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The president has always been a moderate on this issue and his speech last night kept him firmly in that camp. I'm mostly on board with what he says but it will come down to some of the details before I'm sure.
Employer enforcement is key to the whole thing and requires the kind of concerted effort over time that government does not generally show itself of being capable. And of course a biometric national ID for identifying legal foreign workers would also have to be a national ID identifying citizenship. I'm not sure that when push comes to shove this will happen unless they build it into the existing Social Security cards.
I'm very much ok with a huge guest worker program but the devil is also in the details. If it is too bureaucratic it will still encourage people to the illegal route since it is easier and faster. But if it is too loose we'll just end up with the foreign ghettos that Europe has developed through their guest worker programs.
I'm ok with walls in certain areas (particularly urban and suburban) but my opposition to a single 2,000 mile wall is primarily ecological. The fact that success with the other prongs of a comprehensive will render a wall pointless is a more minor concern. I have no doubt that if we wanted to built a wall that we could easily do it.
No matter what we do, if someone still wants to get into the country without documentation they will be able to do it.
The one kind-of fib I saw in the speech was the president saying that his proposal would put current illegal immigrants at the end of the line for citizenship. This is technically true but it does not put them at the end of the line for the process of getting citizenship.
There are two lines you have to go through if you immigrate legally. First you have to get permission to come here in the first place. This can take many years. Then you're here as a legal resident with a green card and after a set number of years can begin the citizenship process.
The president's proposal puts the illegal immigrants at the end of the second line, still giving them an advantage over the people waiting in their home countries going through the first line. For example, I believe the current wait time is 8 years to get here from Hong Kong. Only after that does the citizenship process begin.
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