To follow a theme: No. At least according to this author:
In a breakfast interview with Bloomberg View on Monday, Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, expressed general disappointment with the Republican Party’s rightward drift since his brother left the White House in 2009. He also cited a specific place where his party needs to return to the center: The issue of immigration reform. According to Bush, Mitt Romney’s focus on border enforcement has placed him “in a box” and limited his appeal to Hispanic voters.
Similarly, in a piece in this week’s New Yorker on President Obama’s potential second-term agenda, Ryan Lizza reported that many White House aides believe that comprehensive immigration reform offers the president his best chance of “achieving a major piece of domestic legislation in his second term.” If Obama wins re-election narrowly while Romney runs poorly among Hispanics, the White House theory runs, Republican leaders will feel that they have a strong political incentive to accept some kind of path to citizenship for the nation’s illegal immigrant population.
To the extent that Republican lawmakers are influenced by the conventional wisdom of the city they inhabit, then this theory might be correct. But there’s a reason the push for some sort of amnesty or earned legalization for illegal immigrants failed repeatedly under George W. Bush, and a reason it wasn’t much of a priority for Democrats during their Obama-era window of Beltway dominance. At the grass-roots level of both parties, the politics of the issue are simply more fraught, and the advantages of the pro-legalization position less obvious, than the elite consensus tends to assume.
What follows is a good breakdown of the politics of immigration. It's not that Congress is broken, we've simplified the issue and made it seem easier than it really is. Conflict in Congress is a manifestation of this hidden complexity.
