Immigration Reform: Five Places Where Obama and the Senate Agree
There’s little in President Obama’s immigration-reform proposal that isn’t, or couldn’t be, in the Senate’s proposal. There’s little in the Senate’s proposal that isn’t, or couldn’t be, in Obama’s proposal.
(Marvin Joseph-Washington Post)
Tuesday in Las Vegas, Obama touted the emerging consensus. “Yesterday, a bipartisan group of senators announced their principles for comprehensive immigration reform, which are very much in line with the principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years,” he said.
That consensus has five parts. The first is that U.S. borders need to be secure, or as secure we can make them. But much of the work on that has been done. As Wonkblog’s Suzy Khimm points out, the measures of border security from the 2007 immigration bill have largely been achieved.
But border security can’t do everything. Even after sinking billions and billions into securing our borders, our “operational control” of the border — defined as our ability to quickly respond to any disturbance — is only in the range of 57 percent. That’s less evidence that we haven’t done enough than it is evidence that you can only do so much without simply having members of the National Guard link arms across all 1,967 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
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