-sex marriage, which the Senate rejected.

In all those cases, Bush and the House took more conservative stands than did the Senate. But in the immigration debate, Bush is aligned with the more liberal Senate position -- which most GOP Senate leaders embraced but most rank-and-file Republicans opposed -- because of a philosophy and goal he shares with Hagel, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others.

Since his days as Texas governor, Bush has advocated comparatively generous treatment of illegal immigrants who work hard and avoid trouble. He and political advisers such as Karl Rove dream of bolstering the GOP well into the future by attracting large numbers of Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.