Considered piece by piece, the proposed immigration-reform bill hammered out last week has more to recommend it than many conservatives acknowledge. But considered as a whole, the bill (or at least the version of it that made the rounds online this weekend) suffers from a disturbing confusion of priorities. It aims, above all, at normalizing the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States. It certainly does other things, like re-arranging the categories of legal immigrants and requiring 370 miles of new fencing along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, but only as an afterthought.
Unlike most opponents of the bill, I support finding some way to normalize the status of illegal immigrants now in America. But to give that goal top priority—as the authors of this bill clearly have, apart from all the talk of “triggers”—strikes me as a serious mistake, both tactically and substantively.
“Living in the shadows” is a serious problem for those here illegally. But for America as a whole, there are two much larger problems: that our borders are not secure, and that our legal immigration system is badly broken.
True control of the border should not be a controversial goal, and taking serious steps in that direction would go far toward calming public concerns about immigration and diffusing the populist time-bomb that immigration has become. Reforming legal immigration should also get more attention than it does in this debate.
In this regard, the proposed bill actually takes steps in the right direction—toward eliminating the visa lottery, for example, and shifting the focus of our immigration policy away from extended-family unification toward skills- and employment-based immigration. But the way the bill is structured and written employs all those bits and pieces in the service of the larger goal of normalizing the status of illegal immigrants, mistaking the smaller problem for the larger.
In the current issue of COMMENTARY, I discuss why reforms to the legal immigration system (together with improvements in our approach to the assimilation of immigrants) matter more than what we do about the status of illegal immigrants, and I try to show how such reforms can help us remain a society that welcomes and appreciates immigrants. But these reforms are clearly secondary in the bill.
Washington has to take this issue up in the way the American public understands the problem—as a problem of respect for the law and of our future as a nation that can successfully integrate newcomers. Instead, the President and Congress have presented it in the most divisive way possible—treating the lawbreaker, not the law, as in need of protection.
A bill that included only the border-protection and legal-immigration reforms of the new proposal could be a unifying measure. But by assigning top priority to normalization, the new bill will only exacerbate concerns about immigration—and about the ability of our leaders to understand the public’s concerns. It has done serious damage to the prospects for meaningful change.
