June 26, 2007 03:36 PM UTC

At Least It's Not Your State Party

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• by: Colorado Pols

Suppose there was an issue that’s really, really important to your party’s platform–immigration, for example.

Now, if you were in charge of the party, you’d take extra-special care not to do anything that makes you look like a complete hypocrite, wouldn’t you? Apparently not if you’re the California Republican Party, as the Washington Post reports:

The California Republican Party is having a tough time with immigrants — but not because of the usual debates over Mexican border crossers. For the nation’s largest state GOP, the troubles hit closer to home.

First the party was forced to admit it had hired a Canadian citizen with no political experience to be its new political director, under the H-1B visa program — a program that grants temporary visas. Now revelations have surfaced that the party’s chief operating officer, an Australian citizen, was ordered deported in 2001, spent one month in jail and then filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging wrongful arrest. The officer resigned on Sunday.

The California GOP platform supports federal action to end illegal immigration and calls for an end to non-emergency assistance to illegal immigrants…

Shortly after he was hired, [Australian citizen and California GOP operations director Michael] Kamburowski, in turn, hired Canadian national Christopher Matthews to be the party’s political director, leaving the top two paid jobs in the state party in the hands of noncitizens.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday that Kamburowski arrived in the United States in 1995 and later married and then divorced a citizen. The Immigration and Naturalization Service began trying to deport him in 2001, but Kamburowski’s lawsuit claims he did not receive the notices. He was jailed after an immigration hearing in 2004 and released on bond one month later.