When will immigration be loved?

It was intriguing to learn of Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and his recent comments that the Democrats pushing for health care reform are eager to have the issue resolved before New Year’s Day.

According to Durbin, Democrats are viewing 2009 as the year they focused on revamping the health care system so as to ensure that many of the 47 million currently uninsured people in this country would gain some sort of means to pay for medical treatment.

BY THAT SAME thought, 2010 becomes the year that Congress and the president will focus on measures meant to jolt the national economy back into shape (beyond the short-term measures that President Barack Obama pushed for early this year, and which his GOP critics are determined to think of as failures – even though they appear to be working).

Does this mean that those of us who see a reform of the immigration laws as an equally significant issue are now going to get “the economy” used as an excuse to ignore us – thereby banishing our concerns about the federal laws that regulate immigration to the United States to some future year?

I’d like to think that the senator from Springfield, Ill., merely oversimplified, and that his rhetoric doesn’t mean that immigration is getting pushed further back, since Obama himself (along with his political allies) has hinted that next year is the year that immigration will be dealt with.

In one sense, it makes sense not to do it next year, since immigration reform is going to be a hot-button issue that will make this year’s rhetoric against heath care reform seem like sugar-coated kisses being blown to the president.

WHY BRING UP such rhetoric in an election year?

Yet such an attitude is short sighted, because it underestimates the significance of the immigration reform issue to a portion of the population. Heck, there probably are some people in this country who believe that immigration reform was of a higher priority than health care reform (I find it hard to pick between the two, they both are significant problems confronting our society).

I hope the president realizes that if he and his allies truly are looking for excuses to put off doing something decent to reform the immigration laws, he stands to anger a significant chunk of the U.S. population.

Doing nothing (a.k.a., maintaining the flawed status quo) may wind up angering as many people as doing something.

THIS IS ONE of those issues that is going to have to come up – and the sooner we revamp it, the better off we are because we can then begin the process of healing that our society will have to go through as a result of reform.

For there are those people in our society who have a warped idea of reform – more deportations, and more federal dollars wasted on building those barriers along the U.S./Mexico border.

In short, true reform of the federal immigration laws is going to wind up offending their twisted sensibilities, similar to how the Civil Rights legislation passed by Congress during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson went against the so-called “way of life” that existed in the Southern U.S.

Yet now, we have made progress toward resolving some of the “hurt feelings” that were stirred up in the South (and in other parts of the nation, bigotry wasn’t restricted purely to Dixie) as a result of the legislation.

EVEN THOUGH SOME political analysts still like to push the idea of the Civil Rights Act as LBJ’s political mistake that hurt the Democratic Party – as though leaving the status quo in place would have been proper – most of us now realize that is revisionism by an awkward fringe of our society.

Likewise, in future decades we’re going to realize that trying to put in place laws that try to inhibit the natural order of our society – that Latino population is going to grow no matter what kind of legislative straightjacket one tries to put on it – are equally ridiculous.

Immigration reform’s time is overdue – it probably should have occurred during the years of George W. Bush as president, but didn’t because he couldn’t restrain the nativists of his political party from letting their worst fears run amok.

Now, it is Obama’s turn to take a crack at the issue. His success (or failure) on that issue will be an equally big (if not bigger) part of his ultimate legacy than health care. Let’s hope that Obama’s legacy doesn’t become that he tried to play political dodgeball with the issue.

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