Immigration

Now that a bill has passed the US Senate, the real fun on immigration begins. For the last 5 years we've seen Democrats almost completely shut out of conference committees, and legislation morph from palatable to unacceptable in the blink of an eye. We know there will be some Democrats in this conference, at least on the Senate side. But they will be outnumbered, and the House will be very forceful to try and remove anything but the border security aspects of the bill.

People are discussing the politics of it, whether it would be better not to pass a bill for now because you could get a better bill in the next Congress, or how it would play in the midterms if there was a comprehensive bill passed or not. It's a good discussion to have, but I think it's important to note that in the Senate, at least, the Democrats drove the debate and got major legislation out that essentially hues to their values and ideas. Sure, there are some awful compromises in there (I can't believe the three-tiered nonsense survived), but at its heart, the Senate bill tightens the border, adds teeth to workplace enforcement, acknowledges that those already here are an economic engine and deporting them is pie-in-the-sky, and gives people who want to experience the best of America more of a chance to do so. There hasn't been legislation that close to where Democrats are at that has passed the Senate in a long time, not even when we were briefly in the majority in 2001 and 2002.

Ultimately I don't know if anything will come out of conference. There's a lot of pressure and orthodoxy on all sides. I think sometimes when you compromise and compromise that you end up with the worst of everything, and all the good intentions end up canceling each other out. There's diminishing returns for this legislation as it keeps getting batted about. I hope that at the very least we don't end up perpetuating a European model of a permanent underclass that feeds the corporate need for cheap labor, and I hope someone SOMEWHERE tries to make the point that NAFTA's role in this cannot be underestimated (20 million more Mexicans in poverty since its adoption). But it's hard to expect Congress to do the right thing these days.