Magnifico, in his OND diary a couple of days ago, linked to this NYT article about problems facing McCain’s campaign. A major theme of the story is that McCain’s advisors expect his standing to improve because, with the failure of the immigration reform bill, talk about immigration reform will disappear from our public discourse until after the election.
I don’t care whether McCain’s campaign revives or not. I do care about the premature demise of efforts to fix our broken immigration system.
I don’t want to accept any "gentleman’s agreement" to disappear the immigration discussion for two years. For one thing, Americans deserve to know if our next President can generate a realistic, workable proposal for a way forward, instead of platitudes. The attitudes of the candidates should be a continuing factor in what ought to be a top-level national conversation.
Beyond that, however, it seems possible that if Congress doesn’t act, the dialogue will become increasingly shrill and polarized, and that doing something in 2009 will be more difficult than acting this year. Also, the states won’t wait.
Oklahoma enacted its own legislation recently, signed by the governor in May.
Colorado (slogan: It's time to take Action: If the Feds won't, Coloradans will!) passed anti-immigrant legislation last year. Of course the law of unexpected consequences reared its ugly head (NPR audio clip):
Seven months ago, Colorado passed one of the toughest sets of anti-immigration laws in the country. Now, heads of state agencies report that illegal immigrants really didn't use state services — and the new laws cost more to implement than they save.
Coloradoans, not learning from their mistakes, continue to press for more immigration reform, according to Governor Janet Napolitano (D-AZ).
Speaking of Gov. Napolitano, she signed three Arizona reform bills on July 2, 2007, less than a week after the demise of the U.S. Senate bill. The tough employer sanction bill, by itself, seems likely to keep the immigration pot bubbling for a while, and future initiatives in other states might surprise presidential candidates and Congressionals who just want the issue to go away until 2009.
Fifty separate immigration environments is not a consumation "devoutly to be wished", but that’s what we will get if we don’t get federal legislation.
Voters should give their Congressionals an earfull-bucketfull-whellbarrowfull during the Independence Day recess. Congress is in session. Something should be and can be accomplished. I know, the same Congress will be sitting next week as was sitting last month. I understand that many Presidential candidates have abdicated their Congressional responsibilities, and are taking taxpayer money under false pretenses by retaining their seats in Congress. I see the stupidity of a Senate that tried to pass such important legislation without holding one committee hearing. Most of us are disgusted by the log-rolling, you-rub-my-butt-and-I’ll-rub-yours business-as-usual politics that groaned so mightily and gave birth (girth? mirth?) to a pipsqueak bill replete with something for everyone to hate.
Hmmm. I’m talking myself off my thesis, aren’t I?
No, not really.
Sam Brownback, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, John McCain, Hillary Clinton – each of these and others want us to think s/he will be the best leader for this country and the free world. S/he want us to believe s/he is a leader. The golden opportunity is at hand. Lead. We’ll all be the better for it. Concrete action will beat 30-second sound-bite debates every time.
Immigration reform is so difficult an issue that the National Governor’s Association (whose chair is Governor Napolitano) hasn’t taken a position on it. So, what’s new? If Congress truly can’t find a way to do this, we extend the list of reasons we don’t have confidence in its ability to do anything harder than naming office buildings.
I don’t pretend to know what a comprehensive immigration reform bill should look like in detail. I don’t even know if the only serious way forward is indeed comprehensive instead of piece-by-piece. It seems to me that some helpful provisions are much less controversial and others and could be enacted, but I agree with Senator Sessions and others who complained that this particular bill was not practical, wouldn’t work, and was therefore bogus. I haven’t read the almost-400-page bill, but here is a very skinny Cliff Notes version. I can see some people paying a $1,000 fine in order to get a Z-visa, but I honestly don’t see many millions of people doing it (I might be wrong). Certainly I do not see many millions of heads of household complying with the "touchback" provisions for getting a green card, and I doubt if even one Senator thinks those provisions were pragmatic.
The legislative rule for a new bill should be that the only provisions allowed in are ones that will work. Lack of credibility seems to have been as big a reason for the failure of the Senate bill as anything else, and the touchback green card provisions are one example. They were in the bill for propaganda reasons, so proponents could say the bill was "not amnesty." La Raza was a big-foot negotiator/lobbyist for which touchback was important, but even a La Raza spokesperson with whom I spoke a couple of weeks ago didn’t think it would work in practice. Her thinking was to pass the bill, find out what didn’t work, fix it later. That approach didn’t work.
Governor Janet Napolitano has been involved in immigration issues for many years, and has been a leading advocate for constructive solutions. She presented a thoughtful, helpful analysis to a bipartisan June 27 event at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The complete video is available at C-SPAN. (52 minutes, 51 megabytes. The location of the item will move over time – look for the June 27 page.) The video is available in clip form at CAPAF. Voluminous literature about immigration issues is available at The Manhattan Institute.
Summing up: John McCain, Janet Napolitano, all you people who think immigration reform is on a two-year hiatus – I hope you’re wrong. (I think Napolitano is going to keep stirring the pot, despite what she says in that video.)