Predictions

James Poulos places among his 11 predictions for 2009 amnesty-based immigration reform:

6. Amnesty. The issue of illegal immigration will remain urgent and vast, but anything resembling a guest worker program will be justly jeered from all sides as a Zombie Bush Plan. The left will be correct that the institutionalization of a mass of mobile labor without true citizenship will sacrifice the Mexican people at the altar of amoral, apolitical capital, and the right will be right to say ditto about the American republic. Any democracy, and especially ours, requires a maximum of humans inside it to be full citizens, rooted in the country and committed to their own shared governance. Obama will be looking for game-changing ways to overcome our apparently intractable ‘structural’ failings, and he will be looking for dealmaking Republicans working on a shocking and awesome relaunch of conservative policymaking. The deal is obvious: really seal the borders, then grant a blanket amnesty — and set up the redeeming, 21st-century equivalent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which will demand citizenship of those who have come here and empower them to govern themselves. The alternative is a future in which the rights of citizens are extended piecemeal to noncitizens—something all Americans should recoil against. And who’s that GOP bigwig Obama can rely on? That’s obvious, too: McCain.

I find this pretty unconvincing. If Obama can find his way to clear from the financial crisis long enough to devote some attention to his legislative agenda, health care is almost certainly going to come first. That's going to take months, so the window for immigration reform in 2009 is pretty small. Even if he does have sufficient time, an energy overhaul and education reform seem far more likely to occupy his attention than immigration. Immigration reform (much less amnesty) was not a campaign promise, so Obama has little incentive to dive head-first into what is inevitably going to be an extremely contentious issue. I think the best chance for immigration reform would be after another couple elections of Republicans getting pummeled by Hispanics, after Obama's already been reelected, with a new Mexican president in power, say in 2013.

This makes Bush's failure to jump on immigration in early 2005 all the more frustrating. Alex Massie's thoughts on that episode are very sharp.