Finessing the Immigrant Crackdown

Like Michael Chertoff, her predecessor as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano doesn’t have the power to change immigration law. She’s there to administer the department, enforce the law, and keep the homeland secure. Like Chertoff, Napolitano knows that strict law enforcement alone will not solve the nation’s immigration crisis. The outgoing secretary repeatedly said that the immigration crisis would persist until Congress passes a comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). Chertoff made that case that he was “restoring integrity” to immigration law enforcement and border control. Once Americans were assured that the border was secure and that the government was truly enforcing immigration law, he argued, there would then be more political space for CIR, especially expanded temporary worker programs. With the enforcement-first approach in firmly place at DHS, the new secretary is now signaling her commitment to iron out the wrinkles of the enforcement-first approach, including detention standards and the efficiencies of federal-local collaboration. In a Jan. 20 directive on immigration and border control, Napolitano says: “Smart, resolute enforcement by the department can keep Americans safe, foster legal immigration to America, protect legitimate commerce, and lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive reform.” It is the last in an initial series of 11 directives issued by Napolitano. In this new directive, she poses a series of questions to departmental officials responsible for immigration law enforcement and border security and expects reports back to her by Feb. 20. The questions indicate a shift away from Chertoff’s hard-line approach, which often seemed devoid of any humanity or concern about the social, economic, and environmental consequences of the department’s immigrant crackdown.

Those who were expecting the former border governor and federal prosecutor to call a halt to the immigrant crackdown and to the post-Sept. 11 border build-up will be sorely disappointed. There will likely be some changes around the edges, such as improved detention standards and monitoring, but no rethinking of immigration enforcement and border security will likely come from Napolitano. No questions or concerns about the multitude of issues and problems that resulted from the security-driven campaign to fortify the border and round up suspect immigrants – the value of the border wall, the central role of private prisons in immigrant detention, the wisdom of U.S. drug policy with respect to border drug-related violence, the decreased attention to political asylum and refugee policy, the consequences of workplace raids, etc. A professional bureaucrat and politician, Napolitano is busy organizing, systematizing, and improving the crackdown that Chertoff so zealously spearheaded.

Read entire TransBorder Dispatch

A Homeland Security Colony

Dee Torres sees history in the making in the West Texas borderlands. The elementary school teacher wants to be part of the history of the borderlands, and wants her grandchildren to remember these times. Torres, a resident since a child of the border town of Ft. Hancock, is taking photos of the construction of the new border wall rising along the Rio Grande in this desolate stretch of West Texas. Construction crews are hurriedly completing the last major portion of the 670 miles of border fencing authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. “I am taking photos of the wall for my grandchildren,” she says. “They will be able to say that they were here when this wall was built, and one day they will surely see it torn down – just like the Berlin Wall!” Torres is an activist who participated last summer in a march starting in Ft. Hancock that threaded its way along the border for sixty miles to El Paso to protest what area residents uniformly call the border wall. The wall, which runs through El Paso and extends east to the Ft. Hancock area and west to the New Mexico border town of Columbus, has not been well received.

Although relatively few inhabitants of this border region have actively protested the continuing construction of the wall, criticism of the “secure fence” is common and widespread. There is also an emerging movement that is demanding that the new wall be torn down. "The wall will surely hurt American interests all across the Americas for a whole generation," wrote State Senator Eliot Shapleigh, a Democrat and a fifth-generation El Pasoan, in a December Op-Ed in the Arizona Daily Star. "Is it too much too soon to ask that this wall come down or is it the right thing to do at the right time in history? If not now, when? If not under President-elect Barack Obama, then who?" Activists have taken to labeling the fence “The Wall of Hate” or the “Wall of Shame” (“Muro de Odio”, or “Muro de Verguenza”). But perhaps the most widespread criticism relates to the enormous cost -- $2.4 billion allocated thus far for the construction of the first 670 miles -- of the secure fence, whose benefits are few and downsides are many. “It’s a colossal waste of money,” Torres says, “They are spending millions dollars on this ugly wall dividing our community. It’s an insult.” Part of the insult is having the U.S. government construct a wall between cross-border communities, such as the one between Ft. Hancock and El Porvenir in Chihuahua, whose families and economies have been closely linked. Part of the insult is having their view of the river and mountains now scarred by a metal wall dividing the formerly wide-open landscape. But it is the sheer extravaganza of spending that is perhaps most insulting to the poor communities that dot the Rio Grande flood plains that unite the United States and Mexico. With 1800 residents, Ft. Hancock is the largest of three towns found in the vast distances that separate the 3500 people living within the 4500-sq. miles of Hudspeth County. Most are poor, very poor, and live in dilapidated houses and mobile homes. Per capita income in the county is about $14,000, which in less than half of the state average. Hudspeth County competes with a few other border counties for being the poorest in the state. As a border town, Ft. Hancock is the poorest town in the county and its poverty rate is quadruple the national level. Most of the homes are substandard, and nearly 50 percent live in poverty – and that was before the new economic downturn. The post-Sept. 11 focus on border security by the Department of Homeland Security has meant an infusion of infrastructure spending and the creation of hundreds of new jobs. But the DHS’ “tactical infrastructure” spending for the wall, deployment of sensors, new port-of-entry, and new Border Patrol station hasn’t trickled down. The workers come from elsewhere, don’t make their homes in Ft. Hancock, and speed back and forth (taking advantage of the 80-mile an hour speed limit) along Interstate 10 to El Paso every day. Seeing the federal government spend $1-5 million a mile to build a fence in West Texas doesn’t sit too well with local residents who lived on unpaved roads, many without water lines. Ft. Hancock is getting plenty of DHS’ tactical infrastructure, but it lacks the basic infrastructure of community centers, parks, paved streets, and water services. In border terminology it is a “colonia” (literally colony, roughly neighborhood or settlement), one of the scores of unincorporated settlements along the Texas-New Mexico border with Mexico. Ft. Hancock originated as an army post from which it took its name. But more than ever before, the town has the feel of an occupied town – a homeland security colony. The outsiders here are not the foreigners – aliens in DHS terms – who live across the river in El Porvenir, but the ever-increasing number of Border Patrol agents and other DHS officials (about one for every twelve residents) and the contingents of construction worker that arrive in their trucks every morning from El Paso to fortify Ft. Hancock. Meanwhile Ft. Hancock natives like Torres wonder about the government’s concept of homeland security. She tells of an El Porvenir woman who crossed the border three days a week for nearly twenty years to work as a housekeeping the Torres home. The now-elderly lady still lives on the Mexico side of the river, but because of the new homeland security regime she can no longer easily cross and risks imprisonment if she tries. Nobody along the border disputes the need for measures to control the rise of organized crime and drug smuggling, but they say that the billions spent on border security are wasteful and not well-targeted. Torres thinks there should be a better way to secure the border without occupying it and dividing communities. About her family’s longtime housekeeper, she asks: “What harm did she do? Twenty years without fail. What harm?”

Tom Barry Photo

Border Boom Times at Ft. Hancock

Ft. Hancock is not a typical boom town.

Not the typical town at all. In fact, it isn’t really a town, merely a census designated place (CDP), a move up from its previous designation as a census county division (CDD).

Despite being the largest town in Hudspeth County, it isn’t incorporated, doesn’t have a community hall or plaza or even a grocery store. Ft. Hancock Merchandise, like many of the town’s old stores, lies shuttered and forgotten. According to the census office, 47% of the 1800 Ft. Hancock residents live in poverty.

But the ghost-town pall of the town’s main intersection – where Texas 20 meets Knox Avenue – contrasts with the bustle seen at the other end of Knox Avenue – where it meets Interstate 10.

At the Ft. Hancock exit off of I-10, about 50 miles from El Paso, the boom times are evident. While a few of the cars parked at Angie’s Restaurant (which proclaims itself world-famous for its chicken fried steak) and at the adjacent convenience store are locals and interstate travelers, most now are construction workers stopping on their way back and forth from El Paso.

Ft. Hancock is booming today because of its border location. But it’s hardly cross-border trade and travel that is sparking the increasing activity. Rather, it’s all about the business of stopping cross-border traffic.

While the border bridge that connects Ft. Hancock and El Porvenir, Chihuahua hasn’t been improved or widened (not broad enough for two cars) since it was constructed in 1936, the other border infrastructure on the U.S. side is undergoing a major upgrade.

The average home (most are mobile homes) in Ft. Hancock is worth about $25,000, but the new home of the Border Patrol will cost taxpayers at least $19 million by the time it’s finished sometime this year. The palatial-looking concrete structure rising next to the U.S. port-of-entry station will be the new home for the 146 Border Patrol agents deployed in “line-watch operations” along this stretch of the Rio Grande.

Also contributing to the Ft. Hancock boom is the construction of the new border fence, which extends, with some gaps, from El Paso to the east side of Ft. Hancock. According to BP information officer, Lloyd Easterling, the government is spending about $3 million a mile to construct the fence in this area.

Illegals Don't Leave A Trace

“I don’t mind the illegals so much,” says Craig Miller, whose Miller Bros. cotton farm runs along the border next to the Ft. Hancock port of entry, “They don’t do much damage. In fact, no damage. It’s the Border Patrol agents who are the ones damaging our farms -- driving through our fields as if they own this land and four-wheeling it along our roads and levees, even when it’s wet, so they digging deep ruts that we have to repair.”

“But the Mexicans who pass through,” said Miller, “go through the irrigation channels, not leaving a trace, even covering up their tracks.”

The Border Patrol have long been part of the life on the border, but the relationship between the Border Patrol and community residents like Miller has changed with the recent buildup in the number of officers at the Ft. Hancock station.

“The Border Patrol used to be part of this community,” explained Miller, “but they no longer live here, don’t know the community, don’t know the land.” When he was a boy, he remembered fondly, a member of the Border Patrol was his Little League baseball coach. But now all but two of the 146 agents commute from El Paso, he said.

“Now they don’t even know where the post office is,” said Miller disdainfully, noting that a couple of station supervisors weren’t able to say where the post office is located.

He recognizes the need for a Border Patrol but like other Ft. Hancock residents now regards the Border Patrol as outsiders who don’t respect the locals, or worse don’t even know them. As a result, residents complain that they are repeatedly stopped by roving Border Patrol agents and asked all manner of intrusive questions.

Miller says that one day he was stopped four times when traveling along the border road connecting two of his farms. “By the fourth time, I gave them a piece of my mind,” said Miller.

(That morning I had addition reason to empathize with county residents who bitterly complain of Border Patrol practices. Earlier in the day, I myself had been stopped while traveling the border road and then interrogated by two agents. After providing the two officers with the requested identification and allowing them to search my vehicle, BP Agent McCraven checked my data on his computer and then came back two more times asking for additional forms of identification, my birth date, and social security number, as well as quizzing me where I had spent the night, what I had been doing in the county seat of Sierra Blanca, and where I was going next.

Finally, I, too, had enough when he asked me to roll up my sleeve to see if I had a tattoo on my arm, explaining that someone with my same birth date – but not same name, social security number, or place of residence – was wanted for some crime elsewhere in the country and had a tattoo on his arm. Indignant, I declined saying that had no right and had no reasonable suspicion. “Who do you think you are,” I said irritably, “an FBI agent? You have all my identification, you have already determined that I am not an illegal alien and am not smuggling any, as you can well see.”)

Just Plain Dumb

“They’re just dumb, plain dumb,” said Miller. Most of them he said are brand new and have never been in a rural area before. “They bring them in from Chicago, Philadelphia, wherever, and they don’t know anything about farms or this area.

Pointing out the Miller Bros.’ pump house, which stands near the border, he tells how one morning he saw 18 Mexicans crossing the border illegally near the pump house, each carrying a burlap bag on his shoulder. Taking them for drug runners, he phoned the Ft. Hancock Border Patrol Station, which is located about a quarter mile away.

Telling the officer about the border crossers, he explained that they were now walking past the farm’s pump house. Despite the farm’s prominence in the community, the answering officer didn’t know where the pump house was.

“Well, now they are walking up the dirt road past the Ft. Hancock ruins,” said Miller, recounting phone call. But the agent didn’t know where that was either, according to Miller, asking him if that was the old army post located some 15 miles to the east.

“I bet you know where the Ft. Hancock road is, don’t you?” he asked me, “and this is your first time through here– you can’t miss the sign!” As Miller guessed, I had seen the historical road marker just as I had spotted the Miller Bros. sign, both within minutes of the Border Patrol office.

Miller recalled that he called the Border Patrol again, after seeing the Mexican men pack into a large van that picked them up where the dirt road meets Highway 20. “They’re now coming your way,” he advised the agent, “All you have to do is step out of your office and stop the white van, which will be passing your way in a couple of minutes.”

Apparently, the illegal immigrants smuggling marijuana made it onto the interstate without being caught by the alerted Border Patrol.

Similar stories are told by Hudspeth County officials and other residents who seem uniformly angered and frustrated by the ineptitude of the Border Patrol. They see millions of dollars being pumped into this remote spot on the border but don't feel any more secure economically or any safer.

Tom Barry Photo

The Newly Fortified Ft. Hancock

(This is the first in a series of reports on the Texas-New Mexico-Chihuahua borderlands.) The river runs slow and shallow through the Chihuahuan desert as it flows 1200 miles from El Paso/Juárez to the Gulf of Mexico. Bearing two names, the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo forms the natural divide between the United States and Mexico. Now, another divide – a decidedly unnatural one – is marching west from El Paso, tearing through the farms and riparian zones that turn the desert green. The Department of Homeland Security’s border fence already marks most of the national boundary from San Diego to El Paso. But -- armed with federal waivers to bypass the opposition of borderland communities, farmers, and environmentalists -- DHS and its Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency have expedited the construction of an 18-ft. steel barrier along the Rio Grande. Ft. Hancock, an impoverished U.S. border town about 60 miles downriver from El Paso, is bustling lately from all the new attention to border security. The town’s center, such as it is, lies slightly east of the old U.S. Army’s frontier outpost, which in 1886 was named after Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was wounded in Gettysburg and later commanded the 5th Military Department in the Texas territory. But as the Indians were removed and the area settled by prospective farmers, the fort was abandoned and the town developed to serve the riverfront farmers, mostly Anglos, who depended – and still do – on Mexican farmworkers. Today, Ft. Hancock remains largely a town -- really only a "census designated place (CDP)" -- of white farmers and Mexican-American laborers.

Ft. Hancock is easy to locate on a Texas map because there is not much else around for scores of miles. But it might have proved difficult for Red (Morgan Freeman) in the 1994 film "The Shawshank Redemption" to get to, when, after leaving prison, he is told by his buddy Andy (Tim Robbins) to cross into Mexico at Ft. Hancock to hop a bus for the Mexican coast. (Wouldn't it have been easier to cross in El Paso and go to the bus terminal in Juárez?)

Until recently, Ft. Hancock was a close twin city of El Porvenir, a slightly larger Mexican town on the other side of the river. Today, the twins have grown apart as Ft. Hancock has again become fortified with a large contingent of 146 Border Patrol agents and with what the BP officers call “Tactical Infrastructure.” This TI (in BP jargon) includes a formidable fence that is now rising on either side of the port-of-entry bridge and the network of sensors deployed along the river. Reinforcing the town’s name, there is a newly fortified port-of-entry station and an adjoining a $19 million BP district headquarters building that is under construction.

On both sides of the river, longtime residents are alternately bemused and angry at the border security buildup.

(Next: Where's the Post Office in Ft. Hancock?)

Photos by Tom Barry: New Border Patrol headquarters and the fence under construction in Ft. Hancock.

Brown Can Stick Around in Nashville

“Nashville listened to its leaders — the governor, the mayor, and a vast coalition of churches, businesses and universities — and defeated an English-only measure by nearly 10,000 votes in Thursday's special election.” That’s the report from the Tennessean the day after the city referendum on an amendment that would have made Nashville the largest city in the nation with an “official English” law.

With financial and logistical support from the Arlington, Va.-based ProEnglish, Nashville councilman Eric Crafton founded Nashville English First to spearhead a charter amendment that would have obligated the city government to conduct all government business in English. While the main case for the English Only measure was that it would save the city in translation costs, the issue of identity set the tone of the debate.

Did Nashville want to affirm that it was typically white Southern city, or that it was an inclusive, diverse city that was open to residents and visitors who speak other languages? In the end, after heated debate that energized a strong opposition coalition, the city rejected the identity politics of English only. "Voters are not duped anymore," said Maria Rodriquez of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. "They know when they see bad policy that is going to be costly and that's not progressive. I guess brown can stick around in Nashville." At a time when other cities and states are instituting anti-immigrant measures, the people of Nashville spoke for diversity and inclusion.

It’s likely that the election of Barack Obama underscored the argument of the opponents of the English First measure was “mean-spirited” – as Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said – and not worthy of a city that values and promotes its diversity.

The day after the landmark vote in Nashville, ProEnglish with its Liberty Bell logo still had a running banner proclaiming that “Official English is sweeping the nation.”

ProEnglish, the organization involved in the Nashville campaign, is part of a closely linked network of “official English” and anti-immigration organizations that are based in the Washington, DC area and are involved in local and national campaigns to restrict immigration and to institute English as the official and only language for government business.(See TransBorder Profile: ProEnglish)

A central figure of these groups is John Tanton, who was a founding director of ProEnglish and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Among the other groups in which Tanton, a former president in the 1970s of Zero Population Growth, are English First, Immigration Reform Law Institute, and Numbers USA. As the principals of these groups readily acknowledge, the movements to restrict immigration and to restrict the use of languages other than English are closely connected organizationally and ideologically.

If the Nashville vote is any indication, the issue of the increasing presence of other languages in the country may be losing its emotional and ideological hold on Americans. Both at a national and local level, diversity not uniformity has a new power in American politics.

(Read Entire TransBorder Commentary)

Image from ProEnglish

The New Political Economy of Immigration

(Here's an excerpt from my article published in the current issue of Dollars & Sense.)

Since Sept. 11, 2001 immigrants have become America’s most wanted. The terrorist attacks altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The economic forces that historically drive the demand for unskilled and skilled immigrants – and shape immigration policy -- suddenly lost their dominance. In the wake of Sept. 11, the rightist political forces that had long called for nationwide immigration enforcement, heavily restricted immigration, and fortified borders moved from the margins into the center of the immigration debate. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security and its cultural identity. The millions of illegal immigrants – those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas – who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border-control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward. In the name of national security, responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus – doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds. The $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the prison industry. Immigrants are now the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population. Across the country, but particularly in the Southwest, new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year in the intensifying crackdown. Local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans. Also part of the immigrant crackdown are many states and local governments that -- pressured by anti-immigrant activists and prodded by the federal government -- are eagerly collaborating with federal agencies in enforcing immigration law. Dozens of county and city governments -- often in partnership with private prison firms -- are also expanding their jails to accommodate detained immigrants. High per-diem payments offered by the federal government for each immigrant incarcerated drive this new market. Immigrants are behind one of America’s fastest growing, most profitable industries. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Immigrants have always been a core factor in U.S. economic development. Mining, railroads, agribusiness, and recently construction have been among the many U.S. industries that historically been driven by an abundant supply of immigrants. But now, when the economy is imploding, most industries are shedding immigrants. The demand part of the supply-and-demand equation is faltering, leaving a large supply of unwanted and vulnerable illegal immigrants. The private prison industry, however, is booming, largely because of the ever-increasing supply of immigrants supplied by the federal government. While the Department of Homeland Security is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. It’s all part of a new political economy of immigration that will continue to shape immigration policy under the Obama administration.

Obama's Immigration Challenge -- More About Words Than Policy

(Border Lines CIR Series #16) 

President Barack Obama could quickly go a long way toward resolving the immigration policy crisis. But it’s not the path that the leading liberal immigration reformers are demanding. At this time the introduction of new comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) bill would, even if supported by the president, would be disastrous.

Many of the forces that supported CIR last time around are calling for the Obama administration to support liberal immigration reform within its first year. They say it’s what the voters want and what’s needed to solve the immigration crisis.

But another divisive debate over the details of a new immigration policy is not what the U.S. public needs, and it’s not what immigrants need. Even with an increased Democratic majority, there isn’t the political will or political capital to pass a liberal immigration reform.

What’s needed is not another unwieldy CIR bill. What’s desperately, urgently needed is simply the power of words – and this is a power that the president has in abundance. Before dealing with the controversial specifics of a new immigration policy, Obama needs to weave a new narrative about immigration in 21st America.

A central reason why the immigration debate is so contentious, so deeply bitter is the absence of common terms of discourse. Each side in this debate has set out to frame the issue in terms that reflect its own distorted worldview. The result is a nation that is variously divided and confused. Some say that the immigration crisis is at its heart a national security crisis in which the homeland is threatened by porous borders and millions of illegal immigrants in the heartland.

Others say that it a crisis of supply and demand in the laws of the market clash with unrealistic immigration laws that turn workers into illegals.

Some say it is a social and cultural crisis in which stability and identity in America are undermined by a pervasive presence of illegal immigrants, while others say that it is a crisis in which there is a massive violation of immigrant rights – the right to work without exploitation and the right to be treated fairly.

Adding to the confusion about the immigration issue is that opposing sides employ some of the same conceptual frameworks to mean different things. Both pro-immigration and anti-immigration institutes in Washington, DC now sprinkle their messaging with appeals to the “rule of law” and “worker rights.”

For the pro-immigration forces, the only way to restore the rule of law is to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows” of the law through a legalization process and to provide more legal paths of entry. In contrast, the anti-immigration groups say that only by enforcing immigration law consistently – both at the border and in the country’s interior – will the rule of law be restored.

Worker rights for the immigrant advocates means enforcement of labor laws to protect immigrants (and by extension all workers), while anti-immigration organizations say that the large presence of illegal workers undermine the rights of legal workers who are forced into a competition that drives wages and working conditions downward.

Each side claims the virtue of common sense.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the nation’s oldest restrictionist institute, boasts in its slogan that is "Restoring Common Sense to America's Immigration System." Meanwhile, the competing slogan of America’s Voice, an immigrant-rights organization created in the wake of CIR’s defeat in 2007, is “The Power to Win Common Sense Immigration Reform.”

Each side tells America that its vision of immigration reform is the fair one. It’s the acronym of the leading restrictionist organization, and it kicks off the name of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, the networking branch of the immigrant-rights institutes in Washington.

As it became evident in the CIR congressional battles in 2006 and 2007, comprehensive immigration reform, even if passed, would fall far short of establishing a new immigration policy that was both sensible and fair. While attempting to be comprehensive – border security, temporary workers, family visas, employment verification, immigration law enforcement, citizenship conditions, etc. – the last CIR bill of the Bush administration came to the Senate floor as patchwork of compromises and contradictions.

No doubt there is an immigration crisis in America. No doubt that the system is broken, as contending sides both assert.

It’s out of control.

The budget being thrown by both Democrats and Republicans at border control and immigration law enforcement increases every year by more than a billion dollars. Thousands of newly hired and inadequately trained border patrol officers in an armada of new vehicles roam the borderland, which is booming with construction of border walls, fortified ports of entry, and imposing new headquarters for an occupying arm of Homeland Security agents.

Private prison firms and local governments rush to build dozens of new prisons for immigrants stopped at the border or rounded up in the interior. Most major and medium-size cities now host Homeland Security “fugitive operations teams” that in their hunt for criminal and fugitive (who have not responded to immigration court orders) immigrants are banging down doors in dawn raids and collecting as collateral nontargeted immigrants, legal residents and immigrant-looking citizens.

It’s shameful.

In the name of restoring the rule of law, immigrants are being pulled from their families, communities, and employment and the outsourced to private prison companies that own and operate the country’s new array of immigrant prisons. Immigrant settlements that have revitalized urban centers and dying rural towns are being shorn apart

But in the absence of a national consensus about immigration, the government says it has no recourse but to enforce the law.

It’s up to President Obama to forge that consensus with new words about immigration. Just as he is bringing rivals and parties together and just as bridging other ideological divides with a vision of common hope for a renewed America, he needs to create a new common language about immigration.

The immigration debate that is raging in America is suffused with many valid terms: immigrant-rights, nation of immigrants, justice for all, nation’s right to control its border, identity theft, overburdened social services, etc.

Cobbling all these terms and associated policies together into a comprehensive immigration bill is one approach to solving the immigration crisis. But in a post-Bush America it’s old approach that doesn’t rise to this new hopeful political time.

No one else has risen to the challenge, but Obama is a natural for the task of creating a new framework for understanding immigration and managing it in the national interest. What he needs to explain, as perhaps only he can, is that the nation needs a healthy debate over immigration.

But not a debate shaped and driven by pro- and anti-immigration groups that are irretrievably entrenched in their own narrow rhetoric and convictions. Rather a debate and a discourse that is positive, inclusive, and pragmatic.

The terms used to frame the new national discussion about immigration can be common ones – like justice, community, sustainability, rights, national interest, and yes common sense and fairness – but Obama can infuse them with a new vitality, a new urgency, and an invigorating personal relevancy.

It’s his challenge now to create a new narrative to immigration that brings Americans together. With his power of words and ability to evoke hope, he needs to help us determine together how and how many immigrants contribute to our national interest and our nation’s future.

Next in Border Lines CIR Series: Latino Path to Immigration Reform