Obama Pushes Ahead With Immigration Reform -- Here's the Good, Bad and the Ugly

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The devil will be in the details, and depending on what comes out of the sausage-making process, those details may ultimately prove to be a barrier in undocumented residents' “path to citizenship.”

As the Washington Post noted last week, “Rubio has said he thinks immigrants who came to the country illegally should be able to earn a work permit but should be required to seek citizenship through existing avenues after those who have come here legally.”

Many Democrats and immigration advocates fear Rubio’s approach would result in wait-times stretching for decades, creating a class of permanent legal residents for whom the benefits of citizenship appear unattainable. They have pushed to create new pathways to citizenship specifically available to those who achieve legal residency as part of a reform effort.

Another potential roadblock is that the first of Obama's proposals is to “strengthen our border security.” The Senate framework calls for a sequential process in which the border is first “secured” and only then can a “path to citizenship” (or at least permanent residency) be established.

The question, after a decade of militarization of our Southern border, is whether it can ever be secure enough to satisfy them. As Washington Post's Suzy Khimm notes, “The Senate’s language suggests that the government has held back from devoting money, equipment and personnel to border security. In fact, even though the 2007 immigration bill ultimately failed, we’ve nevertheless hit nearly all of the targets that it established for increased border security—except for achieving absolute 'operational control' of the border and mandatory detention of all border-crossers who’ve been apprehended.”

As far as “operational control” goes, Tom Barry, author of Border Wars, points out, “there is no common understanding of what border security actually means.”

The Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol aren’t much help in defining or assessing border security. About the closest DHS comes to defining border security is declaring its commitment to “secure the border” against the entry of “dangerous people and goods.”

The ambiguity and expansiveness of the new border security mission is paralleled by the Border Patrol’s apparent inability to evaluate the threats and risks to border security and to assess the degree to which the border is secure. The Border Patrol has squandered much of the goodwill, trust and credibility that resounded to its border control mission after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The billions of dollars wasted in flawed high-tech projects, and the agency’s unwillingness to subject its many new border-security initiatives to cost-benefit evaluations and risk-based assessments, have given rise to new skepticism about border policy.

Meanwhile, net migration from Mexico has fallen to zero, and may have even reversed direction entirely. At this point, “securing our borders” may be a sop to homeland security contractors and Fox News' viewers, but it isn't grounded in sound policy.

Obama also calls for phasing in the mandatory use of E-Verify, an electronic system that lets companies check a potential employee's immigration status. But civil libertarians say that it's a back-door to imposing national ID cards. Immigrants rights' advocates point to the system's h igh error rate, and say that it could ultimately cause employers to shy away from hiring people with foreign-sounding names.

Another potential hurdle will rest on how steep the fines undocumented workers will have to pay will be – charging a fine for violating the law may be politically popular, but if it prices poorer migrants out of the process it will ultimately defeat the purpose.