Harriet Miers was strike one. Dubai was strike two.

Will immigration prove strike three for the Bush administration?

For five years, George W. Bush kept a stronger hold on the support of his party than any president since perhaps Franklin Roosevelt. Not even Ronald Reagan had to worry less about internal dissent than President Bush.

But over the past year, the President has provoked two ferocious party mutinies. Now he is goading Republicans into a third, and this looks likely to explode into the angriest of them all--one that could split the party and cost Republicans control of Congress.

The Republican rank-and-file are seething over immigration. The Republican party is the party of America's white working class: In 2004, Bush defeated John Kerry among white women who had not graduated from high school. And the influx of newcomers is squeezing the livelihoods of these Republican voters.

The Center for Immigration Studies--an immigration-restrictionist group known for the meticulous quality of its economic work--last week released a new study demonstrating that native-born workers gained only 9% of the net new jobs created since the year 2000. The rest, 90-plus-percent, went to foreign-born workers.

Some eight million immigrants have arrived in the United States since Bush was elected president, half of them illegally. This huge increase in the supply of low-skilled labour may explain why wages for the bottom half of the labour market--some 75 million Americans--have declined since 2003, despite strong overall economic growth.

At the same time, many Americans, especially in the southwestern states, associate immigration with crime and disorder. Half the prisoners in California's jails are illegal immigrants, as are almost 20% of the prisoners in the federal system. (These are prisoners convicted of felonies, not immigration violations.)

The huge immigration surge is straining schools, hospitals, and other social services. Unlike the immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s, a group on average more highly educated than the native-born, the new immigrants are very poorly educated. They start poor and they stay poor, so the taxes they pay do not begin to cover the costs of the services they consume. The state of California estimates that the net cost of illegal immigration to the state budget is at least US$3-billion per year, or about US$300 per California household.

All of this explains why nearly 60% of American voters rate illegal immigration a "very serious" problem in most polls.

Since he emerged as a national candidate in the 1990s, Bush has bravely defied public opinion on immigration. He has called for expanded immigration, a de facto amnesty for illegals, and a guest-worker program for employers who cannot find workers at the wages the employers wish to pay.

The President called on Congress to enact his program in 2001 and again in 2004, and both times the Republican majority rebuffed him. Now he has taken up the issue again, more intensely than ever--and suddenly action seems imminent.

But what kind of action? Senators John McCain (R) and Edward Kennedy (D) have introduced a bill of their own, which offers illegals an even more generous amnesty than offered by Bush.

Jon Kyl of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas, both Republicans, have proposed a bill that would tighten enforcement of existing law--but still create a guest-worker program. It was the Kyl-Cornyn bill that drew 200,000 protesters into the streets of Los Angeles this past weekend.

But even the Kyl-Cornyn bill goes much, much further than the Republican rank-and-file can accept.

The party prefers the tough enforcement bill that passed the House of Representatives last December: no amnesty, no guestworker program and tough new requirements on employers to check the legal status of workers. Also, it makes it a felony to enter the United States illegally.

The House bill expresses the values of Republican voters; the Senate bills, the interests of Republican donors. And the whipsaw between them threatens terrible damage to the future of the GOP.

Some 61% of Americans disapproved of Bush's approach to immigration in a TIME poll conducted in January. An NBC poll conducted in March found that 10% of Americans "strongly favour" the President's signature guestworker idea--but that 39% strongly oppose it, a 4-1 ratio against the president and the Republican Senate.

And yet the President presses forward. Perhaps he will change minds. More likely he will only damage himself--and force his party to distance itself from him once again. Few Republicans want to hand this beleaguered president another political defeat. But even fewer want to accept the immigration disaster that he is trying to hand them.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.