Sham stances on illegal immigration.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: The San Francisco Chronicle for September 13 reported: "With pivotal midterm elections just two months away, Republicans and Democrats vied to show they are tougher than the other party when it comes to illegal immigration."

ITEM: The Washington Post for September 9 reported: "Congress will not address major immigration revisions before the Nov. 7 election, the Senate's top Republican said yesterday, but he and his allies hope to limit political damage to their party by telling voters they have poured millions of dollars into one component of the controversy: tightening the border with Mexico."

ITEM: In an op-ed column in the Washington Times for September 10, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge wrote that most illegal immigrants "work hard at jobs that many Americans prefer not to do." He added that the United States has a "shrinking number of workers, especially at the lower end of the economy. Entire industries in a growing number of urban and rural areas depend on large illegal populations. Existing law allows only a fraction of these workers to enter the country legally.... Thus, border enforcement will continue to fail so long as we refuse to allow willing workers a chance to work legally for a willing employer."

CORRECTION: Rhetoric notwithstanding, the two major parties and the White House have not effectively dealt with a pet peeve of the electorate: illegal immigration. Virtually every poll reveals that Americans want nothing to do with amnesty for illegals, by any name, but do want their borders to be secure. Whether belatedly throwing some money at a few enforcement measures will be sufficient for the GOP to disguise its poor record remains to be seen. Facing resistance, the White House has, for now, pulled back from its counterproductive efforts to legalize millions of "guest workers."

Inaction is more likely to hurt the Republicans' national electoral efforts than the Democrats' since the GOP is in power. Though many Republican legislators in the House supported a bill to make illegal immigration a federal crime, they were stymied by Senate Republicans (as well as Democrats) who would grant legal status to most of the illegal immigrants in the United States (estimated variously between 12 million and 20 million). The price tag for the Senate bill, concluded the Congressional Budget Office, would be a whopping $127 billion.

Rather than running on their own political stances, many Democratic leaders have tried to shift the blame to the Republicans, pointing out how the federal government in recent years has paid less attention to those employing illegals than during the Clinton administration. And that is true: enforcement operations at work sites were slashed by 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1999 and 2003; prosecutions for hiring illegals fell from 182 in 1999 to just four in 2003.

Yet, consider what the Democratic leaders want: the would-be Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has an almost unmatched record for pandering to border-jumpers. As the Washington Times put it: "Few politicians can match Mrs. Pelosi's fervor on behalf of illegals. During an October 2003 visit to Mexico, she denounced federal raids on Wal-Mart stores which employed them as a form of 'terror.' The following year, after a new Mobile Patrol Group under the auspices of the Border Patrol arrested 450 illegals in a series of raids in California, Mrs. Pelosi and fellow Democratic members of Congress protested and the patrol group was disbanded."