IMMIGMAYHEM: WHY THE GOP WILL CAVE IN ON REFORM.

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON Local View

JUDGING from the cold shoulder President George W. Bush received when he called for a humane, balanced immigration reform law in his recent Orange County speech, it seems like conservative Republicans won't budge one inch from their demand for a crackdown on illegal immigration. But I suspect that, eventually, most of them will.

With stratospheric gas prices, the Iraq quagmire, creeping inflation and Bush's Depression-level low ratings, the Republicans are in trouble. Polls show that if the national elections were held today, Democrats would grab a majority in the House and make deep inroads into the Republican majority in the Senate. The political peril is so great that the GOP can't afford to alienate its one tenuous voting trump card the Latino vote.

Bush knows this better than anyone else. He also knows that immigration reform is the key to getting those votes.

The Latino vote numbers tell the story. In 2002, the "National Survey of Latinos: The Latino Electorate," conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, found that one-fifth of Latinos were registered Republicans. In the 2004 presidential election, Bush got more than one-third of the Latino vote. These are votes that Democrats could once take for granted. By losing them, John Kerry lost the White House.

It's not just the votes, but where those votes come from that cinched the victory for Bush, and could be decisive in 2008. The greatest number of Latino voters is in California, Florida, Texas and New York. In the next two years, the Latino vote will swell in Illinois and New Jersey. The number of Latino elected officials doubled and tripled in those states in 2004.

These are the key electoral states that virtually determine who will sit in the White House for years to come.

Bush got Latino vote support in 2004 by pumping millions into ads on Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. The ads saturated the airwaves in New Mexico, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. The money was well spent. Bush won the four states, and he did it with substantial Latino vote support.

Republicans didn't just spend heavily on Spanish-language ads, they also enlisted a bevy of talking heads which, at times, included Bush with his weekly radio broadcasts in bad, broken Spanish to address Latino voters. They adroitly tailored their political pitches to their Spanish-speaking audiences in Florida, Texas and California and other Southwestern states, complete with local accents and idioms.

If Republicans can hold a substantial part of those votes in 2004, and bolster those numbers with thousands more undocumented workers transformed into citizens and voters, that could potentially result in millions more Republican loyalists.

Then there are the evangelicals.

Latino evangelicals, both legal and illegal immigrants, make up about one-fourth of the membership of evangelical churches in America, and their numbers are getting bigger. They are staunchly anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion and pro-family values. They are prime political pickings for the GOP. Latino evangelicals flexed their political muscle in March when they forced several prominent national evangelical groups to backpedal fast from their hard-nosed stance on immigration reform.

There is a cautionary tale for the Republicans in playing fast and loose with the immigration issue. During the hard-fought Virginia Republican gubernatorial campaign in November 2005, Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore fanned the anti-immigrant flames with a series of 11th hour anti-illegal immigration campaign ads. It backfired. The spots cost him crucial votes in Northern Virginia, where the Latino vote has leaped in the past few years.

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie read the political leaves and sounded the alarm bell. In a Wall Street Journal editorial in April, he firmly put the party on notice that it would be the political kiss of death for them to appear to be an anti-immigrant party. Gillespie crunched the numbers and noted that Republicans can't win without the key swing states of New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Nevada that Bush won in 2004.

Bush and the Republicans rivet their political eye on more than Latino population numbers and votes. They also see their dollars. In politics, money doesn't talk, it screams, and the disposable income of Latinos soared to nearly $1 trillion during the 1990s, and continues to climb. Credit card, shipping and communications companies, trade and tourist associations, hotels, airlines, and sports franchises are now feverishly marketing products to snatch a bigger share of their dollars. Republican campaign officials will do the same.

Republican senators warn that it's absolutely imperative to pass an immigration-reform bill, and that the bill should look pretty much like the one Bush wants. For Republicans, it's more than a matter of fairness, it's also a matter of votes.