Thread: Barack, forget about comprehensive immigration reform

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Barack, forget about comprehensive immigration reform

Monday, April 20th 2009, 1:27 PM

President Obama's regrettable pledge to enact comprehensive immigration reform suggests he will repeat the mistaken attempt of Washington leaders to craft an all-in-one solution to the wildly different strands of our tangled immigration knot.

It's as if the White House brain trust has learned nothing from recent legislative history. Comprehensive bills failed in 2005, 2006 and 2007, first during a Republican-led Congress and later under Democratic leadership.

The last three plans crashed and burned because each contained too many complex, controversial moving parts. It would have been tough enough to get agreement on how to secure our porous southwestern border, but lawmakers combined border enforcement with schemes to offer a path to citizenship for America's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, an idea that always provokes a roar of opposition from those who see amnesty as rewarding criminal behavior.

To this already combustible mix, earlier failed bills added gasoline: proposals to expand work visas and create guest-worker programs.

The result, over and over, has been a political minefield that blew up every bill, leaving a system that's still broken.

Small wonder that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who had a front-row view of the legislative gridlock as a member of Congress, once said that immigration would be a high priority for the second term of the Obama administration.

He was onto something.

Instead of putting immigration reform on hold until every last volatile element can be resolved in a grand bargain, Obama should start by picking two pieces of low-hanging fruit: tighter border security and sensible curbs on immigrant-hunting raids.

Opinion polls and common sense suggest that no immigration reform policy will have credibility until we end the chaos on the southwest border, where drug smuggling cartels are in a shooting war that has killed thousands - including 200 Americans - since 2004, with murders in Mexico now ticking up to a rate of 250 a month.

If Obama, working closely with Mexican officials, manages to tamp down the violence, he'll earn political capital needed to convince border-state officials to venture down the politically treacherous road to discussing pathways to citizenship and looser work visa rules.

An even faster way to create political common ground would be to inject some sanity into the current immigrant-hunting frenzy that has led federal and local law enforcement agencies to seize, and detain, hundreds of American citizens - some of whom have even been mistakenly deported.

Nobody keeps track of the numbers, but the evidence suggests the practice is widespread. A recently published investigation by The Associated Press confirmed 55 cases of Americans locked up or removed from the country over the last eight years, including one Brooklyn man imprisoned for nine years until a U.S. court declared him a citizen.

A single immigrant-rights group in Arizona testified to Congress of seeing 40 to 50 cases each month of jailed people with citizenship claims. In 2007, the Vera Institute of Justice, a prison reform group, discovered 322 detainees with citizenship claims behind bars.

The nation, it seems, has gone nuts over illegal immigrants. We will deport an estimated 400,000 people this year, a number that rises to 1 million if you add those who will simply take off rather than face penalties like imprisonment or a permanent ban. Yet many continue to argue that the country isn't doing enough to catch and deport illegals.

We can build national consensus to create a better, fairer immigration system. But it has to happen one step at a time.

elouis@nydailynews.comIt's the problem, not the solution

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/200 ... eform.html

We can build national consensus to create a better, fairer immigration system. But it has to happen one step at a time.

What? We have a fair and very good immigration system, if only the stipulations of those laws would be enforced with something more than a wink and nod. And if all these "immigrants" took our laws seriously, but the world does see our turmoils as a joke, and come here to see what they can steal from us, while we look the other way.

11 million more to go

And the Dream Act is BACK