First Things First

From IBD:
Posted 5/18/2006

Immigration: Any reform bill that comes out of Congress must above all be credible. That means even a "comprehensive" plan has to start with enforcement.

That's not just our view, but that of President Bush as well. Or so it seems from his latest actions. Despite the disgruntled talk from many in his own party, his Monday speech promoting the "rational middle ground" on immigration law was not a capitulation to the open-borders lobby.

After all, he is deploying the National Guard to beef up patrols on the U.S.-Mexico border. He has followed up by asking for $1.9 billion from Congress to fund the first 1,000 of 6,000 new Border Patrol agents he wants to add in the next two years.

We know, of course, that a large part of the Republican Party dismisses these moves as mere political ploys to win passage of a guest-worker program and a legalization plan that may or may not be "amnesty," depending on one's choice of dictionary.

But even if they're right, and the president is beefing up the border mainly because it's the politically smart thing to do, that just means he is, well, smart. It also means he understands the public's fundamental concern for order and security.

In fact, we would go further and suggest that the president's "middle ground" solution actually requires tough enforcement provisions up front. "Comprehensive" does not mean "all at once."

As a purely practical matter, some aspects of immigration reform are bound to take longer than others.

Setting up a foolproof ID system for immigrants and requiring employers to use it will probably take several years. It also won't be short work to set up a fraud-resistant system for sorting out illegal immigrants to see who is eligible for a legal status.

On the other hand, crews could start building new fences along the border soon after Congress allocates the funds. The National Guard deployment can be carried out in a matter of weeks, though hiring and training new Border Patrol officers will take longer.

And even if everything could be done at once, certain things must come first if the law is to command respect. This lesson should have been learned from the 1986 immigration reform, which offered amnesty without first setting up a workable system for preventing and penalizing the hiring of illegals.

On paper it was reasonable, even restrictive. In practice, its ban on hiring of illegals was a dead letter and its border enforcement was perennially underfunded. Immigrants figured out that they were home free once they got past an overwhelmed Border Patrol.

Congress has not yet dealt adequately with this question of putting first things first. The Senate took it up earlier this week and shied away, voting 55-40 against a proposal to delay the legalization and guest-worker provisions of the immigration bill until the border is secured. But the issue is crucial to any reform plan, and it's not going away.

All the arguments over amnesty, guest-worker quotas, ID cards, the length of border fences and other details are meaningless if they lead only to another law that few respect or obey.