ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

(photo: AP / Morry Gash)

The Times | It’s brave of President Obama, and admirable, to embark on a task at which Bill Clinton and George W. Bush failed. One of his next targets, his team has said, will be to try to legalise 12 million illegal immigrants, in the middle of a savage recession and when Mexico’s bloody drugs war is putting new strain on the border.

It will set him at odds with his own party, never mind Republicans. The question is whether it also dents his wider appeal to Americans in a way that permanently costs him power.

Still, what better use is there of a first term than to mount an assault on one of the US’s most intractable problems? America, so pleased to call itself the land of immigrants, has struggled with its debate about whether and how to shut the door as the long boom sucked in workers across its borders.

Obama, who is as close as you can get to being an immigrant and still qualify for the presidency, campaigned hard for immigration reform. Hispanic voters were important in his success in November. His proposals then were vague – and are scarcely less so now – but the timing is clear enough to be provocative. There will be a White House drive over the summer to prepare members of Congress, followed by legislation as early as the autumn. The cornerstone is clear: offering about 12 million illegal immigrants the chance of citizenship.

Obama’s best line on this is that those who have been living in the US for years – many with children born there – “have to have some mechanism, over time, to get out of the shadows”. His case, which he will have to support with better numbers than he has done so far, is that his scheme would not encourage new illegal workers but would legitimise those who have been working for years without papers. It would fine them for any offence committed but offer them an opportunity to become citiizens. At the same time, to pacify critics, it would tighten the border and bring in harsher penalties for employers of illegals.

The President will have a hard task trying to sell this as something that the US needs, rather than a measure that idealistic policy wonks would like to see made real.

Republican leaders, who have spent three energetic months opposing Obama’s stimulus package as hard as they could, say that they will portray this as an attack on American jobs when the jobless total is at a 26-year high. They will anticipate tapping again into the public uproar that defeated

President Bush’s reform attempt only two years ago, even though he had support from key Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

Bush had consistently backed moves to offer some illegal immigrants a way to become legal, a view he had formed when Governor of Texas. Contrary to his reputation abroad as a unilateralist, he was also strongly in favour of the Nafta trade pact with Mexico (and Canada). He rejected the view that US borders should be sealed to foreign workers and goods.

Immigration brings out a strain of idealism in very different kinds of president, which, time after time, puts them on the wrong side of public opinion. They see, rightly, that it needs reform and that overall the US would benefit. But they fail to persuade those who feel personally at threat of the value of this abstraction. If Obama is serious about this, and he should be, it will be a brutal test of his political base.