Immigration: Coming across as lacking resolve
Neither McCain nor Obama offer anything new on issue that effects many other concerns of voters
Sunday, October 05, 2008

Lost in the maelstrom of a close presidential campaign now dominated by economic concerns is the nagging and unresolved issue of immigration. Immigration — legal and illegal — plays to the emotions, and emotion clouds reason in Congress and in the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns.

Given the other hot-button issues of the 2008 campaign — the credit crisis, health care, the wars, taxes — it might be easy to understand why immigration gets lost. Yet illegal immigration connects to most of those other issues. There can be no separating the impact of an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants on demands for health care, education, housing and jobs.

We in the border states feel that impact first, and the lack of attention both Republican McCain and Democrat Obama are paying to the issue is informed by — what else? — politics. Texas, which has the longest border with Mexico, is presumed to be McCain's, along with McCain's home state of Arizona. New Mexico is in play, and handicappers are ceding California to Obama. Both campaigns mistakenly assume that Latino voters are preoccupied with immigration and are of one mind on it. Neither wants to risk alienating them.

So the path of least resistance is to offer platitudes, toss out sound-good ideas and hope it goes away.

Illegal immigration isn't going away, even though the number of illegal border crossings might be slowing down.

According to a study released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., the number of Mexicans crossing the border illegally is down 25 percent this year from 2005. The number of Central Americans entering the country illegally has been halved.

Aggressive enforcement of immigration laws is one reason, but a more likely cause is the economic slowdown in the United States, particularly in construction.

To his credit, McCain teamed with Sen. Edward Kennedy,

D-Mass., in framing a comprehensive immigration bill that included a guest worker program championed futilely by President Bush. It died. McCain's co-authorship of the bill attracted criticism from fellow Republicans so intense that McCain later said he would not vote now for his own bill.

Now McCain talks about funding border security measures and cracking down on those who hire illegal immigrants. Obama's positions are virtually the same as McCain's.

Both say illegal immigrants, once they clear some legal hurdles — learning English, for example — should be offered a chance at citizenship.

What neither mention is how they would translate their immigration sound bites into legislation, and how they would get a skittish Congress that has steadfastly resisted any kind of immigration overhaul to pass it. Though the issue is crucial to Texas and other border states, neither candidate rises to the occasion.

The turbulent market might provide a temporary slowdown in the flow of illegal immigrants, but an escalation in the violence in Mexico spurred by the drug trade could easily restart a run on the border.

We can hope that illegal immigration will solve itself, but as we well know — or should know — hope is not a plan.

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