What’s most interesting about the Illinois-14 race is that hardcore immigration opponents lost again and with one of their standout candidates.

In 2002, Oberweis’ criticism of Bush’s immigration stance essentially made him persona non-grata to the national party and that relationship didn’t improve with the 2004 race. The difference this year was that Hastert shepherded him through the national party because of the bad blood between Hastert and Lauzen.

Oberweis staked out the hardcore send back 12 million people immediately and no exceptions kind of policy and not only embraced the position, but embraced fairly radical anti-immigrant activist organizations.

Most amazing is that John McCain, long a reasonable voice on the immigration debate embraced Oberweis as McCain’s flip flop to the dark side of several issues continues.

Oberweis is a Board of Director for NumbersUSA which is one of the leading right wing anti-immigration groups.

He’s spoken at Illinois Minutemen meetings such as this one on May 6, 2006 mntmn017.wav

And despite railing on the businesses using undocumented workers, Oberweis Dairy never wondered why the company cleaning for them could afford to do the work they were doing.  Turns out the contractor were paying below minimum wage for undocumented workers.

In his hubris, he made one of the funniest political commercials ever, which was also filled with falsehoods:

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Now, his son decided to sue the DCCC for pointing out the story about hiring a contractor that paid undocumented workers under the minimum wage:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/r08qdqN_fbk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]