WH to Congress: Get Immigration Done

     That was the subtext of the White House' own immigration reform proposal being leaked to the press. Marco Rubio immediately piped up that it wasn't "helpful."

     "It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress,” Rubio said.

      http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/marco-rubio-white-house-immigration-reform.php?ref=fpa

      Right. After all they won the election. Oh, wait.

       “President Obama’s leaked immigration proposal is disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution. The President’s bill repeats the failures of past legislation. It fails to follow through on previously broken promises to secure our borders, creates a special pathway that puts those who broke our immigration laws at an advantage over those who chose to do things the right way and come here legally, and does nothing to address guest workers or future flow, which serious immigration experts agree is critical to preventing future influxes of illegal immigrants.”

       The White House answer was succinct. If you don't like our proposal, get your act together.

       "Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough made clear that the proposal was designed to force Congress to get its act together."

        “He says it’s dead on arrival if it’s proposed?” McDonough said. “Well, let’s make sure that it doesn’t have to be proposed. Let’s make sure that that group up there, the gang of eight, makes good progress on these efforts, as much as they say they want to, and that’s exactly what we intend to do, to work with them.”

         With all this quibbling about the borders there's good reason to believe its already secure. Rubio worries about an "influx of immigrants" but in truth we should want more rather than less immigration. While we should have secure borders and in fact do have them we also really want to encourage immigration.

          As Tom Friedman says, one big advantage we have going forward is that we are much better than Europe and Japan at taking in and assimilating lots of immigrants. With a drop in the birth rate worldwide, are much higher numbers of immigrants allows us to replace loss due to a declining birth rate.

         Of course, we have the advantage over Europe and Japan that we have much lower population density so we can more easily accommodate high levels of immigration.

         http://dollarmonopoly.blogspot.com/2011/07/george-friedman-on-national-debt.html

          In continuing to begrudge immigration the GOP is totally on the wrong side of an issue that the American people and the business roundtable alike is more and more supportive of. As for the economists, for them that more immigration means more economic growth is more or less a no-brainer. We want a larger rather than a smaller flow of legal immigration.

          http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2013/02/12/economists-agree-high-skilled-immigration-makes-americans-better-off/

          If Rubio doesn't want the President to get involved in crafting this, the best thing he can do is to not worry about getting into a back and forth in the media and get down to getting the legislation done.