One would think President Obama, having been through the congressional wringer on health care reform, might wait before taking on another controversial issue that has long lingered on the back burner. But Arizona's harsh crackdown on illegal immigrants has brought the immigration issue to the fore. The president used a visit by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to confront immigration reform. In Washington, Obama sought bipartisan support to address it.
History, and recent history at that, is not on his side. In 2007, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which had been forged by leaders from both parties in Congress and the White House of George W. Bush, failed. It had included a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for those in this country illegally (a number roughly put at 12 to 14 million people).
President Bush contended that the reform plan did not amount to "amnesty." But many conservatives in his Republican Party did see it as amnesty, and so the measure failed. Advocates of ordering the return of illegal immigrants to their countries, mainly Mexico, can fashion lots of inflammatory rhetoric, but the prospect of deporting that many people is ludicrous.
The failure of federal lawmakers to do anything substantial on the issue is frankly shameful, because this obviously is a national issue. Though some states have tried to use local law enforcement to nab illegal immigrants if they are caught in a violation of some kind, that is not where policy should be made or enforced. In Arizona, a new law requires police to question people about their citizenship status if they've been stopped because of another law, and makes it a state crime to be within America's borders illegally. It raises all sorts of issues, including racial profiling.
Obama wants Congress to take on border security, employment conditions for illegal immigrants and possible paths to citizenship, and not in a piecemeal fashion. Hopefully Calderon was listening, because Mexico will have to cooperate with efforts to tighten border security, for example, and the Mexican president must continue to battle the drug trade in his country that funnels misery to the United States.
The truth is, illegal immigration is an issue whose time hasn't just come. It came 10 or perhaps even 20 years ago, but it is so complicated because of the size of the illegal population and other factors involving politics and the economy that members of Congress sometimes approach it as if it were quicksand. But they are elected to take on the difficult and contentious issues. Continued delay on illegal immigration only serves to feed the perception in a cynical public that their representatives are afraid to do so.
