Waiting for Obama

Will he or won't he? One of the new parlor games in Washington is speculating whether President Obama will make good on his promise to reboot the immigration debate this year.

On one hand, Obama said again last week that he was committed to passing comprehensive immigration reform. And later this week he is scheduled to meet with congressional leaders to talk about the issue. Why would the president keep raising expectations if he didn't plan to pursue immigration reform this year?

On the other hand, the country is in the middle of a recession that has left many Americans in no mood to legalize millions of illegal immigrants. And besides, Obama already has a lot of other issues to deal with.

Some observers think immigration reform is less important to the White House, and that the only reason Obama plans to meet with members of Congress this week is to lower expectations. Those would be the same expectations the president keeps raising with his speeches.

We don't know what Obama will do. We only know what he should do. He should use whatever political capital he has at the moment to restart the conversation by spelling out exactly what kind of immigration reform he wants, and then walking that proposal over to Congress so that leaders at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue can put those ideas together in a bill.

There probably isn't enough time to pass legislation this year, but there is time to make a serious start.

Doing so will only be more difficult in 2010, when members of Congress are running for re-election. And it won't be any easier in 2011, when Obama could be facing a more divided Congress if Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections.

And once the conversation starts again, it will be incumbent on both supporters and opponents of comprehensive immigration reform to have an honest discussion that gets us closer to a solution.

The last time Congress discussed this issue in earnest, that didn't happen. Instead, Democrats tried to play games by undermining legislation to serve the interests of organized labor and then convincing Hispanics that they were really serving their interests while portraying all Republicans as anti-Hispanic. And Republicans didn't do a good enough job of clamping down on the nativist rhetoric of some of their members who seemed less concerned with protecting the border than they did the English language and American culture.

Now that both sides have those impulses out of their systems, maybe they can get to work and give the country the immigration system it deserves.

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