This is part eight of a series on the start of the 2008 presidential election’s general campaign. Links to the rest of the series can be found at the bottom of the article.
Way back in March of 2006, a bipartisan group of senators assembled to announce that they’d reached a compromise on a long-awaited immigration reform package.
That bill, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, failed to pass the Senate. It didn’t even earn a direct vote. Still, it was the closest that the nation has come to a consensus in our highly contentious immigration debate: a path to citizenship, a guest worker program, a tightening of family reunification laws, and increased border security.
And who was up there, sharing the television cameras? John McCain and Barack Obama.
Despite that, or perhaps in part because of that, there’s something else the two presumptive Presidential nominees more or less now share on the issue: silence.
The rocky shoals of immigration politics—which can transverse both parties’ base constituencies (nativists v. big business, blacks v. Latinos, etc.)—are, conventional wisdom goes, best avoided. So McCain trimmed his rhetoric—and even abandoned his vocal support of the bill that came to bear his name—in the face of a Republican primary electorate quite hostile to immigration. Nowadays, his website doesn’t even sport a dedicated immigration section. Instead, it offers a section on “Border Security” where conventional immigration topics are combined with other McCain messages—cutting pork, taxes, and regulation—to refocus the issue in a manner that should appeal to anti-immigration voters.
Recently, though only when asked, McCain has been more forthcoming on his old beliefs. Chronicling his rhetorical evolution is worthwhile not only as a matter of consistency and political posturing, but also as an illustration of the opposition that either candidate would face on the issue upon becoming president. But it’s been done.
Obama, like McCain, has not made immigration reform a focus of his campaign. (His website is much more forthcoming, and outlines a policy package very similar to the one he and McCain favored before the lights of the presidential race burned bright.)
Reporters gravitate towards controversy—naturally, since it makes for good stories—and here there’s little controversy between the two candidates. Combine that consensus with the issue’s relative absence from the trail, and immigration is getting something of a pass. It shouldn’t—especially in communities and states where immigration is a hot topic.
In May, The Miami Herald—the second biggest newspaper in the country’s biggest swing state—published an immigration editorial entitled “Candidates Fail Leadership Test by Ignoring Issue.” The paper argued that, by keeping mum, the candidates were depriving the nation of a conversation and education on a major outstanding issue: “If the candidates were to focus on the issue, they could lay the groundwork for a more uplifting debate when a new president and a new Congress return to Washington in January.”
The press, of course, can encourage this debate without the candidates’ help—by keeping immigration on the page and in front of the candidates.
One way to do this is to ask precise questions that could pry minor cracks in the candidate’s consensus—as shelved as it might be at the moment. On first question, McCain is likely to point to his new border security position. But specific questions on discrete elements of immigration policy—does he support mandatory workplace verification? Given border security, what next steps would he take?—might net some more fruitful responses.
While Obama and McCain agree, a long series of failed immigration proposals demonstrate that much of the country does not. All too often, our campaign press treats policy questions like a ping-pong match: an issue is served up by the Democrat candidate, returned by the Republican, and so on. That’s one way. But it clearly doesn’t work when there’s consensus on an issue. And, at least as importantly, it ignores proposals that go unmentioned by the major candidates.
That’s why immigration represents a rare opportunity for the political press to call on each candidate to justify his positions on their own merits—and not just relative to that of his opponent.
Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven of this series.
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.