Immigration Reform and the Rule of Law: Democrats and Republicans in Their Own Words

As PBS' Bill Moyers has noted, if you watched the 2008 Presidential Debates expecting to hear a meaningful discussion on immigration reform, you were likely disappointed. Though much has been said about the potential significance of the Hispanic vote in this year's election, neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain seems particularly keen to make immigration reform--an issue which barely a year ago was the second-most important to American voters after the Iraq war, according to Matt.org--central to this race. That is likely because neither candidate anticipates any benefit from doing so.

So if you're with most Americans and want to know the real positions of Republicans and Democrats, where do you turn? I began by reading each party's official 2008 platform, which you can find here (for the "Immigration" section, turn to page 46) and here.

Dems and Repubs both concede that "America has always been a nation of immigrants," while attempting to reconcile observations of immigrants' contributions to U.S. culture and economy, with a deep need to reform the bureacratic systems that hinder safe and legal immigration.

Together they cite the "rule of law," or, the presumption that rewarding rule-breaking implicitly undermines the legal system that created the rule, as foundational in their respective proposals for reform.

Democrats advocate:

• Securing borders--supporting additional personnel, infrastructure, and technology at ports of entry and along the border
• Providing additional Customs and Border Protection agents equipped with better technoloy and real-time intelligence
• Dismantling human smuggling organizations
• Doing more to promote economic development in migrant-sending nations, to reduce incentives to enter the United States illegally
• Cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants--ensure that the system to verify whether employees are legally eligible to work in the US is accurate, fair to legal workers, safeguards people's privacy, and cannot be used to discrimiate against workers
• Improving the legal immigration system, making our nation's naturalization process fair and accessible to thousands of legal permanent residents eager to become full Americans
• Increasing number of immigration visas for family members of people living here and for immigrants who meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill
• Supporting a system that requires undocumented immigrants in good standing to pay a fine, pay taxes, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens

Republicans are also focused on assimilation and likewise stress the need for immigrants to learn English, "the official language of our nation." On the other hand, the Republican platform refers to immigration as a national security issue, associated with terrorism, drug cartels, and criminal gangs. Republicans propose:

• More effective enforcement
• Giving agents the tools and resources they need to protect our sovereignty
• Completing the border fence quickly and securing the borders
• Employing complementary strategies to secure our ports of entry
• Smarter enforcement at the workplace, against illegal workers and lawbreaking employers alike, along with those who practice identity theft and traffic in fraudulent documents
• Empowering employers so they can know with confidence that those they hire are permitted to work--the E-Verify system (an internet-based system that verifies the employment authorization and identity of employees) must be reauthorized
• Guaranteeing to law enforcement the tools and coordination to deport criminal aliens without delay – and correct court decisions that have made deportation so difficult
• Enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas, rather than letting millions flout the generosity that gave them temporary entry
• Imposing maximum penalties on those who smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S., both for their lawbreaking and for their cruel exploitation
• Requiring cooperation among federal, state and local law enforcement and real consequences, including the denial of federal funds, for self-described sanctuary cities, which stand in open defiance of the federal and state statutes that expressly prohibit such sanctuary policies, and which endanger the lives of U.S. citizens

Helpfully, the Republican platform also lets us in on which policies they oppose, including:

• Driver's licenses for illegal aliens
• In-state tuition rates to illegal aliens
• Social security benefits, or other public benefits, to illegal aliens, except as provided by federal law
• Amnesty

Republicans assert that "the rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activity." For more on this concept, read this article by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank which played a key role in the Republican revolution.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, a law organization which promotes liberal and progressive policies, rebuts the idea that the "rule of law" refers to citizens' (or non-citizens') compliance, and argues instead that it "speaks to the need for government to be accountable to the law." For more, click here.

I personally can't help but think that the phrase "rule of law" has become in 2008 what "middle class" was to Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign--that is, code language used to express widely-held sentiments that would otherwise be called out as xenophobic. It's another one of those subtly powerful images which, contrary to the Democratic platform's insistence that it intends to unite and not divide the country, does precisely that--by implying that there is a distinction between one group of upright, law-abiding citizens, and a rogue element intent on secretly destroying American sovereignty.