All Show, No Go On Immigration
Two wrongs don’t make a right on anything-not even in Washington, D.C., where everything always seems to go wrong.
Last Thursday, President Barack Obama announced he would take executive action to grant residency and working papers to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. The action would prevent these individuals from being deported, but does not guarantee any path to citizenship.
Republicans in Congress seethed before and after the president’s speech, labeling him a “monarch” and an “emperor” for acting unilaterally and failing to broker a deal with Congress. House Speaker John Boehner went as far as to suggest the president “cemented his legacy of lawlessness and squandered what little credibility he had left.”
The president delivered his own jab at the soon-to-be-fully Republican-led Congress, telling them that there was only one method to make his executive action go away: “Pass a bill.”
It’s like that scene from A Christmas Story in which two kids in a schoolyard dare, double-dare and triple-dog-dare each other to stick their tongue on a metal flagpole in the dead of winter. One kid blinked, stuck his tongue to the flagpole and wound up in an awful mess.
Thus the immigration crisis is reduced to a political football in this country, kicked around between the parties to score points off each other in polls, elections and campaign cash. It’s nothing new: so many issues have been reduced to political footballs now that they blanket the field, making it impossible to see the grass.
Few are going to admit it, but we’re going to say it: both the White House and Congress have been dead wrong on the way they’ve handled immigration the last 30 years.
Democrats compared the president’s executive actions last Thursday to those taken by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (Republicans, of course) nearly three decades ago. But those actions amended a bill, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, that Congress passed in 1986 to provide up to 3 million illegal immigrants amnesty while ensuring greater enforcement of the law.
Thereafter, Reagan and Bush 41 issued executive orders to correct flaws in the law that resulted in some immigrant families being nearly divided and deported over immigration status. But the bottom line here was that the presidents acted only after Congress passed a bill.
Which leads us to today’s Congress, and the previous several Congresses, that punted on immigration time and time and time again. Afraid of losing votes, afraid of losing campaign cash, afraid of political pushback, afraid of any other excuse they could give, Congress continues to sit on its hands.
And here’s what really gets us: both the president and the incoming Congressional leaders know nothing substantial will come of this. How do we know? All you need to do is look at the recent history of D.C. dysfunction to realize that immigration reform isn’t happening. We give this issue a month before both sides find something else to cry about.
Ideally, a president and Congress interested in solving problems would work together on a serious immigration reform bill. It would include measures to properly secure the borders to keep the bad guys out and having illegal immigrants presently in the country register with the federal government before pursuing citizenship or public benefits.
The bill would also remove the red tape hindering those immigrants legally pursuing residency in the U.S. and/or gaining citizenship-and crack down on employers who exploit illegal immigrants by paying them off-the-books, well-below-minimum wages for manual labor.
The U.S. is truly a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of law and order. The immigration system is out of order, and the federal government must get up and fix it now-but we’re not holding our breath.
