President Obama Meets with AZ Governor Brewer on Immigration

The war of words reached all the way up to the White House during a recent meeting between President Obama and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who met to discuss border enforcement and other immigration matters – including the infamous new Arizona law that requires police to routinely ask for proof of immigration status when they stop, detain, or arrest people. According to CNN, President Obama continued to press for comprehensive immigration reform as the only real solution to the nation’s current immigration problems – as opposed to an enforcement-only approach, or the piecemeal state-by-state tactics favored by Gov. Brewer and the Arizona legislature. (See Obama and Brewer Hold Arizona Immigration Summit, posted by David Jackson, CNN.com, 03.Jun.2010.) White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told CNN that the President called for a pathway to citizenship and stricter enforcement against employers who hire illegal immigrants. The President also underscored his commitment to securing the border, promising to send an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to Arizona to prevent further illegal crossings from Mexico, CNN reported.

For her part, Governor Brewer was quoted as putting border enforcement above all else, telling the President that the pathway to citizenship should only be considered after the border is secured. As CNN reports, the President argued that his administration has already stepped up its efforts to reduce trafficking of drugs, weapons, and people on the Mexican frontier, and claimed success in suppressing violent crime and illegal entries along the border. The upshot of this he-said, she-said was not so much progress toward resolving our immigration problems as an illustration of the impasse that prevents progress. If the GOP expects perfectly-tight borders before it signs on to CIR legislation, the Democrats might as well resign themselves to going it alone; but without GOP support, CIR will be very, very hard to achieve.