President Obama has decided to take up immigration, so we all need to keep an eye on Lou:
While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Barack Obama plans to begin addressing America’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Munoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration organizations, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.
There could be something hidden in doing this right now – the fact that immigration is a much more divisive issue on the right than on the left. Let the debate go on for a few months, really heating up, and then all those Democrats running in the midterms will get some great ammo from the Republicans that can’t help but sound like racists.