You wouldn’t think the man who made his mark in Washington as the knight-errant of campaign-finance reform and whose name is rarely written without the word maverick attached would ever meet a cause he deemed hopeless. But that was pretty much where Arizona Senator John McCain was a couple of weeks ago in his quest to transform the nation’s immigration laws and set on the path to becoming citizens the estimated 11 million people who are here illegally. When the proposition had been tested, as recently as December in the House of Representatives, the result was a bill that went just about as far as possible in the other direction, one that would build two layers of reinforced fence along much of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and declare everyone a felon who is illegally on this side of it. But then, as the implications of that bill started to sink in, protesters began pouring into the streets of cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to vent their outrage. They were illegal immigrants, and their American-citizen children emerging from behind their shield of invisibility, plus legions of voters who count the newcomers as family, friends and neighbors, in numbers “bigger than the Vietnam War demonstrations,” McCain says. “I never could have predicted that we would have 20,000 people in Arizona or half to three-quarters of a million in Los Angeles.” Something almost as remarkable started to happen inside the Capitol. One by one, Senate colleagues started coming to him privately whom McCain had written off as “rock-ribbed” opponents to the legalization that he and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy had been working on for a year. There were maybe 10 of them, McCain says, all asking the same questions: “Isn’t there a compromise on this? Isn’t there some way to come together on this?” Then came something that McCain had even less reason to expect. With hundreds on the Capitol Plaza chanting “Let our people stay!” the Senate Judiciary Committee last week gave its imprimatur to legislation very much like the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill and sent it on to the Senate floor, where it stands a good chance of passing. But the demonstrators were also sparking other reactions, especially after they ignored the pleas of rally organizers to wave only American flags. There was the scene in Apache Junction, Ariz., in which a few Hispanic students raised a Mexican flag over their high school and another group took it down and burned it. In Houston the principal at Reagan High School was reprimanded for raising a Mexican flag below the U.S. and Texas ones, in solidarity with his largely Hispanic student body. Tom Tancredo, the Republican from Colorado who has become Congress’s loudest anti-immigrant voice, said his congressional offices in Colorado and Washington were swamped by more than 1,000 phone calls, nearly all from people furious about the protests in which demonstrators “were blatantly stating their illegal presence in the country and waving Mexican flags.” Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, describing the marchers, used language usually applied to the tantrums of children: “When they act out like that, they lose me.” Virgil Goode, a Republican Congressman from Virginia, said, “If you are here illegally and you want to fly the Mexican flag, go to Mexico.”
