Gabriel Arana explains that veering to the right on immigration will ultimately make comprehensive reform harder to achieve:
After Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a draconian new immigration bill last week, immigration reform vaulted to the top of the progressive priority list. On Saturday, immigrant-rights demonstrators in nearly a hundred cities will call on the president to pass reform legislation to override the Arizona law, which criminalizes undocumented immigrants’ presence and requires officers to question anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.
The Center for American Progress (CAP), the country’s premier liberal think tank, and America’s Voice, a pro-immigration lobbying group, were quick to join Democratic lawmakers in denouncing the bill. But the Arizona law is actually a more extreme version of “tough on immigration” policies these organizations have espoused in recent years. Since the last push for immigration reform failed in 2007, CAP, America’s Voice, and their allies on the left have been actively advocating for stricter enforcement, which usually means sealing our Southern border, and have adopted rhetoric that portrays undocumented immigrants as criminals who need to “get right with the law” and “pay their debt to society.”
