GEORGE BUSH will today announce the deployment of thousands of troops to the border with Mexico to stem illegal immigration.

In a televised address, his first since December, the President will hope to repair deep Republican rifts over immigration and restore some momentum to his Administration.

He will put fresh emphasis on the need to fix holes in America’s porous border with Mexico, which has helped more than 11 million illegal immigrants to slip into the US in recent years.

A package of security measures is expected to include the promise that border areas will be militarised in effect by the deployment of thousands of National Guardsmen.

This is a concession aimed at conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives who have been threatening to wreck a compromise deal on immigration reform.

The White House has tacitly backed proposals, due to be debated again this week in the Senate, that would grant legal “guest worker” status to millions of undocumented workers already in the US and put them on the path to citizenship.

Mr Bush believes that such a scheme is the only way to satisfy the needs of the economy for cheap and plentiful labour. After marches by millions of Latino workers in recent weeks, the Republican leadership in the Senate has also been persuaded to support the plan.

But it remains sharply at odds with a hardline Bill passed last December by Republican congressmen in the House of Representatives who are possibly more in touch with the party’s conservative base. This would spend billions of dollars building new fences along the Mexican border, as well as making felons of undocumented workers without offering them any route to legality.

The split comes before crucial mid-term elections this November when Democrats hope to regain control of Congress — and confirm Mr Bush as a lame-duck president.

Tonight’s broadcast will be the first TV address made by Mr Bush on a domestic issue since he entered the White House more than five years ago. The power to speak directly to the American people is called the presidency’s “bully-pulpit”, but it is also one of the last pieces of political weaponry remaining in the arsenal of an increasingly desperate Administration. Mr Bush, whose approval ratings fell to 29 per cent in a Wall Street Journal poll on Friday, has been damaged by his handling of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and rising petrol prices. Political opponents are seizing on new disclosures on the extent of the Administration’ s domestic surveillance programme, which they claim may have breached the law. President Fox of Mexico called Mr Bush yesterday to express concern but was told that the measure would be temporary. Maria Tamburri, the White House spokeswoman, said that the plan was “not militarisation of the border”.

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