Immigration Ain't Broke -- Don't Fix It

We are supposed to believe that the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform is a sign of how the process does not work, of political gridlock and of how our elected representatives care more about partisanship than the people.

Maybe. Or maybe it was a good thing.

The urgent need for a sweeping, grandiose immigration "solution" came from where? I don't remember hearing about it much before last year, which was an election year.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has his own theory. As he told me in an interview in March, "For the short-term purpose of winning in '06, (the Republicans) ginned up a big anti-immigrant fervor, which helped them in a few races, turned Hispanics against them by 12 more points, and now they don't know how to get out of it."

That is a partisan view, of course. But the pressing need for comprehensive immigration reform arose when illegal immigration was transformed into a hot-button, national security issue.

No longer did we need a more secure border with Mexico to keep illegal aliens from sneaking in and stealing our jobs (which had long been argued), but now we needed it to protect the nation from Sept. 11-type terrorists (even though none of those terrorists came from Mexico).

President Bush, to the increasing dismay of his party, was "squishy" on immigration. A former border-state governor, he knew the difficulty (if not impossibility) of having impermeable borders, and he also was sympathetic to Mexican immigrants. John McCain, a border-state senator, felt the same way.

They were also being told by Republican strategists that the growing Hispanic vote in this country was the key to the future of their party. And Republican big-business interests wanted the cheap labor that illegal immigration provides.

Though the drumbeat for greater "border security" could not be headed off — it is just too easy a subject to demagogue on — at least it could be balanced: We would create a "guest-worker" program that would legalize the status of the illegal aliens here, put them on the road to citizenship, etc.

Democrats liked this — though they, too, had a rift: While some newer service-job unions were in favor of a guest-worker program, older unions felt it would lead to the loss of more American jobs to foreigners.

To accommodate all the different factions — Democrat and Republican, big business and big labor, border fence advocates and humanitarians — immigration reform grew from comprehensive to incomprehensible.

In the end, as Jake Tapper of ABC News aptly put it recently, "The immigration reform bill cobbled together by a bipartisan group of about a dozen senators was a true compromise in the sense that there was something in it for everybody to hate."

Its failure was seen as a failure of the Senate leadership, the president and, of course, our "political culture."

But was the failure so bad?

Its failure leaves us with the status quo — and the status quo, at least at a certain level, works.

Illegal immigrants manage to sneak in, find work, pay taxes through payroll deductions and send money home.

They provide cheap labor, with many of them filling jobs Americans do not want. While some illegals here do live in fear of being discovered and deported, most do not. The fact that at least 12 million illegals are living here would argue that the risk of being caught and sent back are pretty slim.

We want to build bigger, better fences on the Mexican border? Sure — why not? It probably won't do as much good as advocates say or as much harm as opponents claim.

Comprehensive immigration reform may be a solution worse than the problem.

In his frustration last week, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., asked, "Are we men and women or mice?"

Mice. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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