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WASHINGTON (AP) -- John McCain faces a dilemma on immigration as he works to persuade conservatives he's tough enough on the issue without erasing his historic appeal to Hispanic voters. Once a crusader for offering the nation's roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants a way to get legal status, McCain now says his first priority is fortifying U.S. borders.

The metamorphosis reflects McCain's intensifying effort to consolidate his support among conservatives, who deride the Arizona senator's past proposals on immigration as offering amnesty to lawbreakers, and bitterly resent his work with Democrats, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, on the issue.

Coming off a primary season where his immigration stance was seen as a major liability and GOP opponents hammered him for having an overly permissive approach, McCain is remaking his image with an eye toward the general election.

If he goes too far in the other direction, though, he could alienate the Hispanic voters who he's counting on to siphon support from a Democratic rival in states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and to be competitive in California.

''He's focusing on enforcement, and in this community, enforcement means deportation, and that means separating more families, and more racial profiling and more of the incredible hardship that is affecting not just immigrants, but native-born Latinos,'' said Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza.

McCain infuriated the Republican base when he teamed with GOP moderates like Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. and Democrats led by Kennedy in 2006 to push legislation -- with strong backing from President Bush -- that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. That measure died after the House, then dominated by conservatives, passed a bill that dealt only with border security and refused to consider provisions to address undocumented workers who are already in the United States.

The bipartisan group tried again last year -- but this time, McCain kept his distance from the negotiations as he campaigned for president. He rarely showed up for the marathon round of meetings where the plan was shaped and seldom spoke publicly on the effort until a deal had been cut.

That bill, too, ultimately died in the Senate after being branded as amnesty by conservatives and condemned as too punitive by liberals.

Listen to McCain's speeches or look on his campaign web site now, and there's little mention of the fight to give illegal immigrants a way to stay in the U.S. lawfully. He instead emphasizes border security -- the catch phrase of conservatives who scorned his earlier proposals.

It's a difference of emphasis, not a change in stance, Republican strategists say.

''He's in an excellent place with conservatives who are concerned about immigration, because his position -- that he'll secure the border first and have that security certified by the border-state governors, and then we'll go back and deal with the 12 million -- seems to have satisfied most people,'' said Charlie Black, a McCain adviser.

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