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 Editorials | July 2007 
The Grand Collapse
 NYTimes
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| | U.S. President George W. Bush makes a statement on the Senate immigration bill in Newport, Rhode Island, June 28, 2007. The U.S. Senate dealt a fatal blow on Thursday to Bush's overhaul of immigration policy - an emotional issue that has divided Americans in the run-up to next year's presidential election. (Reuters/Jason Reed) |
The defeat of immigration reform in the Senate last week was appalling, not so much because an ambitious bill died, but because of how stubbornly, to the bitter end, the process remained disconnected from reality. The bill crumpled on the Senate floor on Thursday in a procedural vote, with two-thirds of Republicans swarming to kill it. They shrouded their act with the same rhetorical distortions and ritual incantations — death to amnesty! — that have polluted the debate all along.
Two Republicans, Jeff Sessions and Jim DeMint, hailed the demise of an attempt at immigration reform as a victory for the American people. Victory, maybe, if you favor semiporous borders, rotting crops and millions of people growing old overseas as they wait to enter legally. If you want federal officials to keep thimble-dipping the immigrant ocean with raids and detentions that shatter families and cripple businesses, and state and local governments to go on erecting a ramshackle grid of disjointed immigration policies, then this debacle was for you.
The bill’s defeat also thwarted the possibility of progress on border security, stricter employment laws and an orderly future flow of workers. To top it off, by foreclosing legitimacy for millions of illegal immigrants, Republicans brusquely told Hispanic-Americans what they can do with their votes and hopes.
There was pretending on the other side, too. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, defending the teetering bill, likened it to the great acts of civil rights days. With respect to Mr. Kennedy and his allies, the bill was not even close. Its good provisions were anchored to bedrock delusions: that fixing immigration is simply a job of building fences and punishing illegal workers. The fishy “grand bargain” began to rot as soon as it was unwrapped, as advocates for immigrants kept accepting one bad amendment after another in the hope that this bill — or any bill, please — was better than nothing, and that bad things would somehow be removed later.
Their desperation showed, and when talk radio got a frenzy going — Capitol phones crashed as the crucial vote loomed — nothing good could withstand the hot wind blowing across the Hill.
What to do now? Pick up pieces. Congress will likely get back to what its dim imagination can handle, building fences. It should expand legal immigration, too, with more visas to clear the backlogs. The pro-immigrant side can try to improve things incrementally, with visas for farm workers and tuition breaks for immigrant children, although without the cover of a comprehensive bill, such modest measures might easily be picked off by right-wing sniping. The House could offer a bill, but the Senate’s grim results would dampen anyone’s optimism.
The debate will surely dominate the presidential campaign, where the odds of reasoned discussion and principled leadership are mighty slim. (Example: Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican candidate, was for keeping the bill alive before he was against it, switching his “yes” vote to “no” in his eagerness to follow the elephant herd.)
Reasonable voices on the left and right, like Robert Menendez, Lindsey Graham, Mr. Kennedy and John McCain, must keep pressing for comprehensive reform. The candidates should confront the issue with courage and candor. Everyone could look to Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, who has survived and thrived as an immigration moderate in a state that comprises the multitudes and hot extremes of the debate — Anglos and Latinos, day laborers and Minutemen, a surging population and a wide desert border with Mexico. She is a big fan of declarative sentences and of building up from consensus. Are we all in favor of illegal immigration? No. O.K., let’s figure out what to do about that.
It’s that crucial turn — from analysis to action — that Congress failed to make, as its bloated bill toppled into a ditch like a fat S.U.V. on a curve. At some point it will have to revisit the issue. Its solutions will have to correspond with the complex realities of global economic change, of a workforce that needs immigrants, of immigrants who need and deserve a clear, sure path to citizenship and of a nation that needs to be true to its laws and to its decent, welcoming self.
That’s the reality, and reality could not care less what Congress does or doesn’t do. |
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