I agree with Joshua Green that race will play a role in the next presidential election, but the premise of his column, that Washington is "ignoring" immigration, is really off the mark:
As the country still struggles to emerge from recession, the poll indicates, rather ominously, that ideas about how best to do so break down by race. The shame of it all is that while economic growth is the surefire way to mitigate these tensions -- a rising tide lifts all boats -- agreeing on how best to bring it about will be hard, and harder still because a major source of the dispute is neither being acknowledged nor addressed in Washington.
The idea that the federal government "isn't doing anything" about illegal immigration is the kind of conventional wisdom behind conservative-dominated states implementing harsh immigration laws. But it simply isn't true. Congress approved a $600 million border bill last year, the Obama administration has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than ever before. Several states are in open revolt over the Secure Communities program, in which the federal government uses information from arrests made by local police to find and deport undocumented immigrants. Democrats in the Senate and immigration activists have urged the president to defer deportations of undocumented immigrants who might be eligible for the DREAM Act, which failed by just a few votes last December, while Republicans in Congress are seeking to pass a nationwide mandatory E-Verify bill, which would compel employers to a flawed screening process to ensure potential hires are in the country legally.
Now it's true that little is likely to get done legislatively, but that's for structural reasons -- the party that controls the House has a completely different approach to immigration than the party that controls the Senate and the White House, But that's not the same as the issue not being "acknowledged or addressed," in Washington, since both are actually happening. What's disappointing is that most of what has actually been done involves stricter enforcement policies, while very little has been done to fix the immigration system as a whole. The former are simply less difficult, politically speaking. Plenty is happening, it's just that not much of it is good.
