No "comprehensive" immigration reform

With the exception of a few oddballs and ideologues, we can all agree that whatever our national immigration policy ends up being, it must be conducted in an orderly and lawful fashion. That means that getting control of illegal immigration needs to be the first order of business. Happily, that is something we can do without waiting years or decades to build new walls that will, in the end, address the problem only partially. (Most illegals do not wade across the Rio Grande; they enter legally on visas and then violate them.) Through workplace enforcement (mandatory use of the E-Verify system) and modest financial controls (making it hard to cash a check or pay remittances without proof of legal status) we can greatly reduce the economic attraction of illegal immigration to the United States. (Border walls, properly understood, are not about illegal roofers and avocado-pickers: They are about terrorists and their instruments.) Jeff Sessions could do a great deal to advance this if he happened to haul in a few poultry-plant bosses or general contractors for employing illegals. There is no shortage of cases from which to choose.

Republicans should pursue this first and in legislative quarantine from other immigration reforms: It emphatically should not be part of a “comprehensive” immigration-reform package. Illegal immigration is — focus, now — illegal. We can take positive steps to control this problem right now, in a relatively straightforward fashion at relatively low cost. If our more libertarian-leaning friends are correct (I’d bet against them here) and the nation’s agricultural industry is hamstrung by a lack of workers — if the United States should decide that it has a shortage of poor people with few professional skills — then that problem can be addressed in the future fairly easily. If what happens instead is that the price of tomatoes and landscaping labor goes up a little bit, then the republic shall endure.