Rank-and-file Republicans will be confused and upset when they figure out what John McCain’s stand on immigration actually looks like.

This month, McCain received an F-minus for his stand on immigration by a politically moderate group calling themselves Americans for Better Immigration. It’s a group that has also figured out that the US Chamber of Commerce is the driving force behind increasing immigration in the United States.

But McCain’s campaign machine desperately needs money, and one place they can find that money is at the US Chamber of Commerce.

Unlike most local Chambers, the US Chamber is made up in part of conglomerate agricultural businesses that need as many immigrant farm workers as they can move across the border. Also, shaping the Chamber’s immigration policies is the construction business, the hotel and restaurant service industries and the factory meat processors that raise chickens and cows by the millions and prefer cheap black-market labor.

The US Chamber of Commerce is not an organization that tries to please mom and pop small businesses anymore. Today, that organization is beholding to the conglomerates, and those are businesses that want plenty of immigrants crossing the border.

So it works like this: The US Chamber wants to please those industries that need immigrants, and John McCain wants to please the US Chamber because he needs cash.

But in order to make the Chamber happy, McCain will have to ignore the wrath of a majority of Republicans who want the borders closed permanently. The US Chamber needs to promote the flood of desperate laborers who will work for less than minimum wage. The Chamber’s position is that industry prospers when it doesn’t have to pay health insurance, workers compensation and social security taxes. With immigrant labor, there is no risk when a worker is injured on the job because the bus ticket back to Mexico for that expendable worker is cheap.

Barely a month goes by when state governments are not coordinating police raids on black-market labor employers. Most of the time, fines are small and no one in management goes to jail.

Sometimes, agribusiness is temporarily interrupted, industrial food processing slows and service industries run for cover for a short time. But after commerce stops temporarily bleeding, cheap immigrant labor rebounds back to business as usual.

Last year, Congress took their first serious shot at the US Chamber by trying to legislate immigration changes that would require employer databases to verify employees’ social security numbers. Under that proposal, employers could be fined up to $40,000 per violation and spend 20 years in prison for repeat violations.

Had those standards passed, industry from construction to factory farming would have suffered. But McCain’s rank-and-file political base would have gotten what they wanted—a halt to immigration. McCain predictably voted against this legislation that would have ended the immigration cycle at its source, the employer.

Next to a failing economy and a dismal war, a disastrous immigration policy will be an issue that drives voters to the polls. My bet is that McCain’s effort to raise big money from the US Chamber will put him on the wrong side of the immigration debate with his own GOP.