Over at Forbes, there is a Q&A out today with former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, who left the network last year amid controversy over his strident stance on illegal immigration. Since then, Dobbs has tried to rehabilitate himself with an eye to running for public office. He’s made appearances on Spanish-language TV and done an about-face on immigration (or half of one at least) that has angered his onetime allies within the immigration restrictionist movement.

The Forbes Q&A is a good summation of Dobbs’s new position, and similar to that of other mainstream conservatives– regulate immigration as a function of labor market needs, and make it easier for people to enter the country legally.

DOBBS: If there is any lesson over the past decade it is that this is a warm, welcoming, energetic economy and nation. But we cannot responsibly continue to leave open our borders and our port for the purposes of a responsible immigration policy. I’ve made it very clear that I’m in favor of higher levels of immigration into this country if indeed the economy and our society requires it and if it is an expression of conscious public policy. That said, why are we not talking about it in terms of the needs of the nation and the needs of the businesses and the economy for labor. And what type of labor we should be bringing in.

In an op-ed published today on the chances for immigration reform legislation, Doris Meissner notes that the recession has interrupted a 20-year trend:

The recession has interrupted historically high immigration levels – legal and illegal – that had been underway for almost two decades, and has sidelined the public controversy generated by large-scale immigration for the moment.

The question, says Meissner, is whether the labor market will soon return to pre-2008 conditions and again exhibit high demand for unskilled workers from abroad. Or whether the Great Recession will leave the country with permanently reduced labor needs in this department. In other words, has the historic 1990s and 2000s immigration wave ended? Not because of a border fence, or enforcement, or changes abroad– but because of a major fundamental downshift in the U.S. economy?

The current decrease in illegal immigration does bode well for a climate conducive to reasoned talk on immigration reform since there is less alarmist sentiment in the air, as Meissner also notes.

Angela M. Kelley, who analyzes immigration policy for the Center for American Progress, has put it this way: “You don’t fix a bridge at rush hour.” In other words now that immigration’s “rush hour” is past, it’s a good time to revamp the system.

But opponents of streamlining immigration or legalizing undocumented workers will read things differently. They’ll argue that now’s the time to focus on enforcement and border build-ups to deter future immigration.

As I mentioned in a previous post today, former House Majority leader Dick Armey is getting a lot of attention for his organization FreedomWorks and its closeness to the Tea Party movement, which is beginning to get more involved in immigration politics.

Armey, a Texas Republican, has an interesting, reasoned position on immigration, and seeks to understand the motivations behind illegal immigration in order to grapple with it as a problem. The full YouTube video of his words on immigration at an October 2007 conference should be viewed (it has been overlaid with critical text by the uploader who disagrees with Armey), but I’ll also sum it up below.

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A youthful Tomás Eloy Martínez

I’m a little late on this. But widely admired longtime Rutgers professor, Argentine journalist and author Tomás Eloy Martínez died January 31. He was a prolific author of political analysis, reportage and books, both fiction and nonfiction. Arguably, though, he’s best known for his historical novels about Peronism, Argentina’s home-grown, nearly undefinable, populist political movement.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita told the convoluted, morbid story of Evita’s corpse, which improbably wound up being shipped between continents, in the custody of one unsavory sort after another. The other novel, La novela de Perón is my favorite and tells the story of Gen. Juan Domingo Perón’s disastrous return to Argentina in the early 1970s after over 15 years of exile in Franco’s Spain.

To make a long story short there was a bloodbath outside Buenos Aires at the Ezeiza international airport. Perón had encouraged both the right and left-wing to believe he was their savior, and when the two factions saw each other face-to-face in the hours before Perón’s plane touched down, the gunfire erupted. Tomás Eloy will be remembered as the premier chronicler of Peronism, its tics, obsessions, and pathologies.

But he wrote about a lot places, people and topics, and is often mentioned as a Latin American practitioner of the New Journalism style exemplified by Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. And few understood the complexities and contradictions of modern Argentina better.

Here is a translation of what Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote about Tomás Eloy Martínez in Argentine newspaper La Nación just after the death was announced. continue »

Could a move toward bipartisanship in Washington, D.C. offer the last-ditch chance at immigration reform in 2010?

As I worked on an article about immigration and the Tea Party movement this week, I also picked up some information on the temperature in the capital regarding the chances of immigration legislation advancing this year, ahead of the November 2010 midterms.

The big hope for comprehensive reform advocates is that the wider effort by President Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties to find bipartisan common ground on front-burner issues like jobs will lead, down the line, to action on immigration too.

It is a “long-shot scenario,” said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a pro-immigration reform business grouping, in a phone interview earlier this week.

“It will take Obama making some much more limited proposals,” she added, “if they manage to come together on other things then they can take on immigration.”
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