On Tuesday night, the three major political parties all seemed to agree: it’s time for comprehensive immigration reform. President Obama said so in his State of the Union address. Senator Marco Rubio said so in his tortured Republican response. Even Senator Rand Paul said so in the Tea Party’s two cents’ worth. Then, on Wednesday, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, making the case for reform legislation now. She got an earful from Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. “I do not believe the border is secure,” Cornyn said, and any reform discussion could wait, as far as he was concerned, until it was. “There’s a lot of overconfidence about this bill,” Sessions said. “It will not pass.” Apparently these senators had not received the immigration unanimity memo.
But the stars have been lining up strikingly for comprehensive reform for months. Last June, President Obama issued an executive order that deferred deportation for two years for most young undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children. In November, Republicans got their electoral wake-up call when Mitt Romney, a proponent of “self-deportation,” received just twenty-seven per cent of Latino votes. Many conservative Christian evangelical leaders, having seen some of their own new congregants deported, have been swinging into the pro-reform camp. Big business has long favored a less chaotic immigration system, with policies attuned to actual labor markets. Labor unions, which balked at the terms of the last reform effort, which failed in 2007, are now on board. Police chiefs are for it. And recent polls show a majority of Americans supporting a path to citizenship for the eleven million foreign nationals believed to be living illegally in the United States.
The most abrupt shift occurred among Republican leaders after November 6th. The G.O.P. Presidential primaries had produced the unedifying spectacle of candidates competing to offer the least humane solution to the illegal-immigration problem. Now, suddenly, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and a long list of other once-fierce opponents of the undocumented and their families want only to help. Whether this will persuade many Latino voters to give the Republicans another look is uncertain—immigration is not the only issue driving Latino politics—but no less formidable an election strategist than Karl Rove thinks it’s the place to start. Rove also thinks that Senator Rubio is the man to lead the Party out of the ditch it has landed in. “Having [him] as the GOP spokesman on immigration issues will hasten the GOP recovery,” Rove wrote, in his Wall Street Journal column. Rove even believes that the “Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” which was unveiled two weeks ago by a group of senators known as the Gang of Eight, “highlights the persuasive powers of Sen. Marco Rubio” who is one of the gang. On Fox News, Rove said that Rubio is “the best communicator since Ronald Reagan.” Obviously, enough Party Pooh-Bahs shared this view to get Rubio, a freshman, the big job of responding to the President’s speech.
President Obama, when he talked about immigration reform, urging Congress to send him a bill “in the next few months,” actually sounded like a moderate Republican. In a speech full of vivid phrasing and hearty liberalism, he eased up when the topic was immigration, emphasizing his Administration’s militarization of our southern border and the toughness of the path to citizenship that he envisions for the undocumented—taxes, fines, learning English, “and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.” Paul Ryan, always condescending but, on this issue, in his party, a moderate, said afterward that the President’s “tone” was “measured” and “productive.” Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky who is in the bipartisan House group working on an immigration reform bill, was grateful for Obama’s soft shoe. “It can’t be seen as an Obama plan or Republicans won’t vote for it,” he told the Christian Science Monitor.
Then there are the legislators who seem to have no interest in the many compelling reasons—humanitarian, fiscal, social, ethical—for bringing millions of people out of extreme vulnerability and into our democracy. The opportunities for demagoguery would be fewer, perhaps. Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa planning a run for Tom Harkin’s Senate seat, has described illegal immigration as a “slow-motion holocaust.” King is Karl Rove’s nightmare.
With an opposition as fractured and fractious as the Republicans, success on something as complex and sensitive as comprehensive immigration reform is far from assured. While the ground of the debate has shifted sharply in favor of reform of late, it has shifted just as far in the other direction over time. Reform opponents all abhor “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. And yet Ronald Reagan, who signed the last immigration-reform bill, in 1986, once said, in a 1984 campaign debate with Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” (Obama’s plan, with its fines and undefined “back of the line” and criminal background checks, is, in any event, hardly amnesty.)
The precondition always attached to reform by opponents—and even by the Gang of Eight—is a “secure border.” This is a mythic condition, ill-defined and, in practice, unachievable—except, perhaps, in North Korea. Secretary Napolitano: “The ‘border security first’ refrain simply serves as an excuse for failing to address the underlying problems.” Still, the Border Patrol has more than doubled in size since 2004, and the Obama Administration, despite its deferments, sets a new record for deportations every year, including 2012. The budget of the immigration-enforcement machinery has risen enormously since the September 11th terror attacks. It is now eighteen billion dollars a year—more than all other principal criminal federal law-enforcement agencies combined. Meanwhile, apprehensions at the Mexican border are down nearly eighty per cent from their peak in 2000. According to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, “the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.” On Wednesday, Napolitano told the Senate committee, “The border is more secure than it has been ever.” John Cornyn replied, “I do not believe that the border is secure.”
We have been here before. President George W. Bush had bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, but neither party was able to keep its legislators in line. Jeff Sessions was one of thirty-seven Senate Republicans who abandoned Bush. Afterward, Sessions told the Times that “talk radio was ‘a big factor’ in derailing the immigration bill. Supporters of the bill wanted to pass it quickly, ‘before Rush Limbaugh could tell the American people what was in it,’ Mr. Sessions said.”
This year, Limbaugh was trash-talking immigration reform on the radio on the day that the Gang of Eight revealed their plan. “It’s up to me and Fox News,” he said, to stop “amnesty.” Then he got Marco Rubio on his show. By the end of their conversation, Limbaugh was gushing. “What you are doing is admirable and noteworthy,” he said. “You are recognizing reality.” Afterward, Limbaugh went on, “Is that guy good or what, folks? Marco Rubio. I mean, that was impressive. He stayed on point. He stayed on message and he believes it.” Then Limbaugh returned to the topic of immigration reform. “It’s going to be Barack Obama who undermines this,” he said. “It’s Barack Obama who’s going to undercut the primary objective that all of these eight senators say is imperative to them, and that is border security first.”
Illustration by Matthew Hollister.
