Originally posted on Huffington Post

Last week a three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals looked at five immigration cases, turned to the Department of Homeland Security, and effectively said, “Really!? Are you really going to deport these people? Or are you going to use your common sense and focus your limited law enforcement resources on dangerous criminals and national security risks?” The court went on to say, in essence, “How about this, go and think about what we’ve asked and let us know what you’ve decided by March 19. In the meantime we’re going to focus ourjudicial resources on more important cases.”

The court’s orders were the result of a memorandum issued last year by John Morton, Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in which he announced that the agency would employ “prosecutorial discretion” in its enforcement of the immigration law. Morton ordered ICE agents and prosecutors to focus on the removal of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to our communities — dangerous criminals and national security risks. Each case considered by Ninth Circuit concerned an immigrant who had been in the U.S. for a long time, had strong family ties, and had no criminal record. Unfortunately, such sympathetic factors are usually meaningless to the immigration law which blindly insists on deportation without regard to fairness, justice, or common sense.

I’ll leave it to others to decide whether or not the Ninth Circuit panel overstepped its authority. After all, as Judge O’Scannlain pointed out in his dissent, courts “have only the slimmest authority even to review the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.” And while the Morton memo is a common sense approach to enforcing a badly broken immigration statute, it is not the law of the land.

So what was the court up to?

Every day in this country courts are forced to turn their backs on deserving immigrants and American citizens alike because of the dysfunctional immigration law. In courtrooms all across America judges sit helplessly by, their hands legally tied, as the twisted immigration law wreaks havoc on American families, stymies American business, fails to protect people fleeing persecution, and stomps on the due process rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens. Its mean spirited provisions tear husbands from wives, parents from children and brothers from sisters. Like some sinister beast in a horror movie, the immigration law creeps into peoples’ lives and destroys them without so much as a second thought about the human suffering it leaves behind.

It’s tempting to brush aside the Ninth Circuit judges’ orders as improper judicial activism. But that misses the point. Even the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have weighed in on the broken immigration law through its decisions in cases like Padilla v. Kentucky and Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, which derive from the confusing, contradictory, and counterintuitive statute, and signal a major shift in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence toward greater protection of immigrants’ rights. Nor is the Supreme Court’s concern limited to the law. It has also taken the government to task for its haphazard and illogical reading of it. Late last year in Judulang v. Holder a unanimous Supreme Court called the government’s interpretation of a legal provision “arbitrary and capricious” and “unmoored from the purposes and concerns of the immigration laws.”

Another, more plausible, explanation for these decisions is that the nation’s courts, including perhaps even the Supreme Court, are effectively throwing their hands up and imploring Congress to get to the hard work of fashioning a law that will provide America with a safe, orderly and fair immigration policy — one that protects American families and businesses and restores civil liberties.

Last month, I noticed this piece on the Bloomberg web site highlighting the practical effect of Alabama’s “strictest in the Nation” state-level immigration law on Alabama’s citizens.  The article vividly illustrates what it takes to enact what Kris Kobach and other anti-immigration advocates call “attrition through enforcement” – or what Mitt Romney recently called “self-deportation” – the idea that 11 million immigrants without status can be convinced to leave the US voluntarily, if only we make it hard enough for people without status to live in the United States.

As the article makes clear, the only way to make life too difficult for immigrants without status to bear is to turn every “transaction with a citizen,” in the words of Alabama’s HB56, into an immigration checkpoint.  In other words, the only way to make life in the US difficult for those immigrants is to make life equally difficult for ordinary Americans:

In one month, [Mobile County License Commissioner Kim] Hastie’s office handed out 332 temporary vehicle registrations to legal Alabamians without proper paperwork. There were 152 in all of 2010. Fewer than five people in the country illegally were turned away, she said.

Thwarted citizens got mad: “They’d say, ‘I’m not a Mexican. Do I look Mexican to you?’”

One World War II veteran had no birth certificate, an expired driver’s license and a military identification that the county couldn’t accept, she said.

“He was so mad he was yelling,” Hastie said. “He said, ‘I served my country and I can’t register my car?’”

Alabama’s requirement that any person prove his or her legal status in order to do business, of any kind, with the state government has proven to inconvenience Alabama’s US citizen residents almost as much as it inconveniences the 2.5 percent of the population who live there without authorization – probably more, in fact, since Alabama’s US citizen residents are required to transact business with the government much more often than the relatively few unauthorized immigrants do.

It wasn’t until I heard this week’s edition of This American Life, however, that I really began to appreciate what “self-deportation” will really require.  Transacting business with the government, after all, is hardly a daily event,  whether we are here legally or not.  Merely requiring ID and proof of legal status to license a dog or get water service for a new house is unlikely to make life hard enough that someone without status will want to leave.

What self-deportation is going to require, if it is to work as its proponents say it will, is for all of us, every day, being willing to cut ourselves off – economically and socially – from our neighbors.  We will have to ask everyone we need to deal with for their papers before we sell them groceries or even offer them the sign of peace in church.  And, if we are Latino, or speak with an accent, we will have to prove our legal status every day to everyone we meet.  Jack Hitt, who authored the piece, put it this way:

Every Latino person, legal or illegal, whom I spoke to noted at some point that there’s just something hateful in the air now. Before the law, they felt accepted. They had American friends. They didn’t feel out of place.

Now when they go to a store, every single one of them told me they feel that people are looking at them weirdly, like, what are you still doing here? When the law changed to make them less welcome, they actually became less welcome, in a day-to-day, “passing you on the street” sort of way.

When considered in terms of tax dollars, “self deportation” would, indeed, cost less than having the government arrange deportation of 11 million people (around $285 billion).  The human and economic costs on the communities in which these immigrants live – splitting up families, disrupting businesses whose workers and customers leave, destroying whole towns – are the same.  The human cost to all of us, however, as we must harden our hearts and demand “papers” from every one of our Latino fellow-citizens, from every person we encounter who “looks foreign” to us – that is a price I pray our country decides it never is willing to pay.

Written by: Tony Weigel, AILA Media-Advocacy Committee

I have participated in several meetings with Congressional staffers about immigration policy since 2006.  I have had the same thoughts and questions about these interactions every time.  I hoped to make some minimal impact, naïve as that may seem.  Afterwards, I mainly focused on the question of whether or not I had just wasted my time?  Was this person truly engaged?  Did they make some note of the issues discussed?  Would they share anything meaningful with their member of Congress?  Most importantly, did my interaction with this politician’s representative engender any trust?

I suspect that interactions and agreements among politicians and candidates are somewhat similar.  If they are, you have to wonder what goes on behind the scenes to garner endorsements.

Following the New Hampshire Republican primary, two separate endorsements of candidate Mitt Romney caught my attention.  On January 11^th, the Romney campaign announced that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach endorsed his campaign, welcomed him to the team, and looked forward to working with him.  On that same day, it was reported that the Romney campaign was running Spanish-language campaign advertisements in south Florida featuring Congressional Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart and former Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

It is hard to imagine how the Romney campaign managed to pull this off.  On one hand, you have three of only eight House Republicans who voted for the December 2010 version of the DREAM Act (H.R. 5281).  On the other, you have a politician that has opposed the DREAM Act at every turn, labeling it an “amnesty.”  Politician Kobach has even taken the extreme position of labeling Representative Lamar Smith’s draconian, E-Verify mandate bill, H.R. 2164, as yet another amnesty.

It would be interesting to know more about how these two diverse endorsements came together.  Did these three Florida Republicans know about the pending Kobach endorsement?  If they knew their endorsement would run concurrently with Kobach’s, exactly how did this impact their respective decisions to endorse Romney and participate in the Spanish language ad?

Regardless if these Florida Republicans knew or did not know, it is hard to imagine how one can reconcile policy differences as distinct from each other as the cold winter streets of Topeka, Kansas, and the sun-splashed beaches of Miami.  Candidate Romney has promised to veto the DREAM Act and fully endorsed Kobach’s policies.  These policy positions stand in stark contrast to those supported by these Florida Republicans and a majority of Republicans, as expressed in a recent Fox News poll.

We may never know what happened or why, but something generated mutual trust among an unlikely group of allies.  Given the incomparable divide on immigration policies, time will tell which side will win out over the other in a prospective Romney Administration.

Kris Kobach, anti-immigrant restrictionist lawyer and Kansas Secretary of State, claims to know something about immigration law, but in our Friday night CNN debate he was able to do little more than throw around phrases like “backdoor amnesty” and “illegal aliens”.  The subtext of these words is sinister–that America is under a Latino invasion which threatens our culture, language, and way of life.    Fixing America’s badly broken immigration system is not part of Kobach’s plan.  What he and his ilk want is to put an end to immigration, period.  And since they have no helpful plan for America, restrictionists like Kobach rely on ethnically charged words and phrases—like the ones used by Kobach on CNN.

Not surprisingly Kobach failed to articulate even a single immigration policy solution.  He started off by making the patently false claim that the proposed processing tweak announced by the Administration on Friday is “phase two” of an “amnesty”.  That couldn’t be farther from the truth.  In fact the proposed change will make it possible for the spouses and children of U.S. citizens to apply for a family unity waiver while in the U.S.   It’s a technical adjustment that will keep American families safe and together during administrative processing.

And contrary to what Kobach said, not one letter of the law was changed.  The immigrants it would affect get nothing to which they were not already entitled.  To obtain the family unity waiver, applicants must still meet the strict letter of the law which requires they prove that family separation will cause their American citizen husband or wife extreme hardship.  Currently, these immigrants must spend months, even years, abroad waiting for the bureaucracy to process their waivers.  The proposed change will permit the waiver request to be decided stateside.  It will alleviate bureaucratic delay and reduce processing backlogs at U.S. embassies abroad.  It’s good government pure and simple.

At some level Kobach must have understood he couldn’t seriously argue with a processing fix that promotes legal immigration, keeps American families together, and protects the integrity of our borders.  Realizing he had nothing of substance to add to the debate, Kobach concluded with the phrase “we can all agree”, words used by those who know they not only have lost the argument but are on the wrong side of the issue with the listening audience.  It’s a time tested debate trick designed to fool the viewers into thinking he and I were not that different.

Fortunately we are.

I advocate for an immigration policy that protects American families, keeps the U.S. globally competitive, and restores civil liberties.  Kobach wants to spread the same climate of fear he helped create in states like Arizona and Alabama which have enacted hate filled anti-immigrant laws he helped write.

By Lori Chesser, AILA Media Committee

In the Catholic tradition, December 28 is the feast of the Holy Innocents. These are the babies that were killed by Herod’s soldiers when he learned of the birth of a new “king” in Bethlehem. Jesus escaped because an angel came to Joseph in a dream telling him to flee to Egypt.

I realized hearing the story again this year that our current immigration policy has resulted in innocents paying the price for the failure of Congress to make reasonable changes in the last 20+ years.

Who are these “innocents”?  They include first, the “DREAMers”:  Those that were brought here by their parents and have known only U.S. culture and education for most of their lives. They did nothing to create their situation and Congress will do nothing to alleviate it.

Second, the victims of human trafficking:  Those who are eligible for T or U visas, but are deported because law enforcement is either unaware or unwilling to recognize their plight.  While Postville is the most obvious example, countless other enforcement efforts prosecute victims.

Third, U.S. citizens living in fear of a family member’s deportation:  Those whose relatives cannot immigrate legally because of the outdated and arbitrarily-limited system.

Finally, the story of the Holy Innocents also sheds light on the failure to make a reasonable policy decision about those who are not “innocent” because they did make a mistake in entering or overstaying, but are otherwise fully integrated in our communities and way of life.  The Holy Innocents were killed because Herod felt threatened and did not want to take time to distinguish who was the real threat.  It was the ultimate “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

Similarly, there is no doubt that some people in the U.S. unauthorized should be shown the door and not allowed to return.  But many others are no threat and are instead a benefit to our society, culture and economy, not to mention humans deserving respect as such.

Although it may be hard for us in the land of plenty to imagine, we may have made the same choices given the same situation.  In fact, the right to immigrate for survival was exercised by Joseph to save the baby Jesus and by the relatives of the Old Testament Joseph coming to Egypt during the great famine.  It was this latter migration that eventually resulted in another slaughter of innocents by King Ramses when the Hebrews grew too numerous.  Moses was spared by the quick thinking of his mother, and later led his people to freedom as chronicled in the Book of Exodus.

Members of Congress should reflect on this story too, because it shows the dire results of failing to make just policies.  If you haven’t read it, let’s just say it didn’t work out so well for the Egyptians.

No matter our beliefs and faith traditions, these stories are timeless and instructive because they communicate truths about human nature and justice.  Let’s help our leaders remember them.

When it comes to immigration, 2011 will be remembered as the year Alabama enacted HB56, the most mean spirited state immigration law in U.S. history. It targets Latinos and other people of color and effectively mandates racial profiling by state law enforcement agents. Since it went into effect last Fall, Alabamans have been victimized by due process violations, acute shortages of essential workers, and the creation of a climate of fear which has led many Latinos—legal and illegal—to flee the state. The media has been full of graphic images of produce rotting in unattended Alabama fields and idle machinery abandoned amid the flight of terrified workers. Alabama officials have been repeatedly embarrassed by the shocking arrests of foreign auto executives detained by local law enforcement for failure to produce immigration papers. As 2011 draws to a close, Alabama politicians, including Governor Robert Bentley, who signed HB56 into law, are seriously considering dropping its most draconian sections.

If Alabama’s HB56 dominated the immigration developments in 2011, Arizona’s SB1070 will be sure to dominate in 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the Obama Administration’s constitutional challenge to Arizona’s immigration law, enacted in 2010 but temporarily blocked by the courts. The effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling on immigration policy—and beyond—should not be underestimated. Should the Court strike down SB1070 it will reaffirm, in a loud and clear voice, that immigration policy is exclusively a federal matter, inextricably tied to the idea of the United States as a sovereign nation. However, should the Court uphold SB1070 other states will certainly follow Arizona’s and Alabama’s lead, resulting in a disparate patchwork of state immigration laws throughout America. The challenge then may no longer be limited to the federal government’s plenary power to regulate immigration, but to the very idea of the United States as an indivisible nation. Stay tuned.

2011 will also be remembered as the year of immigration enforcement. Nearly half a million people were deported from the U.S., undercutting those that claim the Administration has not enforced the law. To the contrary, President Obama—for better or worse—has deported more illegal aliens than any president before him, including his predecessor, George W. Bush. But amid all the removals in 2011, Obama tried a new, potentially very effective tool—common sense immigration enforcement. In a policy announced in June, the Administration directed ICE to focus its energy on the deportation of violent criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists. And while Obama cannot grant citizenship to any undocumented immigrant, he can certainly direct immigration agents to use their common sense in enforcing the law.

As 2011 draws to a close the big question remains: When, if ever, will Congress overhaul America’s broken immigration system; or even pass the DREAM Act, which would help promising undocumented youth earn their way to lawful status. But 2012 is an election year, and the reality is that the politicians in Washington will not touch an issue as explosive as immigration reform.

In the meantime, Americans can only hope that whomever they send to Washington in November will roll up their sleeves and get to work on an immigration policy that creates American jobs, protects American families, restores due process, and ensures America’s competitiveness in a global economy.

It’s a little unnerving when the Grinch tweets you just before Christmas.

It started Wednesday when I read a shocking article in the New York Times about an undocumented immigrant who suffers from a life threatening kidney disease and requires dialysis.  Because of a bizarre legal anomaly the government will cover the cost of his dialysis—$75,000 a year—but not the cost of a kidney transplant—$100,000—which would make the dialysis unnecessary and save hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.

The article quoted Rep. Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who opposes giving any medical aide to undocumented immigrants.  While I believe his position is extreme, indeed self-defeating, Rohrabacher is obviously entitled to his view. But what was appalling was the mean spiritedness with which he expressed it. “If they’re dead” Rohrabacher said, “I don’t have an objection to their organs being used.”  He added, “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”

Was the Congressman really saying that the only worthwhile illegal immigrant is a dead one?   I certainly hope not, but given the ugly language of the anti-immigrant restrictionists including, sadly, some members of Congress, it wouldn’t surprise me.

I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind.  But later that evening, while catching up on my Twitter feed, the following tweet about Rohrabacher’s callous comment popped up from America’s Voice.

 Award 4 the most heartless statement in the face of human suffering 2 @DanaRohrabacher http://bit.ly/vi4FjV

I realized I wasn’t alone.  Others were shocked by the cold-bloodedness of Rohrabacher’s remark.  But it was late at night, so I just retweeted the AV’s tweet and went to bed.  I slept well, figuring the issue of Rohrabacher’s insensitivity in the face of human affliction had been settled on the social network.

I was wrong.

When I awoke the next morning I discovered that just after midnight Rohrabacher had sent me the following tweet:

 glad benevolent people like U willing to reduce health&ed benefits to your own families for illegals rather than tax us

Then, about an hour later, he tweeted again,

U mean our own people suffering because not enough to care for them…or illegals on whom u’d spend our limited $?

His tweets included a nice picture of Rohrabacher leaning against a railing in front of a bay. “Well”, I thought, “at least he’s more discrete than Anthony Weiner.”  In any event, I immediately tweeted Rohrabacher back, hoping to favorably inform his views on immigration and impress upon him that he should become an advocate for comprehensive reform.  But it’s tough to do that in 140 characters or less.  So I tweeted:

I mean #immigration reform will create jobs and increase wages for #Americans, Y dont you understand that?

To which the Congressman tweeted back:

R U kidding? Permitting illegals to stay& work draws tens of millions more, bidding down wages, draining health&ed funds

At this point I figured Rohrabacher needed some facts and figures; something other than the half-baked restrictionist talking points he has apparently been reading.  My return tweet referred him to a joint report published in early 2010 by the Immigration Policy Center and the Center for American Progress entitled Raising the Floor for American Workers which makes it crystal clear that immigration reform, including a pathway to lawful compliance for the millions of undocumented foreign nationals, will boost the economy to the benefit of all Americans:

W all due respect Congressman, ur wrong; CIR will add 1.7t to GDP, in tax rev; and 1m jobs; read IPC report

But Rohrabacher would have none of it—apparently not wanting the facts to get in the way of his views.  He tweeted:

thanks 4 the respect, but if U believe that legalizing those here and drawing tens of millions more is good for US Ur dreaming

Dreaming?  I guess I am.  As are a lot of other people—including thousands of undocumented immigrant youth who long to give back to the only country they know and have struggled against all odds to enrich.  So I tweeted,

Mabye I’m dreaming–like many others–but the current situation is a nightmare; America needs solutions not empty talk.

But the Congressman, determined to have the last tweet, responded,

if Ur so-called solution is legalizing the status of illegals give me empty talk, Ur solution will bring more & make it worse

I’m not sure what to make of my ongoing twitter conversation with Congressman Rohrabacher.  Sure, it’s tempting write him off as a heartless old Grinch.  But I’m not going to do that.  After all, this is the holiday season, a time of reflection, renewal, and goodwill towards others. I want to believe that if Rohrabacher allows himself to see the injustice and pain caused by America’s broken immigration system then his heart, like the mean old Grinch’s, just might grow three full sizes. Maybe then he won’t long to steal Christmas from the most vulnerable among us.

In the meantime I’m going to go check my Twitter feed.  Who knows? Maybe Ebenezer Scrooge is following me.

Two weeks ago, the immigration world was abuzz due to the bipartisan support received for a narrow, extremely technical fix to employment- and family-based immigration quotas.  We learned yesterday, however, that one senator has blocked the bill from coming to a vote without substantial changes, making it extremely unlikely to be passed at all.  Hearing that reminded me of what may be the least effective legislature of all time, the Sejm of the 18th Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which any member could nullify the work of the whole session of the legislature by shouting, “Nie pozwalam!” (“I do not allow!”).  Here we are, back in the Sejm instead of the Senate, and a single member is effectively vetoing the entire legislature’s work.

The bill we are talking about is called HR3012, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act.  The thing is, HR3012 does not add any new visas to address the quota backlogs for approved legal immigrants awaiting the availability of immigrant visas each year.  You read that correctly: HR 3012 would not allow in one more immigrant than current law allows.  It would merely change the rules of distributing our current quotas of new immigrants per year, allowing higher-skilled immigrants from India and China to wait the same length of time as higher-skilled immigrants from all the other countries in the world, and reducing the disparity in the family-based system between the worldwide backlogs and the longer backlogs faced by natives of Mexico and the Philippines.  (Readers interested in more detail can check out the National Foundation for American Policy’s incredibly detailed report on the quota backlogs.)

Legislation needs to pass through both the House and the Senate, however, before it can be presented to the President and become a law.  And in today’s Senate, it is becoming apparent that just one Senator can stop a bill from coming to a vote, even where the other 99 senators would agree with the 96% of the House that voted for the bill (The House voted overwhelmingly — 389-15– in favor of HR3012 two weeks ago).  The Senator blocking the bill is Charles Grassley (R-IA).

Senator Grassley has placed a “hold” on HR3012, preventing it from coming to the floor for a vote.  Senator Grassley released a statement saying that his hold was motivated by concern about “future immigration flows” and that “it does nothing to better protect Americans at home who seek high-skilled jobs” in today’s tough economy.  Here’s a reminder for Senator Grassley, however: every high-skilled immigrant affected by this bill has already been certified as filling an otherwise-empty vacancy in the US labor market, or having skills that are in our national interest to retain in the US.

Was the Senator concerned with the merits of the bill, about which I am rather agnostic?  The bill, after all, simply changes the rule of visa allocation to “first come, first served,” which certainly seems fair enough.  The primary question the bill addresses — given that it does not change the number of high skill immigrants allowed in per year — is whether a surgeon from India should have to wait 3-6 years for a green card, while an engineer from the Philippines or Germany doesn’t have to wait at all, as under current law, or whether the surgeon and the engineer should both have to wait 1-2 years.

Of course, Senator Grassley should know this, given that he is the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee and sits on the Immigration, Refugees and Border Security Subcommittee.  His real objection appears to be not to fairness in the process of allocating green cards for high skilled immigrants, but to the temporary visas companies and hospitals use to hire those high-skilled immigrants while they wait for their green cards.  Yesterday on the floor of the Senate, Senator Grassley said he was willing to release his hold, but only if HR3012 was changed substantially – eliminating any changes to family based visa allocation, being less fair to immigrants from India and China, and tacking on a package of onerous restrictions for temporary work visas – a package that the House and Senate have refused to consider a number of times over the past years.

Senator Grassley’s thwarting the will of the majority in pursuit of his own narrow vision of which immigrants should be allowed in to the United States highlights the dysfunction of today’s Senate.  That dysfunction has been noted elsewhere.  While such a procedural move may prevent the majority from considering a bill that a minority opposes, this “hold” is on a bill with a very limited effect – and with overwhelming, bipartisan support.  The lesson of the 18th century Sejm is instructive: paralyzed by vetoes, the legislature was unable to react to a changing world, and eventually their country was divided up between larger European powers.  If one Senator can stop even a legislative “tweak” like this from happening, I am not optimistic about our government’s ability to make laws to govern this country in the 21st century.

I’d like to think that Newt Gingrich, the current GOP front runner, has come out squarely in favor of a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Not because I support his presidential candidacy, but because rejection of mass deportation as a solution to America’s broken immigration system raises the level of the national debate about immigration. At least he’s not ginning up the same old sound bites about securing the border and building fences.

But, the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, Gingrich’s proposal falls far short of what is needed to fix the broken immigration system. In fact, his idea would lead to the mass deportation of millions of people and the demise of scores of American families.

The cornerstone of Gingrich’s plan is the so-called “citizen review panels” which would consider whether an undocumented immigrant’s personal circumstances merit a reprieve from deportation. Gingrich likens the idea to the draft review boards of the World War II era.

But listening carefully to Gingrich it becomes clear that under his plan very few undocumented immigrants would even qualify to go before the review panels. Only those that have been in the U.S. for more than 25 years would be considered, even if they have compelling equities such as U.S. citizen relatives, a record of paying taxes, good moral character, and a consistent work history.

A recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that of the approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., only 35% have been in the U.S. 15 years or more—even less have been in the country for more than 25 years. That’s more than 7.8 million people who, according to Gingrich, would be targeted for what he calls “dramatically easier” deportation. It’s not clear what Gingrich means by that ominous phrase, but I imagine it doesn’t include much due process and fairness.

Yet Gingrich’s proposal shines when compared to Mitt Romney’s. Romney suggests that undocumented immigrants, all 12 million of them, should turn themselves in, be given a transition period to get their affairs in order, and self-deport. It’s obvious that Romney hasn’t a clue when it comes to fixing the broken immigration system. Romney bases his proposal on the idea that the undocumented—many of whom have close family ties to America—can simply go home, get in line, and return legally. He obviously doesn’t understand—or worse, doesn’t care—that the broken immigration law includes a myriad of daunting legal obstacles which prevent undocumented immigrants from returning to America and their families for at least a decade or more. His proposal is as ridiculous as it is unworkable.

On the other hand, Romney and Gingrich both argue forcefully for an immigration policy that will attract the best and brightest to America—the innovators, entrepreneurs, and scientists. On this point—although neither would likely admit it—both GOP front runners agree with President Obama. Recalling a time when America opened its doors to highly skilled immigrants to shore up its competitive edge, President Obama has called for innovation, education, and rebuilding of America’s infrastructure. This  necessarily implies an immigration policy that keeps America open for business.

But what neither Gingrich nor Romney seems to get is that high skilled professionals and creative entrepreneurs won’t come to the U.S. if we do not fashion an immigration policy that restores and protects due process. Just ask the scores of business people and scientists who have been stymied by an overly restrictive immigration bureaucracy or targeted for special registration and prolonged security checks over the past decade. (Note: you may need to contact them via email or Skype because many have immigrated to other, more welcoming, countries).

The subtext of the current immigration debate is that undocumented immigrants won’t do what they should to gain lawful immigration status. This assumes that compliance with the immigration law is as easy as filling out a passport application at a local  post office. What none of the candidates seem to understand is that under the current law there is simply no way for most unauthorized immigrants to comply, as much as they might want to, whether they remain the U.S. or go back to their native countries.

Nevertheless, Gingrich’s proposal, as deeply flawed as it is, recognizes that wholesale removal of 12 million is not a solution.  And, if nothing else, that position is a welcome addition to a Republican immigration debate that has thus far been limited to little more than sound bites about border security, boots on the ground, and fences.

Remember Pete Wilson? JD Hayworth? Tom Tancredo?

That’s what I thought.

These guys are a few of the politicians whose anti-immigrant agenda played a big part in the demise of their political fortunes.  And the list continues to grow.  Just ask former Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, author of Arizona’s SB1070, the “show me your papers” law, who was thrown out of office last month by his own constituents.

So it comes as no big surprise that some of the most conservative voters in the country—Iowa caucus-goers—are, according to a report in NPR, “open to policies that help foreign-born young people educated in the U.S. to enter the workforce, as well as those that help companies hire seasonal and permanent employees for vacant jobs Americans are not filling.”  They also strongly support increasing opportunities for highly-skilled legal immigrants and entrepreneurs to come to the United States.

When you look at these numbers you begin to understand why GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich declared his support for a more humane immigration policy—one which includes a pathway to lawful compliance for the millions of undocumented foreign nationals in the US.

Unlike Mitt Romney, his chief rival for the nomination who continues to pander to the restrictionist fringe, Gingrich’s remarks on immigration have been deftly aimed at the centerist—dare I say more reasonable—Republican voters.  Gingrich understands that America’s economic and social future depends on an immigration policy which attracts the best and brightest to America’s shores and which includes a common sense, humane approach to bringing the scores of undocumented workers out of the shadows and into the sunshine of American life.  In a GOP primary that has offered little more than inane blabber about “amnesty”, “fences”, and “boots on the ground”, Gingrich offers a refreshing perspective.   Though his proposal is still very flawed, he is challenging his party and Republican voters to consider solutions to the nation’s immigration problems rather than pat sound bites.

How then does this explain the Rick Perry’s fall in the polls? Didn’t his moderate approach to immigration, including his support for instate tuition for undocumented immigrants, severely damage his presidential campaign?

No, not so much.

The collapse of Perry’s candidacy has more to do with his debate gaffes and other missteps, not his stance on immigration. Simply put, Perry lost his front runner status because he was not ready for prime time, not because of any one particular issue.

The Iowa poll shows that Americans—liberal, moderate, and conservative—overwhelmingly support a common sense approach to immigration.  This is consistent scores of other studies conducted by pollsters over the years.  American voters long for a modernized immigration system that will create jobs for American workers, protect American families, and restore American due process and fairness.

Politicians who choose to ignore this do so at their own peril.