US: Tom Tancredo is obscure outside his native Colorado, but he is becoming a familiar figure in New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, three states that will hold early primaries in the 2008 presidential election.
The Republican congressman says he has not yet decided to run for president and admits that he could not win his party's nomination.
But Mr Tancredo is prepared to put his name on the ballot to highlight his signature issue - immigration reform.
His suburban district in Denver has the lowest percentage of Hispanics in Colorado, yet Mr Tancredo has become the most outspoken advocate of an official crackdown on America's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, who include perhaps 25,000 undocumented Irish citizens.
He wants more fences and border guards along the frontier with Mexico and has proposed sending illegal immigrants home, punishing businesses that employ them and halting legal immigration to the US until the government shows it can stop the flow of illegals.
Two months ago he tabled a bill similar to Ireland's constitutional amendment abolishing the automatic right of citizenship of children born in the country.
Mr Tancredo's campaign against immigration has made him unpopular with the Bush administration and he has said that Karl Rove told him: "Do not darken the doorstep of the White House".
But as President George W Bush's popularity sinks, support for the Iraq war slips away and senior administration officials fret about the CIA leak investigation, the White House has seized on immigration reform as an opportunity to please the Republican base.
In southern states close to the Mexican border, many voters blame illegal immigrants for everything from long waiting times in accident and emergency clinics to falling standards in schools and accidents on the roads. US immigration reform has also become an Irish foreign policy priority, and Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern will be lobbying on behalf of Irish illegal immigrants when he visits the US next week for the seventh time this year.
Last week the House homeland security committee approved a bill that would increase border security and make it easier to deport some illegal immigrants.
Some Republicans want to go further by building a 2000-mile fence from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico to keep Latin Americans out of the US.
The barrier would include two layers of reinforced fencing, stadium-style lighting, video surveillance and in-ground sensors.
Fortifying the border in one way or another is the first step in the administration's immigration reform strategy.
Over the next three months the House and Senate will consider comprehensive legislation to create a temporary worker scheme that would allow immigrants to work legally in the US for up to six years.
Under the White House proposal, illegal immigrants could apply for temporary work permits but would have to leave the US after six years.
Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain have made a similar proposal, although they would allow such immigrants to get on to a path to US citizenship during that six-year period.
A third proposal, from Republican senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyle, would demand that illegal immigrants leave the US for one year before applying for a temporary work permit.
The White House wants to avoid a mass deportation of illegal immigrants, which would require enormous manpower and billions of dollars and would almost certainly fail.
Each immigrant would be entitled to due process, potentially overwhelming the courts with cases, and the economy would suffer as businesses that depend on illegal labour would be left without workers.
The last time the US attempted such a mass deportation was in 1954 when "Operation Wetback" tried to repatriate nearly one million Mexicans living in the southwest. The authorities went into neighbourhoods where immigrants lived and deported anyone unable to produce on the spot documents proving their legal status.
In fashioning its immigration reform plan, the administration also wants to avoid giving the impression that illegal immigrants now in the US are being granted an amnesty.
This makes it impossible for the White House to support the automatic path to citizenship proposed in the McCain-Kennedy bill.
The administration is also under pressure to incorporate the Cornyn-Kyl proposal to oblige illegal immigrants to leave the country before gaining temporary work visas.
Officials are looking at the possibility of demanding that immigrants leave the country after their temporary work visas are approved but before they are activated.
The administration and the republican leadership in Congress have made the issue of immigration reform their priority for the next three months and they hope to have legislation passed by March.
