The Monitor's View By the Monitor's Editorial Board / May 10, 2011


Immigration reform and border security: Obama's standards


Immigration reform depends on sustainable, provable security along the southern border. But Obama, in a speech in El Paso today, hopes to change the meaning of security.
BThe porous nature of America’s borders has long worked against a deal over what to do with 11 million people already in the United States violating immigration law. Granting them legal status would be convenient, even moral in some family cases. But then, after giving this break to lawbreakers, more foreign migrants would slip in, with hopes of me-too leniency. That was exactly the case after a 1986 amnesty.

But now President Obama foresees a possible end to this cycle of migrant sin-and-forgiveness.

In a speech today in El Paso, Texas, he suggested that the border with Mexico is secure enough for Congress to pass immigration reform. For those in the US illegally, that would mean a “pathway to citizenship,â€