GOP not serious about immigration reform

"The serious problems in our immigration system must be solved, and we are committed to working in a bipartisan manner to solve them."

From the preamble of the House Republicans' "standards for immigration reform," released Jan. 30

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Well, that didn't last long. A week after declaring that it's time to deal with the "political football" of immigration reform, House Speaker John Boehner is threatening to punt again.

"The American people, including many of my members, don't trust that the reform that we're talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be," Boehner said last week, icing the optimism that greeted the GOP's outline for a promised legislative package.

The document acknowledges that the failure to repair our broken immigration system — a failure that rests squarely on House Republicans' refusal to do anything at all — "is hurting our economy and jeopardizing our national security." It's sprinkled liberally with phrases like "it is past time" and "it is imperative" and "we must."

But never mind all that. In a matter of days, the hope that immigration reform might be realized by the end of this year has been replaced by the excuse that it can't possibly happen as long as Barack Obama is president.

The Obama administration has deported 2 million people since 2009, far more than were deported during eight years under George W. Bush, whose calls for immigration reform went unheeded by his own party. Obama has taken a lot of heat from immigration activists, but his emphasis on enforcement helped create what emerged last week as an opening for compromise.

For the first time, Democrats in Congress signaled a willingness to consider something short of a special path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants who came to this country illegally. The president has insisted on such a provision, and hard-line Republicans have ruled it out, calling it "amnesty." But many advocates for immigrants now say that ending the threat of deportation is more important than the promise of citizenship.