The Immigration Issue

Michael Barone writes, correctly I believe, that the Democratic debate last week demonstrated that immigration will be one of the major issues of the 2008 campaign. The reason that Hillary was tying herself up in knots over the question about giving drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants is because she knows that the majority of Americans oppose it, but she is afraid of antagonizing the Democratic base. Such waffling or outright support for those drivers' licenses may come back to haunt her or whoever the Democratic nominee is in the general election. And they won't be able to get around the issue by calling their opponents racists. As Barone writes, it is quite possible to be concerned about the lack of enforcement of our borders and not be a racist.

The reason is that the Democrats -- and Bush -- are out of line with public opinion on the issue. That became clear as the Senate debated a comprehensive immigration bill in May and June. Most Republicans and many Democrats, in the Senate and among the public, turned against the bill. Supporters of the bill tended to ascribe that to something like racism: They just don't like having so many Mexicans around.

But if you listened to the opponents, you heard something else. They want the current law to be enforced. It bothers them that we have something like 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. It bothers them that most of the southern border is unfenced and unpatrolled. It bothers them that illegal immigrants routinely use forged documents to get jobs -- or are given jobs with no documents at all.

You don't have to be a racist to be bothered by such things. You just have to be a citizen who thinks that massive failure to enforce the law is corrosive to society.

That was apparent to me as I listened to a focus group of Republican voters in suburban Richmond, Va., conducted by Peter Hart for the Annenberg School of Communications. One voter after another complained that the immigration laws were not being enforced. None of them made any derogatory remarks about Latino immigrants -- two said they admired how hard they work. They don't want to see Latinos banished from this country. They want the immigrants here to be legally here.

Which leaves Democratic politicians and political candidates out on a pretty flimsy limb. Most of them reflexively back a comprehensive bill, and some of them (like Bush and a number of Republicans backing such a bill) have dismissed opponents as racists.

Most Democrats have also been backing bills extending various benefits to illegal immigrants, like the Dream Act for college education for illegals brought over as children. There are appealing arguments for such bills. But most voters reject them. And most voters certainly reject driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. That was one of the issues that led to the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in California in 2003.

And it won't work to try, as Hillary did, to say that this is all George Bush's fault. For gosh sake, Bush has the same position that the Democrats do. He supported a bill for comprehensive reform and so alienated many in his own party. She is so used to blaming everything on Bush that she trots out that excuse even when it doesn't apply.

I've just been covering the Compromise of 1850 with my students and talking about how it first didn't pass when Henry Clay introduced it as an omnibus bill because too many people opposed different aspects of the comprehensive bill. It only passed when Stephen Douglas of Illinois took over and split it up into five separate bills. He was able to create different groups to support each bill. And thus it passed. But supporters of comprehensive reform on illegal immigration are unwilling to try the same thing with these reforms. They know that they will get a majority to support increasing security and enforcement of our immigration laws, but they fear that they don't have a majority for the rest of the provisions. So they're holding the laws that could be passed hostage for the rest of the desired reforms. And they're creating an issue that could actually help Republicans next year in a lot of elections.