It’s not an officially sanctioned activity of the GOP. But at least some Republicans are trying to mend fences with Hispanic voters so as to improve the party’s prospects in 2012 and beyond.

This is one of the major goals behind the Hispanic Leadership Network, a new organization that wants to act as a bridge between Hispanics and the “center-right movement.” It recently held its inaugural conference in Miami, and I was invited to participate as part of a media panel.

The event was co-chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush – who has spent most of his life around Hispanics. That includes being married for nearly four decades to Mexican-born Columba Garnica Gallo de Bush.

Bush raised eyebrows when he told those gathered at the conference that, because of the phenomenal growth of the Hispanic community, it would be “incredibly stupid” for Republicans to ignore the Hispanic vote.

Come to think of it, it would be even more stupid for Republicans to continue to do what they do now: antagonize Hispanics by using them as piñatas to entertain white constituents – or, worse, portraying them as bogey men to scare up votes.  This is the modus operandi for too many in the GOP. They reach for low-hanging fruit by pursuing non-Hispanics and,they think, the best way to do that is to use Hispanics as a convenient foil.

This is a dangerous game these Republicans are playing, given the fact that Hispanics are projected to account for 30 percent of the U.S. population by 2050.  So it’s a good thing they have people like Bush watching their back.

Not that this is easy.  It seems not every conservative is in the mood to kiss and make up with Hispanics.  Some still want to fight, and they don’t mind first having to slug it out with Jeb Bush or anyone else who is offering Hispanics an olive branch.

This includes the racist and right-wing website, vdare.com, which published a snarky piece about the conference – the basic point of which seemed to be that these kinds of overtures were themselves racist.

Sure, and when firemen show up to put out a fire, they’re secretly feeding the flames.

Then there was radio talk show host Mark Levin who quickly pounced on Bush for “race-baiting” and called his remarks “divisive” and “destructive of conservatism.” Levin also accused Bush of not being “that bright” and lacking a basic “understanding of the greatness of this nation” and the Constitution.

Levin has it all mixed up. Repairing the breach between Republicans and Hispanics won’t destroy conservatism. In fact, it could help save it. And the greatness of this nation is wrapped up in its immigrant tradition, which some conservatives want to destroy by limiting legal immigration.

Besides, what is this to Levin? It’s not like Bush insulted the Republican Party, and Levin has to rush and defend its honor. Bush simply warned his fellow Republicans that they couldn’t afford to ignore Hispanics. Nothing more. Does Levin want to take the opposite view, and argue that they should ignore them? Talk about doing things that are stupid.

Meanwhile, even among those who are willing to go along with the idea that the Republican Party does have a problem with Hispanics, there are those who insist that the problem limited to tone and that the fundamental message is fine.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As I said during my appearance on the media panel, the fundamentals are not sound. When it comes to immigration, the Republican message is toxic. There is too much dishonesty, too much racism, and too many simple solutions to what remains a complicated problem.

If the GOP wants to make a serious play for Hispanic voters in 2012 and beyond, then that has to change. Yesterday.

Ruben Navarrette is a syndicated columnist.

The theory holds true in the case of the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson – a tragedy that resulted in the killing of six people and the wounding of fourteen, including Giffords.

Soon after the shooting, word spread to a gathering of the Maricopa County GOP in Phoenix. In attendance was DeeDee Garcia Blasé, the president and founder of Somos Republicans, a national organization of Hispanic Republicans. Garcia Blasé was shocked at the news, but doubly shocked by what followed.

“I heard snickers in the distance and muffled voices asserting that the shooting was probably ‘done by an illegal,” she said.

In the days that followed, conservative radio talk show host Chip Franklin, morning host at San Diego’s 600AM-KOGO, freely admitted that he thought the same thing when he first heard the news. Nice people. Just not particularly informed. The alleged gunman, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, is not an illegal immigrant. In fact, he isn’t an immigrant at all. Loughner was born in the United States.  He’s one of ours. Lucky us.

Do you suppose that this rush to judgment is exactly what Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was talking about? After the shooting, Dupnik said at a press conference that tempers run high in the desert due to the vitriol of political discourse and that Arizona has become “the mecca for bigotry and prejudice.”

In the Grand Canyon State, there is no escaping the issue of illegal immigration. In fact, leading up to the midterm elections, polls showed that it was the number one concern of voters. And, as this story proves, Arizonans literally see illegal immigrants everywhere – even where they don’t exist. Maybe the people who assumed the assailant was an illegal immigrant were thinking about the fact that Giffords is a hawk on border security and someone who has defended Arizona’s tough immigration law as simply a response to “years of federal inaction and neglect.” Or maybe they weren’t thinking at all.

It’s more likely that these people were blinded by prejudice and guided by fear of those who are different. Many Americans see illegal immigrants as menacing and dangerous. And yet, interestingly, that perception doesn’t stop them from handing over their children to illegal immigrant nannies.

The story might have ended there. But as we now know, there is a shred of truth to the assumption that a Latino was somehow involved in the shooting. As it turns out, one was. Twenty-year-old Daniel Hernandez is an intern in Giffords’s office who, while at the scene, bravely ran toward the gunfire that others were fleeing. Hernandez, who is studying nursing at the University of Arizona, treated Giffords’s wounds and held her head in his lap to ensure that she didn’t choke on her own blood. He also asked her to squeeze his hand to let him know that she was okay, and rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital.

Hernandez has been credited with helping to save Giffords’s life, and he’s been called a hero. And, while – as he told a memorial service in Tucson attended by President Obama – he rejects the title, many Americans would say that it fits just fine.

Daniel Hernandez, this hero intern, represents the very best that Arizona has to offer. The Republican Party officials who unfairly and recklessly jumped to hurtful conclusions without having all the facts? Not so much.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, an NPR commentator, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

The answer to both questions is: “Yes.”

Someone needs to spell all this out for Arianna Huffington, the founder and editor-in-chief of the wildly successful and just as wildly liberal Huffington Post. The New York-based website, which has an estimated worth of $200 million, does not publish enough Latino writers. No one argues that, certainly not in a country where Latinos are on their way to making up 30 percent of the US population by 2050.

That omission is itself interesting since liberals are always lecturing the rest of us about the need to embrace diversity. Apparently, they need to heed their own sermons.

It’s also a problem. Any media entity – website, newspaper, television network, etc. – that doesn’t keep pace with the country’s changing demographic will soon become irrelevant.

The solution, decided Huffington, is not to recruit more Latino writers to write for the website. That is too obvious. She prefers instead to create a special section for Latinos.

(Another site – for African-Americans – is also on the drawing board.)

This kind of cyber-segregation is creepy, and it’s exactly the wrong path. But it’s not entirely surprising. When liberals try to do the right thing and be more inclusive, they still can’t seem to surrender the need to maintain control. That causes them to open the door only a crack, which in turn reminds everyone just how exclusive their club really is. The message here is: Latinos don’t write well enough to sit at the grownup table, so we’ll put them at the children’s table instead.

Besides, Latinos are an integral and inseparable part of the American community.  Go to Santa Fe, and you’ll find Latinos whose families have lived on that soil for more than 400 years. They have fought and died in every war since the American Revolution, and they represent a higher ratio of Medal of Honor recipients than any other ethnic group. Latinos helped build this country by taking jobs than no one else wanted, while putting up with humiliation and state-sponsored discrimination. And through it all, they’ve loved America even when it wasn’t clear that America loved them back.

Huffington seems to think that you need a Latino section to cover Latino issues. But that raises the question: What are Latino issues anyway?

It’s true that Latinos care a lot about a hot-button issue like immigration, especially when they’re under-fire and politicians are busy reloading. But polls show that the top three issues for Latinos are always generic: education, jobs, and health care. Those aren’t Latino issues but American issues.

Huffington could have handled this whole project much better. She could have hired more Latino writers for the main website, and run more pieces dealing with Latinos. Not to be politically correct, but to survive the tidal wave of changing demographics.

Or she could have launched a stand-alone product aimed at Latino readers. If she had done that, then there would have been no problem. It’s not condescending to have a Spanish-language newspaper like La Opinion, or a Latino-themed magazine like PODER. And there is nothing inappropriate about Latino-themed websites like Red, Brown and Blue. In each case, we’re talking about a separate media product specifically aimed at Latinos. Not a mainstream product with a Latino section.

If Arianna Huffington wants to build a new home for Latino writers, then more power to her. We could certainly use the shelter. But all she’s done so far is to invite Latino writers into her existing home – while requiring them to use the servants’ entrance.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, an NPR commentator, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

The word is “illegal.” You and I know that word to simply describe something that is against the law. But, to those activists who agitate on behalf of illegal immigrants – including people who favor an open border and a suspension of all laws against unlawful entry into the United States – the word is an unfair and dehumanizing slur against a group of people who are more accurately described as “undocumented.”

To this bunch, “illegal” is a bad word. And those who use it are bad people. Ironically, that includes a wide swath of the liberal media that often expresses support for comprehensive immigration reform and condemnation of reactionary measures like virtually anything coming out of Arizona these days.

These are natural allies for those on the left, and so it makes little sense that radical left-wing activists would declare war on them. But that’s what happened when The Fresno Bee, the largest newspaper in Central California, ran a seven-day series called “In Denial” which explored the contradictions in popular attitudes and public policies over “illegal” immigration. The series asked: “We’re unhappy about illegal immigrants. So why do we make it so easy for them to live and work here?”

Good question. It points to the hypocrisy and dishonesty in a debate that often seems disconnected from reality. People talk about ending illegal immigration, but is there a national consensus that Americans want to see it ended? And if it were to end, who would do our chores for us?

These are the kinds of questions that one would have hoped people would have asked following the Bee series, but instead the conversation was hijacked by a silly and juvenile controversy over – yep, you guessed it – the “I-word.”

Like most of the media, the Bee uses the term “illegal immigrants.” The newspaper follows recommendations from the Associated Press Stylebook to employ neutral terms for reporting. In doing so, it eschews pressure from the left to use terms like “undocumented workers.” But it also resists pressure from the right to use the more inflammatory term, “illegal alien.” In this case, the middle-of-the-road approach is also the most reasonable and most accurate.

But not to Michael Medrano, an English professor at Fresno City College, who started a Facebook group that urged people to boycott the newspaper during the series. “HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT ILLEGAL,” Medrano has written. “Being called such is a violation of their human rights.”

Wrong, Professor. Human beings may not be illegal. But they can commit illegal acts. And the acknowledgment of that fact isn’t a violation of anyone’s human rights.

Elsewhere, another group of activists have launched a national “Drop the I-Word” campaign, which claims it is dedicated to eradicating the use of the word “illegals” in everyday life and in the media. The campaign urges everyone to sign a pledge not to use what it calls a “racist” word and offers a toolkit for journalists and organizations to use in discussing immigration.

Oh brother. Speaking as a Latino journalist who has been on the job for 20 years, I’m sure I speak for many of my colleagues when I say: I don’t need no stinkin’ toolkit.

But these people need to get a clue. There is nothing wrong with the word, “illegal.” Or with the phrase, “illegal immigrant.” They’re not demeaning or dehumanizing. They’re descriptive.

Besides, this isn’t about a word. It’s about what the Fresno Bee series tried to examine: denial. Many on the left are in complete denial that the people they’re trying to help have done anything wrong, broken any laws, violated any statutes or trampled any borders.

Guess what? They did. And we have a word to describe that sort of activity: illegal.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, a regular commentator for NPR, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

It was a great idea. It embodied that concept that you can’t get something for nothing. Instead, here, participants would have gotten something (legal status) for something (attending college or joining the military). It also happened to be the last best hope that Congress would do anything even faintly resembling comprehensive immigration reform before mid-century.

Of course, the DREAM Act had a troubled history. The idea of swapping college or military service for legal status isn’t new. It was first proposed way back in 2001, and it spent nearly ten years on Congress’s back burner. When that happens, it’s a giveaway that lawmakers in both parties find themselves in a tough spot.

In this case, conservatives knew they couldn’t very well support a measure that many in their base consider “amnesty” for college students; but they were afraid to come out against a group of individuals who seem sympathetic to much of the general public. Meanwhile, liberals were inclined to support the measure; but they were afraid that tackling the immigration issue piecemeal in this way would undermine whatever support there might be for a more sweeping comprehensive immigration reform bill.

But, after the 2010 election, there was a new sense of urgency to get something done and try to make the DREAM Act a reality. Perhaps Democrats were eager to repay the support of Latino voters. Or perhaps, with Republicans poised to take the control of the House of Representatives in January, some liberals concluded that this was their last chance to get the bill through.

Whatever the reason, the House of Representatives recently scheduled a floor debate on the bill and held a vote. C-Span viewers were treated to the spectacle of GOP Congressman saying a host of ridiculous things, such as when Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-CA, suggested that the bill would give college admissions “preferences” to illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens and thus amounted to an “affirmative action amnesty.”

When the votes were cast, to the surprise to many, the bill passed – mostly along party lines.

Then the spotlight shifted to the Senate, where those who oppose a piece of legislation have an additional weapon at their disposal: the filibuster. The concern of Democratic supporters of the DREAM Act was that Republicans might filibuster the bill, and that this would amount to a humiliating defeat. So naturally, they did the logical thing and simply surrendered.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the bill from consideration when it became clear that he didn’t have enough votes to avoid a filibuster. He might re-submit it, or he might not.

It doesn’t matter. The DREAM Act is dead. That is clear. The only question is whether supporters should direct their anger at the party that attacked the bill, or the one that abandoned it.

Answer: Both.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, a regular commentator for NPR, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

They don’t understand that it’s an economic phenomenon and not strictly a law enforcement issue. Poor people in a neighboring country who can’t feed their children but could earn 10 times as much next door aren’t going to let little things like a long treacherous journey across the desert or a shiny billion-dollar border fence stand in their way. U.S. authorities could deport 5,000 illegal immigrants a day, and it won’t do any good because those people will always come back – until they have a better alternative to keep them at home.

And they don’t understand that enforcement-only is not a workable strategy. We can’t simply round up and deport our way out of our immigration fix. While Americans have every right to deport each and every one of the estimated 10.3 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States, that’s never going to happen. And even if it were to happen, most of the deportees would (see above) come right back.  And before it was over, we’d take those millionaires who currently do a brisk business smuggling illegal immigrants and provide enough additional clients to make them into billionaires.

We know that Republicans don’t understand these things because they continue to try to make the case that this is simply a matter of desire and will, and that the only reason we have so many illegal immigrants in this country is because the Obama Administration has so little interest in removing them.

To force the issue, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee – Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Jon Kyl of Arizona, John Cornyn of Texas, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Jeff Sessions of Alabama — have signed a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano how much money she would need to remove every illegal immigrant her department comes in contact with. Specifically, the letter asks Napolitano to “detail exactly how much funding” would be needed to “ensure that enforcement of the law occurs consistently for every illegal alien encountered and apprehended.”

What’s the point of this stunt? The answer is obvious: It would take mucho dinero.

John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently told me that Congress appropriates $2.6 billion each year for the detention and removal of illegal immigrants. The total annual budget for the department is $5.7 billion, but it naturally has other functions.

With the allotted $2.6 billion, ICE is able to apprehend, process, and remove a maximum of 400,000 immigrants per year. (From October 2009 to September 2010, the Obama administration deported 392,862 people.) Multiply each side of that equation by 25, and we could remove 10 million illegal immigrants for a mere $65 billion. Give or take a billion.

Ok, where does that leave us? We’re not really going to spend $65 billion on the futile exercise of a mass deportation just to make us feel as if we’re dealing with a problem that we’re simply kicking down the road. Government has a million and one other uses for that money, and we’re not going to spend it removing people from the United States that we can be reasonably certain will re-enter at will.

So this is nothing more than political theater, the kind that reveals for all to see just how trivial Senate Republicans must think the immigration issue really is. They’re not interested in doing anything but using this highly emotional issue for their own partisan benefit.

The cost of deporting 10.3 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States? $65 billion.

The reward of getting Republicans to stop playing “gotcha” and start getting serious about fixing an immigration system that all sides of this debate agree is broken? Priceless.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, a regular commentator for NPR, and a weekly contributor to CNN.COM.

And while, just a few weeks ago, the chances that Congress would pass the DREAM Act made the whole idea seem more like a pipedream, the legislation is back with a vengeance.

Democrats are threatening to push the bill through Congress in the lame duck session as what President Obama calls a “down payment” on comprehensive immigration reform. According to Politico.com, in a meeting at the White House, Obama recently told a handful of Latino lawmakers that he wants Congress to use the lame duck session to pass the DREAM Act. Obama even promised to call reluctant lawmakers personally. That is quite a departure from the timid and hands-off approach that Obama has taken with immigration in the last two years.

Meanwhile, both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have said that they plan to bring the DREAM Act to the floor before the end of the year.

What’s striking about all this is that it wasn’t that long ago that the DREAM Act was considered the stepchild of the immigration reform movement. The idea was first proposed in 2001, and it gelled into a bill a few years later. For years, the bill languished on the Congressional back burner. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Bush White House, a major proponent of comprehensive immigration reform, wasn’t interested. Neither was the Obama White House.

Put bluntly, the DREAM Act was considered small potatoes. At a time when immigration reformers were pushing for legal status on behalf of as many as 10 million illegal immigrants, the idea of bestowing that benefit on just 600,000 young people – and then only on the condition that they complete two years of college or join the military – seemed to many like addressing, in a words of one Latino congressman I spoke to, a “sliver of a sliver” of the problem. What about those illegal immigrants who don’t go to college, or those who opt for vocational school? What about children and the elderly? What about hardworking day laborers who dream of having their own businesses one day? Better to grab the web whole, the argument goes, and not settle for a half measure.

Complicating matters, there is also a segment of the immigration reform community that has quietly opposed the DREAM Act because they believed that the legislation could actually hurt the chances for passing a comprehensive plan. The thinking is that the young people who would benefit from such a law – many of them brought here as children by their parents — provide just the kind of positive and uplifting images that reformers need to pass a larger bill. Take them out of the political equation by offering them a separate deal, and we might not see a large-scale overhaul of the immigration system for another 20 years.

But now, all of a sudden, everyone is talking about the DREAM Act as if it’s the best thing since warm tortillas, and the same Democrats in Congress who ignored the bill for years suddenly can’t wait to get it passed.

What happened? For one thing, the midterm elections happened. Latino voters delivered for Democrats at a time when many other Americans were voting Republican. In fact, in Nevada, Latinos singlehandedly kept Harry Reid from being bounced from the Senate. Ditto in California, where they saved Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer from the unemployment line.

Now some Latino leaders are asking for payback, in the form of the DREAM Act. And why choose this piece of immigration reform legislation? With both parties so reluctant to confront the larger issue, what else is there?

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist, a CNN.COM contributor and a commentator for National Public Radio.

But sometimes what a Harvard student needs is the real thing: a U.S. passport. Or, for that matter, a birth certificate, Social Security card, or any proof of legal residency to avoid being deported to a country you don’t know.

That sort of thing would have come in handy for Harvard sophomore Eric Balderas, a 19-year-old biology major who recently became internationally known after he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for being in the United States unlawfully. The arrest occurred on June 7 as Balderas tried to board an airplane to Boston after visiting his mother in San Antonio. Because he lost his Mexican passport, he tried to board the plane using only his Harvard student ID card and his Mexican consular card. That tipped off authorities. So Balderas was quickly slated for deportation to Mexico.

This didn’t make sense to a lot of people, and the case triggered international outcry, support from Harvard officials, involvement by U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, and a lobbying effort on Facebook that drew more than 5,000 supporters.

Why, supporters wanted to know, would the federal government want to deport Balderas to Mexico when he hasn’t been there since he was 4 years old. Besides, coming here fifteen years ago was hardly his idea; it was his parents who made the decision to bring him without the United States without proper documents. Also, with all the hand-wringing about how many U.S.-born students perform so poorly academically, wouldn’t the United States want to keep an intelligent and driven former high school valedictorian, Harvard student, and aspiring cancer researcher? Is this really the kind of export we want to send to Mexico? Why? So he can contribute to that country and not this one?

Good arguments, one and all. Good enough, it seems, to have convinced ICE officials to back off and abandon their changes to deport Balderas. Instead, they granted him “deferred action,” a discretionary authority that federal immigration officials can use to halt a specific deportation based on the merits of an individual’s case. Balderas can stay in the country until the deferred status expires. When it does, he can apply to have it renewed. In the meantime, while he remains in the United States, Balderas can finish his studies at Harvard and apply for a work permit.

This particular story had a happy ending, and that’s great. But not everyone is so lucky. Not every college student in the United States, who is also an illegal immigrant, has the benefit of having Harvard fight for them, or U.S. senators lobby on their behalf because their story is so compelling and their plight so sympathetic. There’s no question that the main reason Balderas captured the imagination of the media and, in turn, won the support of powerful members of Congress was because of his affiliation with Harvard. But there can’t be one set of rules for Harvard students, and another set of rules for everyone else.

That’s why we need for Congress to stop sitting on its hands and finally pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Both Democrats and Republicans have actively ducked the issue because, in each case, the debate divides their party. That needs to stop. Congress needs to fix a broken system.

And while they’re at it, lawmakers should also approve the Dream Act. This is a piece of legislation, introduced in 2001 with bipartisan support, that would allow young people who are in the country illegally to apply for legal residency if they finish two years of college or join the military.

It’s a good deal for participants, who get a chance to earn their spot in our society. And it’s a great deal for the United States, which gets to keep precisely the kind of people who countries all over the world dream of having.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist, and a regular contributor to CNN.COM.

This fall, Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce is expected to introduce a bill that is already getting a fair amount of national attention. The legislation would deny state-issued birth certificates to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants – those so-called “anchor babies” that nativists and others on the right have been trying to marginalize for more than a decade. And why is that? It’s because U.S. citizenship acts as a protective cloak over these children and prevents those on the far right from doing to them what they’d really like to do: deport them along with their illegal immigrant parents.

It’s an ugly and punitive crusade that started in Congress more than a decade ago, and luckily never went anywhere – not because Democrats stopped it but because others on the right worked to undermine it for the good of the Republican Party. In the late 1990’s, the member of Congress leading the fight against “birthright citizenship” was Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-CA. The San Diego-area congressman proposed a bill to limit the privilege to the children of U.S. citizens. The legislation didn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t even get a hearing from some of Bilbray’s fellow Republicans, who rightly cringed at the idea of visiting the sins of the parents onto the children.

When Bilbray lost a bid for re-election in 2000, he went to work as a lobbyist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a restrictionist outfit that puts the lie to the claim by some that the immigration debate is only concerned with cracking down on illegal immigrants because the organization is just as desperate to keep out legal immigrants. When he ran for Congress again in 2006, Bilbray got elected after warning elderly voters that one day their grandchildren wouldn’t choose to take Spanish in high school as much as “have to” take Spanish in high school. Once back in Washington, Bilbray continued to milk the immigration issue for all it was worth. During a recent television interview, while defending Arizona’s racial profiling law, Bilbray insisted that detecting illegal immigrants isn’t that difficult and suggested that police “will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of – right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes.”

This is what we have come to expect from Bilbray. He’s not a serious person who says serious things. And the good news is that his anti-citizenship bill never enjoyed any serious support, even from members of his own party.

But now comes Arizona, with its unique — and undoubtedly unconstitutional — self-serve approach to immigration reform. First, state lawmakers deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law based on nothing more than a suspicion that someone is in the country illegally. Now, they’re threatening to disenfranchise the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, as if the states had the power to decide on whom we should bestow U.S. citizenship. They don’t.

I guess someone was sleeping in high school civics when the teacher covered the 14th Amendment. Here’s a refresher:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

It’s pretty cut and dried. It’s also the law of the land, which makes it all the more curious that a crowd that claims to cherish the concept of law and order would be, when it suits their purposes, so quick to brush it aside.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to CNN.COM.

One minute, they’re badmouthing the federal government for being ineffective in securing the border and stopping illegal immigration. The next, they’re defending the state law by insisting that it’s a mirror image of federal law, the same approach that we were just told is ineffective — but apparently still worth emulating.

One minute, they’re insisting that they care about the rule of law and that’s why they oppose illegal immigration. The next, they’re declaring their support for a state law that is blatantly unconstitutional — or, in other words, contrary to the rule of law.

But perhaps the biggest contradiction of all has to do with racial profiling, which is, after all, the whole purpose of SB 1070. One minute, supporters are asserting that there is no way Latinos will be profiled by local and state police under this law. In fact, they say, the law – in several places – specifically prohibits racial profiling. Thus, they assume, what is prohibited cannot happen.

How quaint. It’s worth noting here that racial profiling is already prohibited by federal statute, and yet it still happens. It happened, for several years, on the New Jersey Turnpike where, as state officials formally acknowledged a decade ago, state troopers searched African-American and Latino motorists with much greater frequency than they did white drivers. Moral: Just because something is against the law doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

That’s not even the biggest problem, however. While this idea is still out there – that police won’t racially profile Latinos who they suspect of being in the country illegally – supporters come back with a second punch. But, they say, in the unlikely event that Latinos were profiled, such a thing would be totally justified given that most illegal immigrants come from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. After all, they say, in a state like Arizona, which borders Mexico, who should police be looking for if not Latinos?

One reader wrote me to say: You suggest that we not use “racial profiling” (a politically bad word) to determine if someone caught near the Mexican border is here unlawfully. Would you suspect a blue-eyed blond to have crossed the border into our country from Mexico? Of course we must suspect Spanish speaking “Latinos” as possible illegal immigrants!

Another wrote: What bothers me is that you are vehemently opposed to the Arizona law recently enacted. You call it racial profiling, presumably against Latinos. Well, sir, who is coming across our borders illegally? It certainly are (sic) not Swedes, Inuit, Estonians, Bosnians, etc. It is Mexicans. So, really, the law has to target them because that is the group coming over.”

Absolutely unbelievable. What rhetorical dexterity. Obviously, supporters can’t have it both ways. They can’t insist that a practice won’t occur. Honest it won’t. Then turn around and insist that it is perfectly logical and thus likely to occur if police do their jobs correctly. One of these things can be true but not both.

Of course, the first claim is meaningless public relations. It is just garnish on the plate. It allows supporters to pretend to oppose racial profiling in the hopes of building their own credibility and the credibility of the shady law they support.

It’s the second claim that matters. That one they believe. They obviously think that racial profiling isn’t just justifiable but also effective and essential to good law enforcement. And they want it used in this case to ferret out illegal immigrants by focusing on the group of people that most resembles them: Latinos.

In battle, the biggest break you get is when an adversary steps from the shadows, shows himself and makes clear his intentions. Don’t look now. But supporters of SB 1070 are standing in full view.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to CNN.COM.