Anglonautes > English vocabulary - words - dictionary - encyclopedia > Immigration > USA > Illegal Immigration > Migrants > U.S. - Mexico Border > Fences, Southern Border wall, Trump's wall

The United States is home to 11 million illegal immigrants. The undocumented hold jobs, have children, pay taxes, use government services — and too often live in fear. What is to be done about them? It’s a difficult question, and one the Republican presidential candidates in the last two debates spent a great deal of effort avoiding.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, none of these Republicans favor “amnesty,” and President George W. Bush’s comprehensive solution — tougher enforcement and legalization, with penalties — has gone nowhere. Comprehensive reform is President Obama’s answer, too, which means no Republican today dares support it.

Asked about illegal immigrants, the candidates settled on the simplest-sounding response: seal the border. What about immigrants already here? Same answer: seal the border. This was both a nonanswer and a call for billions in new government spending, which was very strange to hear from politicians also determined to slash even the most basic public services any chance they get. The seal-the-border answer is not only not a solution, it cynically misrepresents what’s happening on the ground. It falsely paints the border region as a dangerous place when American border cities are among the safest in the country. It also denies the fact that Presidents Bush and Obama have already spent years and billions on border fencing, more Border Patrol officers and National Guard troops, spy planes, even seismic sensors.

As for spending billions more to stanch the “flood,” illegal crossings are at the lowest they have been in decades, because of the fence and the terrible economy.

We were hoping that Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Rick Perry of Texas and Jon Huntsman of Utah would at least offer sensible solutions, having dealt with the reality of immigration in their years as governors. But reality is clearly not on the agenda.

Mr. Romney has slipped into and out of practically every immigration position possible. He endorsed President Bush’s call to create a path to citizenship, but when Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy offered a bill to do just that, he opposed it. As governor he blocked in-state tuition for undocumented students. He now opposes “amnesty,” rejects a “special deal” on legalization and supports building a fence, “technologically.”

Mr. Perry maintains that fencing off Texas’s 1,250-mile border is too expensive. Instead, he favors more troops and spy planes. Mr. Huntsman, who once endorsed comprehensive reform and driver’s licenses for the undocumented, called Mr. Perry’s skepticism about a fence “pretty much a treasonous comment.”

Mr. Perry was also attacked for signing a bill giving in-state tuition to the undocumented. “I’m proud that we are having those individuals be contributing members of our society rather than telling them, ‘You go be on the government dole,’ ” he explained. For that he was booed.

But even this assertion of an old American ideal — of immigrants as contributing members of society — was only a faint echo of Mr. Perry’s former moderation. In 2001, he told The Dallas Morning News that he was “intrigued” by and “open to” President Bush’s comprehensive reform approach. A legalization plan, he said then, was better than “illegal immigrants living in fear of the law and afraid to access basic services.” That’s the definition of a sensible, pro-American immigration policy. Today, it’s also Republican heresy.