Thinking about the State of the Union

As KJ noted in an earlier post, the President mentioned immigration in the State of the Union address, calling for a “rational, humane guest worker program.”

Notably, the President eschewed “amnesty” in no uncertain terms. Nevertheless, his statements seem unabashedly pro-immigrant when juxtaposed with the Democratic response. The statements of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine pertaining to immigration were confined to border enforcement issues. On one hand, he noted that the patchwork of border enforcement regimes created by state action are not helpful — specifically, he called them a “confusing patchwork of state and local efforts.” (True — and that’s putting it mildly.) On the other, his “solution” was to call for coherent federal border enforcement. Full stop. No mention of the irrationality of our immigration laws; no call for reform of the substantive admission policy; no mention of the millions of people working here now; etc., etc.

Border enforcement is only a part of immigration reform. Most of the evidence supports the conclusion that border policies — restrictive or otherwise — have very little influence on the flow of migrants. This cannot be the sole focus of any real reform effort.

As many of our posts have shown, current immigration policies are bad for human rights, bad for low wage laborers and very good for smugglers and unscrupulous employers. In spite of this, at the moment, the Democrats would apparently rather talk tough, and focus on border enforcement. And the President seems unlikely to squander any of his scant political capital to keep the “humane” in “guest worker program.” Perhaps there are other forces at work that can be counted on to steer the immigration debate in the right direction — but we didn’t hear about them in last night’s speeches.

-jmc