America’s immigration dilemma — Obama hasn’t done his homework and it shows

If President Obama wants to solve America’s immigration dilemma, he should avoid mixed messages. On May 19, he naively sided with visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderón who complained that Arizona’s new immigration control law could lead to racial profiling. This last week, he ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest border and requested an additional $500 million from Congress to step up border enforcement.

While his words may have pleased undocumented migrants (a potential constituency) and immigration lawyers, his deeds seemed too much like bait for Republican votes on upcoming reform legislation. In both cases, he forgot to do his homework. 

For starters, he was too quick to criticize the Arizona law. It hardly differs from federal statute that penalizes illegal entry, or a 2007 Prince William County, Virginia ordinance that allows police to check the immigration status of detainees. As amended, the Prince William law ensured that the status of all detainees would be reviewed, not just those who looked like migrants. Fears of profiling abated. With similar tweaking, worries over the Arizona law are likely to recede. 

Obama also backed up his Mexican counterpart without knowing the history behind his remarks. President Calderón (an otherwise fine leader and good friend of the United States) carps at our immigration policies to satisfy Mexican voters — including entrenched elites who resist land tenure and market reforms that would end monopolies and expand jobs at home. His predecessor Vicente Fox felt compelled to do so and now it seems to have become a ritual.

As for deeds, sending soldiers to the border is a stop-gap measure. The Bush administration deployed 6,000 National Guardsmen in Operation Jump Start only while it was boosting numbers in the U.S. Border Patrol. With that pretty much completed in 2008, what has changed that makes it necessary to call out the troops again? If really needed, 1,200 wouldn’t be much help. And as a purely symbolic gesture, unnecessarily remilitarizing the boundary makes the United States look xenophobic.

Rather than cater to constituencies or flail in haste, the Obama administration might do well to look at the big picture — and then propose a solution that matches rhetoric to reality consistent with American values and national interests. Consider the following: 

Despite our recession, the United States still attracts migrants from nearby Mexico and Central America as well as the rest of the developing world. Most seek employment, safety, and social mobility lacking in their own societies.Drug and human smugglers tag along for the ride. So in our diplomacy toward source countries, wouldn’t it make sense to vigorously promote deeper economic reforms, stronger rule of law, and fair commercial codes that make it easier to start small businesses-measures that would reduce incentives to migrate?

Our procedures for obtaining U.S. work visas are excessively bureaucratic and regarded as rarely productive. Such perceptions drive migrants to sneak across the border, feeding a cutthroat smuggling industry, and stay to avoid another perilous trip. Why not streamline applications for temporary visas and make them portable from employer to employer so more of the migrant population can be legal and visible to authorities? Much of this can be done through regulatory changes. Workplace enforcement might be less painful if visiting labor could come and go as it wished legally and out in the open. 

By securing only part of the U.S.-Mexican boundary with fences, we have shifted more illegal crossings to where there are gaps.  And at that, human smugglers, drug traffickers, and gang members still use tunnels, ultralight planes, and blowtorches to defeat the fence. Why can’t intelligence, surveillance, and apprehension be multi-dimensional, inconspicuous, and unpredictable in ways that fences and soldiers in Army humvees cannot be?  Finally, shouldn’t jurisdictions from Panama to Canada be on one page concerning migration?  Mexico and the United States aren’t even in the same book. 

Achieving reforms that will satisfy these quandaries will be no small feat. Americans are divided between those who would rather keep most foreigners out, those who want to open floodgates to let cheap labor in, and those who would simply like a little law and order on our southwest border. The divisions don’t conveniently run along party lines or permit easy legislative agreement. 

So far, pandering to interest groups and pursuing half solutions hasn’t done much for the White House except attract criticism. A better approach would be to start with the basics — a studied understanding of global demographics, past measures and their effects, current legislation, and resources. Then the Obama policy team could lay out a very general set of objectives and end-state visions. Once Congress and a majority of citizens buy into them, specific reforms to improve conditions outside our borders, bring foreign job seekers out into the open, and strengthen border controls can help achieve meaningful progress.

Stephen Johnson was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2007 to 2009.