The policies, plans and politics of immigration

Kim Geiger Writer • E-mail

REDMOND, Wash. - This election cycle, msnbc.com is presenting a weekly series assessing issues and controversies that the next president will confront.

From New Bedford, Mass. to Postville, Iowa, the federal government has been conducting raids on factories in an attempt to deport illegal immigrants.

Will the next president be able to build majorities in Congress to enact a new immigration law, after fruitless attempts in 2006 and 2007?

And what kind of balance will the president strike? Is the electorate eager for more vigorous enforcement and more deportations? Or do Americans want to offer illegal immigrants a path to become legal residents?

Why it matters
An estimated 12 million illegal immigrants live in the United States. 

That illegal population, the difficulty of finding and deporting those immigrants once they’re here, and the cost to state and local governments of jailing those who commit crimes — all have implications for an array of other issues: national security, drug trafficking, job losses, and health care. 

The public is divided on the issue, with some supporting amnesty, others calling for deportation, and many of the businesses that employ illegal immigrants stuck in the middle. 

Both parties have wrestled with how to deal with illegal immigration legislatively, even as some activists in each party have tried to exploit the issue to make the opposing party look bad.

The GOP is divided between pro-business interests, which value the economic advantages of having a low-wage illegal immigrant work force, and some social conservatives, who fear that immigrants won't assimilate into American culture.

Conservatives are further fractured on the issue, with some on the right praising Latino immigrants for having traditional family-centered values, and others criticizing the creation of insular Spanish-speaking communities in some states.

Democrats are also torn. On one side is the party's traditional labor union base, which is concerned about job losses and lax immigration policies.

On the other side is the increasingly powerful Latino Democratic voting bloc, which supports a much more generous immigration policy.

President George W. Bush’s 2007 attempt at getting immigration reform through Congress is an accurate illustration of how contentious the issue has become.

The failed proposal would have increased border security and created a path for illegal immigrants to become naturalized.

But many in the president’s own party mocked the measure as "amnesty." A stalemate in Congress led Bush to abandon the effort.

Where the candidates stand
“Once you get past the initial rhetorical seeming difference, then there aren’t significant differences between the two candidates,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, who heads the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “Both of them would agree that the whole system needs reform.”

Sen. John McCain has spent years working to reform immigration policies. In 2006, the Arizona Republican joined with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy to introduce an immigration bill that would have allowed illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship as long as they learned English and paid back taxes and fines.

Sen. Barack Obama, McCain's Democratic presidential rival, supported the bill.

Video   McCain, Obama tiptoe around immigration Sept. 17: Both John McCain and Barack Obama are facing a delicate balancing act on the issue of immigration, but where do they actually stand? NBC’s George Lewis reports. Nightly News

Traditionally, McCain and Obama have tended to differ on the order in which they plan to deal with their list of immigration problems. McCain has often pointed to the priority of border security, while Obama has been reluctant to give preferences.

“The difference may be one of sequencing and how they argue the case,” Papademetriou said.  “Mr. McCain now sequences things. Mr. Obama does not.”

After the failure of the McCain-Kennedy bill, and subsequent others like it, McCain said he now understood what Americans wanted.

“The lesson is they want the border secured first,” he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in January.

Despite having suffered defeats in the past, McCain insists that immigration reform would be a priority if he wins the White House.

“It will be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow,” the candidate told a group of Latino officials in June. “We have to secure our borders…but we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary.”

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