America's new enemy: The guys who cut the lawns

The American public has focused its gaze and identified its real enemy.

It's not Osama bin Laden. He's become a bit of a bore, and President George W. Bush's War on Terror just doesn't inspire the same interest, or ratings, that it used to. (Even Fox News has found other drums to beat. It now fumes about the War on Christmas, which it detects every time some diversity-minded official wishes the country "Happy Holidays.")

Nor is the real enemy in Iraq. People here are tired of that story, too, and want the troops home soonest. But since no one's children are being drafted and most Americans' taxes aren't going up, the issue has no real urgency.

President George W. Bush says Iran's controversial president is the real enemy. But Bush's own intelligence agencies assured Americans this month Iran isn't building a nuclear bomb after all. So much for him.

No, the real enemy chosen by American voters as they contemplate their choice to replace Bush doesn't have an identifiable name, or even a face.

That is because the unobtrusive men and women who slop out America's toilets and dig its ditches and mow its lawns and bag its groceries and plaster its drywall try for the most part to remain invisible — although they're everywhere if you bother to look.

When they speak, they often just mutter that they don't understand, and turn away before they attract any more attention.

An illegal world

There are as many as 12 million illegal immigrants here in the U.S. None of them has a work visa. And they are here for the very good reason that most Americans don't want to do cheap manual labour themselves, which, incidentally, also explains why the federal government generally tolerates their teeming presence.

Still, they are consistently cited in national polls as among the greatest concerns of the American voter.

In fact, in Iowa, migrant workers have suddenly shot to the number-one concern, which makes them a very important concern indeed, because Iowans are about to hold the first of the presidential primary contests early next month.

Why the illegal immigrant is so detested is hard to say. Most don't speak English, which doesn't help. And, of course, there's the belief that they steal jobs from Americans.

But the big factor is probably plain old nativism, fanned by radio talk shows, and championed by those such as the populist CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, who has developed the self-important habit of quoting himself as an authority on the matter — "Well, sir, I have always said that any solution must begin with securing our borders."

Dobbs has used the issue to rise from an unprepossessing business reporter to one of the most powerful media voices in the United States.

Republican politicians like presidential candidate John McCain or, for that matter, Bush who try to strike some sort of reasonable compromise on the issue, feel Dobbs's lash, and cower.

Bush has now dropped any talk of legalizing the illegals. McCain says he's "gotten the message" and prefers to talk only about border enforcement.

The Huckabee phenomenon

Some candidates have even rewritten their views, beginning to end. Which seems a successful tactic.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and Baptist preacher who, only months ago, was nowhere in the national polls, used to take what some might call a Christian attitude.

Some of the anger about the illegal immigrants, he wrote in a book published earlier this year, "is fueled by prejudice."

Huckabee wanted to provide them with some sort of path to citizenship: "It would be sheer folly to attempt to suddenly impose a strict enforcement of existing laws, round up 12 million people (and) march them across the border," he wrote in From Hope to Higher Ground.

Last week, the former preacher announced he now wants to do just that: He would deport all 12 million of them within four months.

Huckabee was immediately endorsed by a co-founder of the Minutemen, a vigilante group that stages patrols of the southern border with Mexico. The actual U.S. Border Patrol takes a dim view of them, but Huckabee has now apologized to the group for ever having doubted their mission.

Not coincidentally, Huckabee is now the Republican frontrunner in Iowa, and has risen to seriously challenge the big-name candidates nationally, effectively turning the party's nomination into a wide-open race.

That has provoked his opponents to push back fiercely in the who-hates-illegal-immigrants-the-most contest. It has made for some striking about-faces.

Reality check

When he was mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani announced that undocumented workers ready to do an honest day's labour were welcome in his city.

Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he says he secretly wanted to deport them all, but was basically thwarted by a gutless federal government. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, who paints Huckabee as soft on illegal workers, mocks his rival and Giuiliani for their previously held views, while choosing to ignore his own moderate policies during most of his time as governor of Massachusetts.

Romney also used to support abortion rights and gay marriage. He's changed his mind about those things, too, since beginning his run for the White House.

Thomas Frank, a political author who wrote a well-received book about Midwestern politics just before the last presidential election, says all the posturing over who is tougher is particularly ridiculous given economic reality.

American business, he notes, is solidly pro-immigration, especially illegal immigration, because it depends on undocumented workers as a source of cheap labour, a source moreover who aren't likely to make trouble or organize.

He likens the issue to abortion or gay marriage or pornography: A political hot button Republican candidates press during campaigns, but then do very little about once they achieve power.

"Republicans actually like illegal immigration for the simple reason that it keeps wages low," says Frank. "So all this talk all of a sudden is quite ridiculous. It's so mean-spirited it's hard to understand."

A wedge issue?

Democrats, who have a much larger base of Latino voters, take a more moderate tone on illegal immigration. They would clearly rather not discuss the issue at all right now but don't seem to have much choice.

Most of the candidates in that party's nomination race have put forward complicated plans to allow illegal immigrants to eventually earn citizenship — but not before they learn English, pay fines for entering the country illegally, pay back taxes and undergo criminal background checks.

Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton supported a plan by the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, to allow illegal immigrants to apply for and receive drivers' licences as a means to bring some insured order to that state's highways.

But, stung by the Lou Dobbs brigade, she had to pull back. Public anger forced Spitzer, a Democrat, to drop the idea, as well.

Once the election is over a year from now, the prominence of illegal immigration as a public concern could well dissipate.

Voters will find another real enemy, and the invisible workers they employ will have a little more breathing room. America's bathrooms should remain sparkling clean.

Like so many issues here, it will remain acknowledged but unaddressed, a problem with an obvious, but deeply unpopular solution. The very solution Huckabee himself espoused just a few months ago.