Tackle Immigration First- Mr President

Obama must not make Bush's second term mistakes.

By Jonathan Rauch / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/t...#ixzz2IWSZGJ4v

Asked a few years ago whether George W. Bush had made any consequential mistakes in his second term, a senior official of Bush’s administration had to think for a moment. After all, Bush and his people were not known for regrets or introspection. Yes, he finally said, there had been one serious mistake: putting Social Security reform ahead of immigration.
In 2005, the newly reelected President had two domestic policy goals. Immigration reform, a long-time objective of the former Texas governor, looked to the center. Social Security private accounts, prized by conservatives as a game-changing reform of the New Deal welfare state, looked right. Bush chose Social Security.
The Democrats folded their arms and said no. Even many Republicans balked. By the time the resulting wild goose chase had run its course, Bush’s second-term political capital, unreplenishable at that point in his presidency, was depleted.
Worse, the immigration debate had changed. In early 2005, not only Bush but many Democrats and such prominent Republicans as Sen. John McCain were ready to deal. More quickly than anyone expected, the Republican base moved right and the window closed.
And so what should have been a historic policy achievement, and a political watershed for Republicans, never happened. Imagine how different Republicans might look to Hispanic voters today if a Republican President and Congress had led immigration reform. Bush probably still rues that misstep.
And now President Obama looks set to repeat it.
Once again, a reelected but polarizing President begins his second term with political stars aligned for immigration reform. Democrats need to do it, because their liberal and Hispanic base demands it. Republicans also need to do it, because they are desperate to shed their hard-won reputation for hostility to immigrants and Latinos. Obama needs to do it; he has been campaigning on it since 2008, when he said he would “move that forward as quickly as possible.”
Not least important, the country sorely needs immigration reform. The current system has become not only a political thorn in the side of both parties but a drag on growth and innovation. Recent evidence shows that immigration, even low-skilled immigration, is a net economic and social plus.
Meanwhile, the current federal policy takes too little account of skill and talent, and admits fewer workers than the economy needs for the jobs it actually has. America’s current policy is to educate the next foreign-born generation of engineers and entrepreneurs and then expel most of them.
And the policy is inhumane as well as inefficient. Millions of otherwise law-abiding and productive people are driven underground, including many who would pay a reasonable fine or penalty to get right with the law; thousands of same-sex partners and spouses are vindictively shut out of the country.
These are not problems over which Washington has merely indirect influence, as it does with most social problems. They are problems that Congress could actually solve.
You say we should secure the borders before reforming immigration law? Though you would never know it from some of the political rhetoric, border control has been accomplished, at least as completely as it ever can be.
As Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a Cato Journal article last year, over the last two decades, the government has more than septupled the size of the border patrol, built nearly 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border, and deployed technologies ranging from cameras to drones.
“The U.S. borders are far harder to cross illegally than at any time in American history, and the number of people entering illegally has dropped sharply,” Alden writes. Border security is not perfect and never will be, but enough has been achieved so that even “security first” advocates should be willing to move on to legal reform.
Immigration reform, then, offers the highest bang for the buck of any reform agenda now before Congress. For Democrats, it also offers to cement the electoral loyalty of the growing Hispanic population for decades to come.
So what does Obama do first? Gun control.
If ever there was a political sticky wicket, this is it. “Gun Agenda Faces an Uphill Battle,” headlined the Washington Post the other day. You can say that again. On the merits, in a magic-wand world, it makes sense to tighten some gun regulations, especially by closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” which allows non-dealers to buy firearms without background checks.
But let’s not kid ourselves: In a country with perhaps 250 million firearms already in private hands, even the deftest regulatory improvements will bring only marginal reductions in violence. No one likes to hear this, but it is true: the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School was an atrocity of the first magnitude, and even one such atrocity is too many — but mass shootings in schools are very rare, and way, way down the list of causes of violent deaths. Moreover, there is little the federal government can do to prevent them.
No doubt, Obama was distraught by those murders. We all were. But this was a case when his more characteristic cold-blooded realism would have served him better.
None of what makes immigration so urgent and accomplishable is true of gun control. There is no bipartisan desire to get it done. In fact, not even Democrats are united. Republicans already smell blood: a chance to grind Obama down by stalling and obstructing in the usual way and to re-energize what has been, until now, a demoralized conservative base. The National Rifle Association will provide plenty of assistance with that project, fattening its coffers along the way.
Now, Obama is more popular today than Bush was in 2005, and he won a stronger reelection victory; nor is gun regulation as quixotic as was Bush’s effort to reform Social Security with only one party’s support. Obama may yet succeed where Bush failed.
Suppose he does succeed, though. What with the upcoming two (or is it three? four?) budgetary crises, the bandwidth for immigration was always narrow. It will be narrowed still further by diverting legislative time and energy toward guns. Gun control gives liberals a new crusade, but in doing so it opens an attention-distracting, resource-depleting two-front war.
Meanwhile, the window of opportunity for immigration might stay open for a while, but it might not, especially if Obama is weakened and conservatives regroup.
And if he loses on guns? Bush thought he could afford to lose on Social Security and move on to immigration. He was wrong. In fact, he never recovered. His political strength and strategic credibility were shaken, and he spent the rest of his second term playing defense. Also, of course, the immigration-reform window closed. Republican moderates were marginalized by conservatives who had no interest in any reform that Democrats might accept.
Unlike President Bill Clinton, Obama has never broken in any important way with his liberal base. Gun control, despite its poor return on investment as a policy matter, is catnip to liberals. They just can’t stay away from it. That might be all right if the opportunity cost weren’t so high — for Democrats and liberals, for the economy, and not least for immigrants.
One thing I have learned about Barack Obama: When he and I disagree, he is usually right and I am usually wrong. Maybe he sees something I don’t. Maybe it is true, as liberals seem to believe, that public opinion on guns has undergone a fundamental change (though more likely, based on the available facts, is that the public is undergoing a short-term reaction to a prominent news story).
As a supporter of both immigration reform and smarter gun regulation, I hope Obama, unlike Bush at the same point eight years ago, gets away with his off-center lurch. If not, in a few years senior administration officials will be scratching their heads, wondering why the heck they didn’t put immigration first.

Its looking good!!!!!