Immigration as national security

The immigration bill is on life support but not yet ready to have a fork stuck in it. President Bush is trying very hard to prove that he is not irrelevant, as he continues to push for it. The new approach is to label it a national security issue, and pump more billions into enforcement.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was haggling with senators over possible amendments, said: “This is a national security bill. We are fixing a national security problem.”
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“It’s a matter of our national security,” Mr. Kennedy said Wednesday. “We have broken borders and a broken immigration system.”

The notion that we need to verify who is in the country is not too controversial, but as the article correctly points out, the Senate debate is skirting around the difficulty of developing a verification system that all employers can access. No one should expect such a system to be up and running quickly, or to be free of any number of glitches.