Kennedy and immigration reform

By Morton Kondracke

ROLL CALL

August 28, 2009

Along with a health care reform bill, it would be a fitting tribute to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., if Congress could act on his other great unfinished cause: immigration reform.

Kennedy worked with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and President George Bush in 2006 and 2007 to fashion a compromise that would allow illegal immigrants with clean records to earn their way to permanent status.

And though his motives for reform might have been primarily humanitarian — especially, getting 12 million illegal immigrants “out of the shadows,” where they can easily be exploited economically — he understood the need to get America's borders under control.

Kennedy and McCain came painfully close to passing reform legislation in 2007, but fell just seven votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster.

It came close despite a hysterical campaign mounted by right-wing groups and talk-show hosts that the bill would grant “amnesty” to illegals. It's akin to the current demagoguery over “death panels” supposedly created under pending health legislation.

McCain, running for president, abandoned his own bill and declared that the lesson of the reform failure was that Americans were demanding that the borders be secured before other aspects of reform should be considered.

Last month, a Council on Foreign Relations task force co-chaired by Bush's brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, reported that substantial strides have been made to seal the border.

U.S. Border Patrol manpower has been doubled since 2005 — to 20,000, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security has spent billions creating physical and high-tech “virtual” barriers along the border with Mexico, and the DHS last year deported 350,000 illegals caught in the United States, a 20 percent increase over 2007.

And the Bush and Obama administrations have toughened enforcement of laws against the hiring of illegal immigrants, staging large-scale raids on various businesses to make the point.

So to the extent that “control the borders first” became a rallying cry for reform opponents in 2007, improvements since then can be a pro-reform argument now.

“Impressive” as control efforts have been, the panel declared, “no amount of enforcement can eliminate the underlying problem, which is that aggressively enforcing a broken regime does not fix it.

“Unless the United States has a more sensible and efficient system for admitting legal migrants who come to take advantage of work opportunities, no reasonable level of enforcement is likely to resolve the illegal immigration problem,” the panel said.

The role that Kennedy played as chairman of the immigration subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee has been taken on by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who has vowed to get a bill written this year.

Schumer could well advance the cause by holding a high-profile hearing featuring Jeb Bush as a key witness along with others from the 19-member task force, co-chaired by Thomas F. McLarty III, Bill Clinton's first White House chief of staff.

The panel made an especially strong case that immigration reform is necessary to keep the U.S. economy growing — and that robust growth, especially in high technology, is necessary for national security.

The task force recommended significant expansion and simplification of the H2-A agricultural worker program, the H2-B program for temporary, generally low-skilled workers and H1-B visas for the highly skilled.

While family reunification should continue to be the dominant principle of legal immigration policy, the task force said, more emphasis should be placed on economic immigration.

The panel made an especially strong case for attracting and keeping foreign students and graduates and high-skilled workers.

“Immigrants are especially important in science, technology and engineering, which are so critical to U.S. economic competitiveness,” the report said, noting that more than half of U.S. scientists are foreign-born.

The task force recommended that “foreign students who earn graduate degrees from American universities be presumptively eligible to remain in the United States and receive employment-based visas” and that no quotas should apply.

Despite repeated assurances to restive pro-reform groups, however, it remains to be seen when and how hard President Barack Obama will push to repair a system that practically everyone agrees is badly broken.

Obama campaigned in 2008 promising that comprehensive immigration reform would be on his first-year agenda, but during a trip to Mexico this month, he said it had to be put off until 2010, an election year.

The administration is certain to call for swift action on health care reform as a tribute to Kennedy. But it also should accelerate work on immigration reform in his name.

Union-Tribune