In his views on immigration, President Bush has taken a baby step toward the House Republicans, and National Review. He now favors “enforcement first.” But what he means by enforcement first may not be what we mean by it.

Enforcement first could take at least four forms. 1) A bill could provide that enforcement provisions be implemented before a guest-worker program or an amnesty took effect. 2) It could require that some reasonable amount of enforcement be shown to have actually been achieved before those liberalizing provisions took effect. 3) It could confine itself to stepping up enforcement, with politicians reaching an understanding that Congress would consider separate legislation in a few years to create a guest-worker program or provide amnesty or both. 4) It could mostly confine itself to enforcement, while also setting up some mechanism to spur a future Congress to consider such further legislation.

The first alternative would in practice be little different from what the president has already proposed, and would hence be no concession at all. Even if increased enforcement were enacted at the same time as a guest-worker program and amnesty, the latter would require much longer to take effect because of the bureaucratic challenges involved.

The second alternative would be a modest improvement over the bill the Senate passed if it included a requirement that the guest-worker and amnesty provisions be suspended if they undid the previous progress on enforcement or proved to be unenforceable themselves. (If guest workers who overstayed their welcome weren’t deported, for example, the program would have to end.) Even then, we would not favor such a bill, because we do not think that a strong case for either an amnesty or a guest-worker program has been made.

Only the third and fourth alternatives would represent valuable forms of enforcement first. Both would ensure that Congress made separate decisions on enforcement, on one hand, and a guest-worker program and amnesty on the other.

Splitting these issues would have several advantages. We would learn whether enforcement is really impossible, as the open-borders crowd insists, and a guest-worker program is the only way even to know who is coming here. If that assumption proves false, we can then consider whether other rationales for a guest-worker program–such as the alleged need of American business for ever-increasing supplies of cheap labor–are compelling enough to justify it when it is not the price of getting the enforcement the public rightly wants. And this approach would ensure that Washington prove its seriousness about enforcing any set of immigration policies before creating new ones.

Throughout this debate we have argued that our national experience with immigration has been, on balance, a positive one because we have assimilated immigrants. They have become part of our culture even while changing it. We believe that assimilation will proceed faster and better, and both established residents and newcomers will be happier, if the current level of immigration, legal and illegal combined, is reduced. That is the most important metric we have used to evaluate various immigration proposals. It is one that leads us to praise the president for adjusting his position, and to encourage him to adjust it some more.