TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2011 07:01 ET
WAR ROOM
Comprehensive immigration reform is dead -- and the left is to blame
BY MICHAEL LIND

AP/Ralph Freso
Comprehensive immigration reform is dead. For the foreseeable future, there is no chance that Congress will pass a grand bargain on immigration reform like the one that fell apart in 2007 including a mass amnesty or path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants already in the U.S. Nor is there any chance that the Dream Act, which would provide citizenship for many illegal immigrants as long as they attended college or served in the U.S. military, will be enacted into law. The Democrats could not pass the unpopular Dream Act even when they controlled both houses of Congress last December. Their cynical purpose in reintroducing it now is to play wedge issue politics with Latino voters in the run-up to the 2012 elections.

As in an old Perry Mason TV serial, or an Agatha Christie novel, the victim was murdered by multiple killers. The greatest wound may have been inflicted by the Great Recession. With mass unemployment expected to last for years to come, it is hard to imagine public support for an amnesty for the 12 million or so illegal immigrants in the U.S., particularly if it were not accompanied by adequate enforcement and encouraged a new wave of law-breaking by millions of foreign nationals in anticipation of future amnesties.

But even before the world economy collapsed in 2008, public opinion toward illegal immigration was hardening on both sides of the Atlantic. The backlash against mass immigration, legal and illegal, has contributed to the implosion of center-left social democratic parties in Europe. One unacknowledged goal of the war in Libya is to prevent enormous numbers of North African refugees from seeking asylum in Europe.

In the U.S., America's neoliberal globalist establishment has completely failed in its effort to persuade America's populist, nationalist citizenry that preventing illegal immigration is racist and retrograde in the age of global markets. According to a September 2010 Quinnipiac poll, "stricter enforcement of laws against illegal immigration" beat "integrating illegal immigrants into American society" by 68-24, with 9 percent answering "don't know."

http://www.salon.com/news/immigration/? ... ation_left