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Bush takes lead on immigration

By Times editorial
Published May 17, 2006

President Bush carved out a reasonable middle ground on illegal immigration Monday night. He addressed issues of security, fairness and practicality, and he hit only one false note - on deployment of National Guard troops to the southern border. That sounded more like a sop to his party's right wing than a real fix for a porous border.

So Bush finds himself at odds mainly with his own party. House Republicans have passed a draconian bill and Senate conservatives are holding up balanced legislation.

Everyone seems to agree on one point: The government needs to get better control of the border with Mexico. Of every 10 people trying to slip into the country illegally along that border, three succeed. But even 6,000 National Guard troops won't improve that statistic much, because the challenge is daunting. The overworked U.S. Border Patrol has sophisticated surveillance equipment along only 4 percent of the 1,200-mile border. As for the National Guard, it is already stretched too thin with the war in Iraq and national disasters.

If Congress hopes to make a meaningful effort to bolster the border, it will have to commit enough money to get the job done. Rhetoric alone won't suffice.

As for what to do with the illegal immigrants who are already here, the political gap is wide, with the main differences over legal residency and a guest worker program.

A House bill has no provisions for either. Rather, the House would make undocumented residency a felony. That's an unreasonable approach in a country with an estimated 12-million illegal immigrants. If the House had its way, a population the size of Ohio's would be rounded up and jailed. The cruelty of such a policy aside, the danger of passing a law that is unenforceable is that it would make a further joke of immigration law.

Bush's approach agrees more with a bipartisan effort in the Senate. Both would give established illegal immigrants a way to earn legal residency and citizenship. Those people would have to work, pay taxes, stay out of trouble and get in line for citizenship - hardly the giveaway implied by critics who label it "amnesty."

The Senate bill being debated also would create a guest worker program, a reality in an economy in which Hispanic immigrants are a significant part of the work force in construction, food processing, housekeeping and other labor-intensive industries. Americans like to complain about illegal immigrants while enjoying the fruits of their labor.

All sides want to get tough on work-site enforcement. Both the House and Senate would require employers to participate in a new citizenship verification system, and Bush proposed "a tamper-proof (identification) card" that every immigrant would be have to present to be hired.

Bush exposed the xenophobia behind much illegal-immigrant bashing when he said: "We cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger, or playing on anyone's fears or exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain." His words would carry more moral authority, however, had he not used similar tactics to justify the war in Iraq and the weakening of constitutional rights in the guise of fighting terrorism.

Still, Bush deserves credit for trying to lead the nation forward on a pressing issue. It remains to be seen if he has the political clout to inspire action from lawmakers more interested in posturing that problem-solving.

[Last modified May 17, 2006, 06:15:33]