Little Fanfare for Nat'l Immigration Meeting

After repeated delays, President Obama finally convened his first bipartisan meeting on immigration yesterday, but nothing he said indicated significant political movement on the issue.

Obama met with 30 or so lawmakers in the State Dining Room, naming an immigration workgroup to liaison with Congress that will be led by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary and former Arizona governor who supported the deployment of troops along Arizona's border with Mexico.

Hinting at some of the more thorny issues between Democrats and Republicans, Senator John McCain said that Obama will need to convince labor unions to allow for business to expand their foreign labor pool.

“I would expect the president of the United States to put his influence on the unions in order to change their position,” Mr. McCain said. As he left the White House, he said Mr. Obama needed to show leadership, saying, “That's why he was elected president.”

For his part, the president commended McCain, one of a handful of Republicans who tried to help push through immigration reform in 2007, for taking political risk.

But he seemed unwilling to do so himself, saying only that America's roughly 12 million undocumented workers comprise “a group that we have to deal with in a practical, common-sense way.”

As McCain had noted, a main point of contention is foreign labor. America's two largest unions, AFL-CIO and Change to Win, oppose any employer-led plans to attract more foreign workers.

In a frank recognition of the obvious, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said an immigration bill would not muster enough support this year. “If the votes were there,” he said, “you wouldn't need to have the meeting.”

Nonetheless, Obama did announce that the Citizenship and Immigration Services Office will begin working closely with the White House's chief information personnel to make the agency more efficient and transparent. USCIS will have a new website in the next three months, allowing applicants to get online updates for the first time.

The tepid progress did not stop America's vociferous paramilitary group from holding a protest to stop “the pandering to illegal aliens” at Congressman Jerry Jewis' office in Redland, Calif.

The immigration issue tends to draw out the core contradictions not simply between but within the political parties. Democrats need to balance the demands of labor unions with those of Hispanic groups, and Republicans must avoid alienating both employers and their populist-conservative base.

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes about America and Islam at his website, Crossing the Crescent, and for WireTap, where he is also the immigration blogger.