In part, that will involve addressing economic tensions already emerging in today’s immigration debate. Even before the September credit meltdown, the immigration enforcement arms of the government were shifting their efforts away from the border per se and toward the “magnets” of illegal immigration — workplaces that hire undocumented workers en masse.
Without a clear path forward on the various measures in the comprehensive plan that Congress voted down last summer, the Department of Homeland Security elected to target the economic demand for immigrant labor within U.S. borders. Hence, the recent run of high-profile raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the slaughterhouse industry of Postville, Iowa, and at a Laurel, Miss., plant making electrical equipment.
Now, however, with the specter of a long-term economic downturn, this improvised workplace-driven consensus on immigration enforcement may not hold. As small-business credit seizes up and unemployment increases, going after businesses providing jobs — no matter how poorly paid, underground or unsafe those jobs may be — is not playing well among most constituencies, apart from hard-line immigration opponents. Indeed, lobbyists and managers in other potentially vulnerable companies — such as high-tech concerns and seasonal industries — are already contending that they need access to specialized non-U.S. workers now more than ever.
Still, if the effort to secure the border first is receding somewhat from the immigration debate, it’s far from clear what package of proposals will take shape next. Many observers suggest that some of the measures that the 110th Congress did approve could come under renewed budgetary scrutiny as their mandates expire — such as the 670-mile stretch of concrete fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, which was supposed to be completed by the end of 2008, but now is more than $400 million over budget and just barely half-finished.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=weeklyreport-000002971127&parm1=3&cpage=3
Long but great read!