DallasNews.com: Time hasn't made immigration reform easier

Dallasnews.com - Time hasn't made immigration reform easier


WASHINGTON – Immigration, after 10 months on the president's back burner, got its very own trial balloon the other day.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano went before a friendly crowd at a liberal think tank Friday and proclaimed that the time has come for comprehensive reform – a goal that has eluded Congress so many times, it has become a third rail of American politics.
It's different now, she argued: Border security is tighter than ever. Inflows of illegal immigrants have dropped by half. Benchmarks for fencing much of the border and roughly doubling the Border Patrol have been met. Lawmakers have hashed out the arguments so many times, the next debate can be streamlined.
"We are in a much different environment than we were before," she said.
We shall see.
Health care and Social Security, after all, have been in crisis for years. The fact that each side's arguments are well-honed doesn't make the positions less entrenched. And keep an eye on the 2010 midterm elections. Congress will become more paralyzed as they get closer.
"It's not going to go away. It's there. We have to address it," said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, a moderate whose border district is at the heart of the debate.
The Obama administration's idea of a "tough and fair pathway to earned legal status," as Napolitano put it in her speech to the Center for American Progress, would require that immigrants register, pay fines, pass criminal background checks, pay taxes and learn English.
For anti-immigrant hardliners, that didn't sound onerous. It sounded like amnesty for 12 million or so foreign lawbreakers – and at exactly the wrong time, with unemployment in double digits and rising.
It's been only two years since Congress rejected efforts to enact "comprehensive" reform: beefed-up security and workplace enforcement, a new guest worker program and some mechanism to allow undocumented workers to emerge from the shadows.
The argument for moving ahead with those other elements hinges largely on whether security benchmarks have been met. Napolitano insisted they have.
"We have attained, I believe, basically, control between the ports of entry," she said.
That is, basically, a pretty bold statement. Critics don't buy it.
"How can they claim that enforcement is 'done'?" asked Rep. Lamar Smith of San Antonio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee and a key GOP player on immigration. With 400 miles of Southwest border unfenced and millions of undocumented workers still competing for increasingly scarce jobs, Washington should be talking about deportation, he said, not legalization.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, noted with at least a tinge of criticism that Obama had promised to make immigration reform a first-year priority, "but it has now been delayed until 2010." It's nice to see Napolitano "becoming more engaged," he said, but Obama should offer a a concrete proposal "sooner rather than later."

That part of the environment hasn't changed all that much. Overcoming it will take more than a trial balloon from a Cabinet secretary.

"Obama needs to be stronger on his comments," Cuellar said. "There's a lot of us that wish he was a lot more outspoken, like he has been on a lot of other issues."

In coming months, we'll get a clearer gauge of Obama's sincerity. And we'll learn if all those security-firsters were simply playing for time or really would be willing to tackle the rest of the issue.

That's the dare Napolitano threw down in her speech.

"The way you lay this out is to say, 'We've made progress, we've reached these benchmarks,' " Cuellar said. "Whether people buy or might not buy the argument, at least that's the message."