Immigration Reform

As Congress moves slowly on immigration reform, President Obama is making numerous policy changes in enforcement and other areas that are designed to shift priorities and boost confidence in the administration as it lays the groundwork for possible legislation. Most of the changes are being driven by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and are primarily aimed at illegal immigrants with criminal records and employers who hire undocumented workers.

In a stretch of desert just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, men and women in khakis and the colors of the American flag recently gathered at a border watch post they call Camp Vigilance and discussed their next offensive in the nation's immigration wars. The target: Illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children who receive public benefits.

Immigration reform -- you may think you've seen this movie before, too many times already. You know the arguments. You dread the polarization. And you doubt that Congress can do any better at making the compromises needed to fix the system. But with the Obama White House rekindling the conversation about immigration, skeptics ought to think again. None of the problems have gone away, after all.

Based on my e-mail, a lot of folks think the solution to California's state budget deficit is to round up all the illegal immigrants and truck them down to Mexico. Wrong. Even if it were logistically possible and the deportees didn't just climb off the truck and hitch another ride back up north, their absence from the state wouldn't come close to saving enough tax dollars to balance a budget that has a $42-billion hole projected over the next 17 months.

Religious and labor leaders called upon Congress and President-elect Obama to pass a comprehensive immigration package this year and said that the U.S. economy could not be restored without legalizing the nation's undocumented immigrants. "Immigration reform is a necessity in order to fix the American economy," John Wilhelm, president of Unite Here's hospitality-industry division, said Thursday during a national teleconference call on immigration reform.

In a major departure from the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday issued new work site enforcement guidelines that shift the focus to employers rather than illegal workers and could be a harbinger of more immigration reforms. The federal guidelines instruct agents to conduct "carefully planned criminal investigations" of employers and to look for evidence that they may be involved in smuggling or visa fraud.

On a recent afternoon, 15-year-old Marlon Parras stood on stage in front of 3,000 people and talked about the hardships he and his 13-year-old sister have faced since their parents were deported to Guatemala. He wept as he spoke of his parents' decision to leave them, both American citizens, with relatives and church members so they could continue their education in suburban Atlanta. "This is not a family," Marlon told the crowd. "This is not fair."

American Apparel is in the process of firing all of its undocumented workers, under pressure from the Department of Homeland Security -- a move that will cause as much real harm to Los Angeles as it will imaginary good. Taking away as many as 1,800 jobs that pay $10 to $12 an hour plus benefits will probably drive those workers into an underground economy or into sweatshops, maybe into crime, maybe homelessness. They and their children will be more susceptible to poverty and hunger and more likely to require public assistance.

Hundreds of American Apparel Inc. workers must leave the company because they were unable to prove their immigration status or fix problems with their employment records, the company said Wednesday. The terminations come two months after the Los Angeles manufacturer and retailer announced that a government inspection had found that about 1,600 of its workers didn't appear to be authorized to work in the U.S. About 200 more had been found to have discrepancies in their employment records.

Pledging more oversight and accountability, the Obama administration announced plans Thursday to transform the nation's immigration detention system from one reliant on a scattered network of local jails and private prisons to a centralized one designed specifically for civil detainees.