I’m probably giving these right-wing immigrant-hating folks more attention than they deserve, but the American Legal Immigration PAC, based in North Carolina, is calling for the arrest of Meg Whitman and her former housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, for violation of immigration laws:

In response to the explosive revelations that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman employed illegal alien Nicky Diaz for nine years, ALIPAC is asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and charge both Whitman and Diaz for numerous immigration and employment law violations.

This is something of a stunt by the bigots, but it does indicate the broader unease starting to be felt by Whitman’s anti-immigrant base. They’ve never quite been happy with her stance, as her meltdown on the John and Ken show indicated.

Whitman was always in a precarious position on this issue, partly through her own doing, partly because of the nature of today’s California Republican Party. That party has become not only virulently anti-immigrant, but anti-Latino. They see themselves as a white people’s party, defending the state against “Mexifornia.”

Whitman could not hope to win the nomination or keep her base engaged for the general election without appeasing this anti-immigrant base. Yet Whitman also cannot hope to win the general election without getting Latino votes. Whitman has tried to reach out to Latinos, but that effort is always compromised by Whitman’s need to keep her base happy, a base that doesn’t like her appeals to Latinos – John and Ken criticized her for having Spanish-language ads.

This isn’t to let Whitman off the hook, of course. But her experience shows that the California Republican Party has decide it is better to be unelectable than it is to be open to the fact that California is – and has always been – home to a significant Spanish-speaking population who deserve the same rights and prosperity as the rest of us.

Instead of confronting this squarely, the right-wing is now trying to say “Dems do it too,” lamely pointing to someone who worked for Assemblymember Hector de la Torre and who was later deported and trying to pin this on Jerry Brown – as if he personally knows the immigration status of every single person in the state of California.

It’s a pathetic attempt to deflect attention from the fact that this scandal has exposed Whitman as a liar and shown that she really can’t have it both ways on immigration – either she sides with justice and fairness, or she sides with the immigrant-hating base in her own party. So far she’s chosen the latter, and now she’s reaping what she sowed.