The national debate on illegal immigration, which Washington politicos have been afraid to touch since a bi-partisan proposal in the U.S. Senate crashed and burned discussing it in 2007, has instantly become a topic du jour after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on Friday signed the nation's toughest bill on illegal immigration into law. It's aim is to identify, prosecute and deport undocumented immigrants.
The move has generated a flood of opposition, including from police officers in Arizona and others, who say this will lead to racial profiling (and comes as there has been an intense organizing campaign by Latino groups in the Tampa Bay area and across the nation to pressure Democrats to deal with the contentious issue this year, as we reported on in the current CL).
The issue was hotly discussed on all of the various Sunday morning talk shows.
Immigration reform in recent years has divided Republicans – social conservatives who think it's abhorrent and would go as far as deporting millions of people back to Mexico, to the pro-business Wall Street Journal editorial page liberal side. Fox News analyst William Kristol has always been in the latter camp, but he said that as far as he's concerned, the critics are hyperventilating about the possible downsides to the law, saying "it's not draconian", nor unreasonable.
Some Republicans seem more upset about the timing of the issue than whether or not it should be discussed (given the fact that we have at least 12 million people in this country that are undocumented, if not know, when?). They believe it's all about election year politics, and in particular, election year politics for one man, embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham was so disgusted when he heard about how the Democrats were going to start talking up immigration reform (there isn't any bill that's been seriously discussed, though there is Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez in the House, and a proposal by New York Democrat Charles Schumer and Graham that has yet to be fully written in the Senate), that he says he's not going to work with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman on a crucial climate change bill.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2010.