Adios, Amigo?

President George W. Bush is going out the same way he came in: pretending to be compassionate with illegal immigrants while running an immigrant-bashing administration.

With "amigos" such as Bush, immigrants don't need "enemigos"!

Yet on two separate occasions during the past week, Bush tried to advise his fellow Republicans to be "open-minded" and to avoid being perceived as "anti-immigrant."

Amazingly, the comments came shortly after his Justice Department made yet another ruling that will hurt thousands of illegal immigrants seeking a legal way to stay in the United States.

In a questionable last-minute ruling — only a couple of weeks before the end of the Bush administration — Attorney General Michael Mukasey decided that immigrants facing deportation cannot have their cases reopened when they claim their attorneys made errors. Because illegal immigrants are often victims of fraud by unscrupulous legal advisers and of mistakes by unprepared paper filers, many immigrants with valid reasons for becoming legal could end up being deported.

Just as immigrant rights advocates were blasting the ruling and calling on President-elect Barack Obama to overturn it, just as it became clear that the Bush administration was trying to diminish yet another constitutional right, Bush was out giving compassion lessons to his fellow Republicans as if he was totally unaware of the outrage over what is happening on his watch.

Could he be so removed from reality that he doesn't realize that while he preaches compassion, his administration often performs with cruelty? Could he be talking from la-la land?

"It's very important for our party not to narrow its focus, not to become so inward-looking that we drive people away from a philosophy that is compassionate and decent," Bush said in a Fox News interview.

On Monday, in his last news conference as president, after recognizing that Republicans "got whipped in 2008," Bush said the GOP must be "compassionate and broad-minded" to be able to make a comeback. He said that conservative opposition to comprehensive immigration reform made it seem as if "Republicans don't like immigrants."

It's true! But you have to wonder why it took him so long to say that and why he is saying it on his way out. Certainly, he had enough time to lead his party in the direction of the compassion that he preached.

The problem is that he never had the cojones to confront the conservative base of the GOP. You never saw him criticizing their Draconian measures or exerting real pressure on his fellow Republicans to tone down their mean-spirited, xenophobia-mongering rhetoric. He practiced political prostitution, flirting with both immigrants and xenophobes at the same time.

While saying he felt immigration reform needed to be comprehensive, including a legalization plan for illegal immigrants, he kept signing enforcement-only measures into law, and his administration kept setting records for the number of raids and deportations it conducted.

As Bush tries desperately to leave behind some sort of positive legacy amid a multitude of failed policies, we should keep in mind that he failed many pro-immigrant Americans who believed in him and his alleged compassion. We should note that Bush's approach to immigration was two-faced; he spent the past eight years saying illegal immigrants need to be brought out of the shadows, while his administration kept driving them deeper underground.

This is an amigo who won't be missed.

To find out more about Miguel Perez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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