Rangel: Texas leadership does a 180 on changing immigration issues

When it comes to illegal immigration, times have surely changed in Texas.

For instance, in the 2007 session of the Texas Legislature, Reps. David Swinford of Dumas and Leo Berman of Tyler were among the few Republicans openly criticizing the federal government for its alleged failure to secure the Texas border with Mexico. Nonetheless, though Swinford said President George W. Bush's administration was doing a lousy job on illegal immigration, on the advice of state Attorney General, (and now Gov.-elect) Greg Abbott, he killed more than two dozen anti-illegal immigration bills, most of them authored by Berman.

Swinford chaired the House State Affairs Committee and, like all leaders of a panel, he had the authority to kill any bill sent to his group for screening.

One of Berman's bills would have denied basic public services such as education and health care to U.S.-born children whose parents were here illegally.

"Me, being a right-wing nut, I agree with some of those bills," Swinford said about the bills he killed. "But it's a waste of money and that's not what I was sent (here) for."

This was in reference to the millions of dollars the state could have spent defending - most likely unsuccessfully - those bills in court if they had become law.

Fast forward to most of the last six years President Barack Obama has been in office, and it is a different story. Now it is Abbott, departing Gov. Rick Perry and most Republican legislators harshly criticizing Obama for his alleged failure to secure the border.

Berman said he is glad to see Abbott, Perry and some of his former Republican colleagues taking on the issue he championed during most of his 14 years in the Legislature. However, they did not criticize Bush because it was not politically correct, Berman charged.

"The higher ups in the Republican Party were afraid that by doing anything with illegal aliens they would antagonize the Hispanic vote," said Berman who maintains that there are more than 20 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, not the 11 million the federal government and the media use in their reports and stories.

He ignored the party line "because it was the right thing to do," he stressed. "I didn't care about votes, what I cared about was my country, the United States of America."

Two political experts agree the criticism Obama's immigration policy gets from Texas leaders is largely partisan.

"If you look at President George W. Bush's platform and policies on immigration and compared them to Barack Obama's in a lot of way they are very similar," said Brandon Rottinghaus at the University of Houston.

"Bush wanted and ultimately did increase investment on border security," Rottinghaus said. "They put more troops on the border, they engaged in the temporary worker program and (like Obama) he was very clear it was not amnesty."

However, under Obama, Texas Republicans use illegal immigration to rally the base because "it is a hot button issue," Rottinghaus said.

Tony Payan, director of the Mexico Center at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, said it is easy for Texas Republicans to criticize Obama's immigration policy because the president is very unpopular here.

"The Republicans are going to do some posturing to satisfy their political base, their constituents, the tea party," Payan said.

"However, they have controlled the Texas Legislature for 13 years and my examination of the Texas legislation in biennial meetings is that they have never passed anti-immigrant legislation," Payan noted.

"That tells me that there is a coalition in Austin that is composed of moderate Republicans and Democrats," Payan added. "They understand the contributions immigrants make to the Texas economy and they are torn between satisfying their political base and obviously protecting the contributions the immigrants make."

True, but with Abbott as governor, Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston soon as lieutenant governor and a more conservative Legislature, things could be much different in next year's session. We'll see.

Enrique Rangel is AGN Media Austin Bureau Chief. His email address is enrique.rangel@morris.com.