David Weigel of the Washington Post reports that Marco Rubio has issued a press release criticizing Arizona’s new immigration enforcement measure. It strikes me as an unusually intelligent and thoughtful intervention from an elected official.

“States certainly have the right to enact policies to protect their citizens, but Arizona’s policy shows the difficulty and limitations of states trying to act piecemeal to solve what is a serious federal problem. From what I have read in news reports, I do have concerns about this legislation. While I don’t believe Arizona’s policy was based on anything other than trying to get a handle on our broken borders, I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with ‘reasonable suspicion,’ are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens. Throughout American history and throughout this administration we have seen that when government is given an inch it takes a mile.

“I hope Congress and the Obama Administration will use the Arizona legislation not as an excuse to try and jam through amnesty legislation, but to finally act on border states’ requests for help with security and fix the things about our immigration system that can be fixed right now – securing the border, reforming the visa and entry process, and cracking down on employers who exploit illegal immigrants.”

I’m not an expert on the Arizona law, and I think that Rich Lowry makes a solid argument that efforts to demonize the law and its proponents fail to reckon with the failure of the federal government to effectively control our southern border and basic facts about existing federal immigration laws, honored mostly in the breach.

The central problem is that fixing our immigration system is exceedingly difficult. Employer verification systems and national ID cards aren’t likely to prove very effective.

Those against mandatory use of E-Verify at the present time argue the system is limited in two key respects. First, E-Verify cannot detect identity fraud or the use of legitimate (work-authorized) name and ID data by someone other than its true owner.
For example, the 2006 raid on Swift & Company, a meat-processing firm in Minnesota, resulted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detaining 1,282 workers even though the company had meticulously participated in the Basic Pilot/E-Verify programs since 1997. Hundreds of Swift employees were later found to have used identity fraud to obtain employment.

Moreover, this would create a boost for off-the-books employment and it would sharply increase costs for small businesses, leaving aside the questions of the risks involved in making all U.S. employers dependent on a centralized database that would cause enormous economic harm if it were ever compromised. This isn’t a case against mandatory E-Verify. It might be worth the cost to make it work as effectively as possible. But let’s not kid ourselves: this will be extremely expensive, not least to those of us who consume labor-intensive goods and services, and hardly anyone wants to face up to the real costs.

My gut instinct, like that of millions of other Americans, is that we need to control the southern border and start shifting our immigration mix from a heavy emphasis on family reunification to a heavier emphasis on skills. Mark Krikorian has made strong arguments against this approach and in favor of a straightforward reduction in the size of the immigrant influx, legal and illegal. And on the other side, Douglas Massey and Lant Pritchett have made strong, and very different, arguments for a guest worker program, an idea that strikes me as very difficult to enforce.

Are we going to settle this in 2010? No, we’re not.