The marches and demonstrations around the country last week by immigration-reform advocates are a useful, even necessary, reminder that this issue remains at the top of the agenda of the nation's unfinished business. The collapse of the effort to enact comprehensive reform last year was a major disappointment, but that failure didn't make the problem go away. On the contrary, it makes the search for a reasonable solution all the more urgent.
Although this president and this Congress are in no position to tackle the issue in a politically charged election year, there is plenty for them and others to do while we're waiting for the results of the election.
Let's begin with the candidates themselves. With the demise of the presidential campaign of U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., the fiercest opponent of reform, immigration more or less disappeared as a campaign theme. That's a shame. A campaign can serve as a forum to inform and enlighten the electorate, but apparently immigration is such a politically tough issue for Democrats that both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama want to ignore it for fear of being divisive. Sen. John McCain, the probable Republican nominee, has been far out ahead of the rest of his party on this issue. Yet he, too, has steered clear of immigration reform for fear of alienating rank-and-file GOP voters.
If the candidates were to focus on the issue, they could lay the groundwork for a more uplifting debate when a new president and a new Congress return to Washington in January. They could, for example, tell the country that the surge in immigration reached its peak in 2000 and has been in decline ever since, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The most reliable projections show the rate of new immigrants per U.S. resident stabilizing and then declining over the next two decades.
This will take place as the rate of baby-boomer retirements accelerates. Instead of being demonized, immigrants should be seen as an asset, a human resource that will become increasingly necessary in the coming years. The unwillingness of candidates to talk about what's really happening in immigration allows inaccurate and hysterical views to dominate the discussion and suggests a failure of leadership on their part that will complicate efforts to enact reform later on.
Meanwhile, Congress and the president shouldn't stand still, either. If comprehensive reform is off the table for the time being, lawmakers can go forward on a narrower front by approving the Dream Act and the AgJobs bill.
The Dream Act would allow undocumented students who grew up in the United States to attend college or join the military and earn their legal status. It would allow youths like Juan and Alex Gomez, talented Miami students almost deported last year, to stay and give back to the communities that nurtured them. The AgJobs bill would create a guest-worker program for the agriculture industry at a time when it is suffering labor shortages and finding it difficult to hire legal workers. By providing more legal labor, the bill would staunch the loss of agricultural jobs to places like Mexico. Remarkably, Agjobs is supported by farmers and farm-worker advocates alike.
As a lame duck with dismal popularity ratings, there is not much President Bush can do to influence legislation, but he could and should order his Homeland Security secretary to stop the immigration roundups at workplaces across the nation. These raids hardly put a dent in the illegal immigrant population, but they terrify millions of workers. The raids impose an extreme hardship on families when parents are summarily deported while their U.S.-born children are left behind in the hands of child-welfare agencies that are already overburdened. At a time when immigration reform is stalled and no immediate solution is available, the least the president can do is stop making the problem worse.
