Even-Numbered Politics

I kind of mentioned this in talking about Claire McCaskill's setting the terms of the immigration debate in her Senate race in Missouri, but this article from the Washington Post nicely displays the bankruptcy in the Bush Administration policy on the issue:

The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.

These studies have been well-known for a while, and it's perfectly legitimate for Democrats to bash the Administration and fellow Republican opponents for cozying up to big business by ignoring law enforcement in the workplace. I know it's not the only side of the immigration debate, but it's an important point to make to contrast the fearmongering and anti-immigrant rhetoric of the other side. Once again, the Republiwon'ts are trying to distract from the real issue here. They've continued selling out the middle class of America by turning away from enforcement when corporations hire illegal workers. New technologies provide ways to implement verification databases and other safeguards but they are unfunded pilot programs at this stage. Only after it became a campaign issue did this government get as serious about enforcement as, say, the Clinton Administration was a decade ago.

Identifying and correcting the root causes of immigration - like breaking the oligarchy that limits Mexican entrepreneurship and allowing subsistence farmers in Mexico to actually live off their crops, a reality shattered by agribusiness in the decade since the enaction of NAFTA - is just as crucial. But if we're talking electoral politics, bashing the Republicans for only getting serious about the immigration problem in an even-numbered year is not a bad strategy. Especially because that fits into a convenient theme that we see every two years.