Illegal immigration and crime

As the Senate and the White House turn their focus to comprehensive immigration reform, little attention has been given to who would be negatively impacted by any move to fix the country's broken immigration system and provide a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. 

By Dara Lind

The Senate and the White House have each had their turn. Now it’s up to the GOP-controlled House, the most volatile of the trio, to figure out an immigration plan. Who are they? What are they working on? Members of both parties are keeping a tight lid on not just the substance of negotiations, but the group’s roster.

A bipartisan group of leading Democratic and Republican senators stood side by side Monday, vowing to take on the often heated issue of comprehensive immigration reform.

COMMENT “Unless there are aboriginal people in this building,” councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam intoned at city council on Thursday, “every single one of us, and our ancestors, arrived to this country at some point in time as undocumented workers…. Let’s acknowledge that once and for all.” Actually, let’s not.

A majority of Americans think undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country and apply for citizenship, according to a new CBS News poll. 

Those 11 million illegal immigrants — what’s the policy sweet spot between outright amnesty and deportation? A smart National Affairs piece tries to split the difference. It suggests granting the undocumented a new status as ”permanent non-citizen residents.”

I wasn’t surprised to see that early polling on Arizona’s draconian immigration crackdown was somewhat positive. But I assumed that people didn’t really understand the issue properly, as is often the case. But Supreme Leader Faiz Shakir’s writeup of the NYT’s poll on the subject reveals the more disturbing possibility that the public knows what’s going on and likes it anyway: