So that's it: Why the president is in a hurry for immigration reform

At last, an explanation.

If you've been trying to find the reason that a president with a thirty percent approval rating would try to force a wildly unpopular immigration reform proposal down the throat of the Republican Congress six months before an election, search no more.

The answer comes to us from Reuters reporter Frank Jack Daniel, writing in Mexico City:

"Mexican President Vicente Fox's ruling party could be the big winner of an immigration overhaul passed in the U.S. Senate as it tries to hold on to power in July elections," he wrote on Friday.

Mr. Daniel goes on to report that while the bill may never become law due to significant opposition in the House of Representatives, President Fox declared that it was a victory won by his government.

"It is a truly joyous day, a historic day," Fox told reporters on his presidential jet. Mr. Daniel noted that he raised his fist in triumph.

Vicente Fox cannot run again for president, but on July 2 his party's candidate, Felipe Calderon, will run against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has been hammering Fox for the failure of what he calls his "free market economic policies."

In fact, Mexico's economy is dominated by a combination of government-owned monopolies and crony-owned monopolies. But never mind. If Lopez Obrador wins, it is likely that the Mexican government will take a sharply socialist turn, joining Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and possibly Peru--not to mention Zimbabwe--in a self-destructive cycle of property seizures and economic failures.

Let's assume that whatever debts Mexico owes to U.S. banks and international bondholders will be the first thing the new leftist government disavows.

That kind of thing is really bad news on Wall Street.

Really bad news on Wall Street, especially between July and November of an election year, is really, really bad news in Washington.

Can Vicente Fox sell the people of Mexico on the idea that the U.S. Senate bill is a great victory that he has won for them?

"This is the only good news we have had in a long time," Guatemalan migrant Alexander Chung, 21, told Reuters in a Catholic church shelter in the Mexican border town of Reynosa as he waited to cross illegally into Texas.

Sounds like he can, but then, Guatemalans probably can't vote in Mexico's election. Mexico's a lot stricter than we are about that kind of thing.

We will know that this is the real story behind President Bush's passion for immigration reform if the House and Senate bills go into conference and we never hear another word about it after Mexico's July 2 election.

Then President Bush will have four months to persuade the American people that it never happened.

We'll see if he can.


Copyright 2006

Editor's note: For a completely different approach to solving the problem of illegal immigration, see "How to Get Congress to Foot the Bill for Illegal Immigration, and Fast" at www.SusanShelley.com.

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