The Shape of A Future Immigration Deal?

 Two incremental immigration measures might pass in the next year, and their outlines are clear. One is a bill by House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, which the House will likely take up Friday.  This would give green cards to foreign students who get U.S. graduate degrees in technical fields, in exchange for eliminating the egregious Visa Lottery for random unskilled immigrants. What’s been added since the last timethe House considered this measure is a change making it easier to move here for spouses whom green card holders married after immigrating.

The second possible piecemeal measure is some version of the DREAM Act, amnestying illegal aliens who came as children, in exchange for an E-Verify requirement for all employers plus some kind of limits on downstream chain migration by the relatives of DREAM amnesty beneficiaries.

But the longer-term question is what kind of broader “grand bargain” might be possible on immigration — specifically, how to address the larger illegal population, estimated at 11 or 12 million people. The open-borders Left, plus its fellow travelers on the right (Jeb Bush, Grover Norquist, et al.) want amnesty now, along with huge increases in legal immigration, in exchange for a promise to try really, really hard to enforce the law in the future.

Immigration hawks, on the other hand, have correctly rejected the very idea of a grand bargain, insisting on Enforcement First. They’ve promoted a policy of attrition through enforcement — reducing the illegal population steadily over time through consistent application of the immigration laws. This would mean continuing the steady increase in deportations that started in the Clinton administration (which has stalled under Obama), but also more self-deportation, as illegals who can’t find work and in general can’t live a normal life here pack up and head back home.

Expansionists counter that this is really “Enforcement Only” — that the “First” part of Enforcement First is disingenuous because there’s no plan for what comes “second.” And it’s true there hasn’t been a lot of thinking about this at the political level, but that’s mainly because when your tub is overflowing, the first thing you have to do is turn off the tap — and we haven’t even reached the tap, let alone moved to turn it off.

But it’s never too early to think about the outlines of a future deal. I’ve long thought that, once real enforcement measures are in place (and functioning, and funded, and survived the ACLU’s legal jihad against any and all enforcement tools), after a few years of shrinkage in the illegal population, considering amnesty for some of those remaining might well be prudent. But the trade-off would not be the conventional one imagined by “comprehensive immigration reform” (amnesty and even more immigration in exchange for insincere enforcement pledges) but rather amnesty in exchange for deep, permanent cuts in future legal immigration.