Tancredo rides high on immigration

Tom Tancredo is used to anger and hostility. But success is something else. So when the Senate buckled under a wave of popular protest and rejected an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, Tancredo wasn’t sure how people would respond.

The five-term Republican congressman from Colorado is not just the hard-line face of immigration reform. His run for the GOP presidential nomination is based entirely on a platform that can be summarized in a single sentence: Seal the border and send ‘em back.

A three-day Iowa swing, after the Senate bill’s collapse last week, was a triumphal lap of sorts. But it was also a test: Would victory stoke the forces that helped kill the legislation? Or, Tancredo wondered, would followers say, “Geez, we’ve won the day. Let’s go home now.”

He needn’t have worried. The people who burned up talk radio and filled the Internet with their fury, who blitzed the White House with their faxes and e-mails, who crashed the Senate switchboard with their indignant phone calls are still spitting mad.

“People want something done,” said Al Manning, 50, the owner of a sandwich shop in Waterloo who drove more than 250 miles to hear the congressman speak twice over the weekend. “We need to stop the inflow of illegals, and we need to deal with the ones that are already in the country.”

Those sentiments were echoed in numerous interviews at Tancredo campaign stops and a Des Moines presidential forum that drew hundreds of conservative activists. (Of the six candidates who spoke, Tancredo received the best reception, coming and going to standing ovations.)

There was also widespread doubt that the Senate bill, which combined tougher enforcement with a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, was really, truly dead.

If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) “is willing to do backroom negotiations and then stick it on the Senate floor without debate, that tells me, if he has a chance, he will bring it up at the next opportunity,” said David Connon, 46, a substitute teacher from the outskirts of Des Moines.

John Makow agreed. His family emigrated from Poland in 1962 after waiting four years to come to the United States “the right way” -- so the issue is personal for the 58-year-old retired systems analyst from Granger.

Makow suggested that President Bush and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, another Republican White House hopeful and a leading proponent of the bill, “got too much at stake” to quit now. “They’re going to keep bringing it up, and we’re going to keep fighting,” Makow said.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey last month found that about 4 in 10 Republican primary voters nationwide said immigration was the most important issue facing the country. (That compared with a quarter of Democratic primary voters.) The figure was probably high, inflated by the intense emotions stirred by the Senate debate, but few see the debate ending with the bill’s demise.

“The issue is not going away,” said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Des Moines’ Drake University. “The only question is how much will be subject to demagoguery and how much subject to some reasoned discussion.”

Tancredo’s immigration prescription is simple.

First, secure the borders, doing whatever it takes. Build a fence -- or two or three -- along the borders with Canada and Mexico. Station armed guards to block illegal entry. Then, go after businesses that hire illegal workers, hitting employers with massive fines and, if need be, criminal charges.

Also, bring criminal cases -- aiding and abetting -- against mayors and city council members who establish “sanctuary cities” that prevent city employees from cooperating with federal immigration agents. (Yes, that would have included Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani, back when he was mayor of New York.)

Once the jobs dry up, the estimated 12 million people in the country illegally -- or 20 million, by Tancredo’s count -- will go home. No need for the jackboot immigration raids that are conjured up by his many critics.

“Attrition through enforcement,” Tancredo called it, sipping green iced tea on a shady patio before opening his campaign office in Ames, home of Iowa State University. “If people cannot get the thing for which they came -- a job -- they go home.”

Some look at the immigration issue and see a complicated and confounding tangle of interests and emotions. Not Tancredo.

“I have a solution,” he told a Friday night crowd of about 100 at the Quality Inn in downtown Des Moines. “It’s a radical one. Scary. Enormously controversial.” Then he paused and spaced his words for effect. “It’s called: Enforce ... the ... law.”

Blunt talk like that is a big part of Tancredo’s appeal.

To Belinda Lawler, it’s simple. When she called the offices of Iowa’s U.S. senators, the pharmaceutical consultant from Gilbert demanded: “What part of the term ‘illegal alien’ don’t you understand?”

“We have laws,” Lawler, 50, said after Tancredo’s talk. “Whose job is it to enforcement the laws? Isn’t it them?” (Republican Charles E. Grassley and Democrat Tom Harkin voted to kill the Senate bill.)

But Tancredo, 61, also has a way of delivering his alarums -- the country is under siege by “a cult of multiculturalism,” the country is spiraling apart, splintering into a collection of competing ethnic fiefs -- in a way that smooths the jagged edges and modulates his tone. He is no screamer.

He speaks in a warm, conversational style, leavened with plenty of puckish humor -- much of it aimed at himself.

He confesses his inability to match shirt and slacks without his wife’s help. He acknowledges his banishment from the Bush White House for political mischief. (Recently, Tancredo sent a head of lettuce, a fruit basket and a jaunty note -- “Plenty more where that came from!” -- to Michael Chertoff after the Homeland Security chief expressed concern about the failure of immigration reform hurting the agriculture industry.)

Reminded of something he said before launching his presidential bid -- that he was “too fat, too short and too bald” to ever be elected -- Tancredo threw his head back and laughed merrily. Later he repeated the line for the 150 people at his Ames office, massaging his scalp and sucking in his gut for effect, then chuckled along with them.

Iowa, which hosts the first contest of the 2008 presidential campaign, seems an unlikely source of agitation over illegal immigration. Latinos make up about 4% of the population. But that represents a significant increase: Since 1990, Iowa’s Latino population has more than tripled.

Many Latino immigrants -- legal and illegal -- work in the meatpacking plants, transforming parts of rural Iowa into communities that could pass for neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Orange County or Phoenix.

“All over Iowa you see pockets of these changes and that makes people nervous,” said Steve Grubbs, a GOP pollster and former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.

Or as Goldford put it, “People say, ‘I grew up in this town. Why do I see Spanish signs everywhere?’ ”

Crime and drug abuse are nothing new in rural Iowa. But the problem has become worse in some places, and that has fueled the immigration debate.

“I knew when they started coming here we were in for trouble,” Diane Watson of Altoona said of the growing Latino population. She left California more than 30 years ago after seeing “what happens when they move in five and six families in one home.”

A vote for Tancredo is one way for Watson to register her upset. He won her over with his tough-but-amiable talk at the Quality Inn. “I think he’s an honest man,” she said. “He wants to protect our country.”

But Watson, 63, her pink sleeves pushed up to show an armful of charm bracelets, is ready to do more.

Toss a “big net” over any illegal immigrants you find, she said, and “shoot, I’ll drive a busload of them back.... I mean, they’re criminals.”

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mark.barabak@latimes.com

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Begin text of infobox

Tom Tancredo

Age: 61 (born Dec. 20, 1945)

Birthplace: Denver

Experience: Congressman from Colorado, 1999-present; president, Independence Institute, 1993-98; regional representative, U.S. Department of Education, 1981-93; Colorado State House of Representatives, 1976-81; teacher, Drake Junior High School, 1968-81

Education: University of Northern Colorado, B.A., 1968

Family: Wife, Jackie; two children

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National Journal, Project Vote Smart