Walls

By NANCY GIBBS

President Bush tried once more to show that compassion and conservatism can speak the same language, as he reopened the debate over immigration reform. First he had to reassure conservatives that he's still the sheriff, and so his trip to the Yuma, Ariz., borderlands included a dedication of a new border-patrol station and an inspection of the Predator, an unmanned plane used to track incursions. Deterrence is working, he said; arrests are down 68% here, which must mean people have given up trying to get in.

And indeed, the South looks North and sees the U.S. growling: the Wall rises in Arizona. Eagle Pass, Texas, adopts a zero-tolerance policy called Operation Streamline, in which border agents stop sending migrants home and send them to jail instead. Colorado proposes paying prison inmates 60-c- a day to pick the peppers once harvested by undocumented workers. If Bush's hard line can persuade enough Republicans to embrace "comprehensive" reform--a balance of tough enforcement and some eventual reckoning with the 12 million illegal immigrants already here--then he can test whether, on this one issue at least, he can find common ground with Democrats, who have a 700-page bill of their own.

But he's already lost some Republican allies, such as anyone running for President, and he can't count on conservative Democrats going along with anything that even whispers of amnesty for illegal workers. Meanwhile, liberals deplore his harsh approach, with its $10,000 fines and $3,500 fees for temporary work visas. Thousands of protesters threaded through the streets of L.A. carrying signs saying LOVE THY NEIGHBOR, DON'T DEPORT HIM. Their champion, Senator Edward Kennedy, whom Bush will need in his corner to get anything passed, is still fuming after the March raid of a Massachusetts factory, in which agents swept up undocumented workers and shipped them to detention facilities halfway across the country, leaving children stranded at school and a baby, cut off from a nursing mother, hospitalized for dehydration.

Bush set August as a goal for getting something done--a nod perhaps to the political calendar and to the fact that in Washington, at least, his own guest-worker visa will expire soon.