Anne Jolis

Lame duck unleashed – Bulgarian in London asks ‘what next’ on US immigration

London

Careening through the city in a minicab last night, en route to a pub in Bloomsbury that had promised to screen US election results, the mustachioed driver confirmed my accent and inquired: ‘So, what will happen after the elections?’

I issued the run-down: left-ish Democrats lose control of the Senate to right-ish Republicans, who also expand their House majority. The Republican gains won’t be enough to have too much fun (for instance, re-reforming health care) without meeting the President‘s veto pen; but should prove enough to justify more executive action from the White House, bypassing Congress in areas such as immigration and border control, if Mr Obama’s pre-election promises can be believed.

Yes, yes – the driver nodded and waved me along; a Bulgarian native with strong English, he was aware of the preliminaries. But what next?

Who knows, I told him. Washington did try the legislative route to immigration reform in 2010 – with a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, and measures to ease legalisation for the children of illegal immigrants. The bill died thanks in part to five Democrat senators who voted ‘no’. There’s also the matter that, by and large, Americans do not care about immigration nearly so much as do the grievance-mongers on all sides. Gallup’s latest ‘most important problem’ survey has a mere 7 per cent of US respondents ranking ‘immigration/illegal aliens’ as the most pressing issue of the day, after ‘economy in general’, ‘dissatisfaction with government’, ‘unemployment/jobs’ and ‘healthcare.’

Immigration is, however, the sort of ‘problem’ about which pundits and pols love to yammer; it makes for an instant campaign-issue: foreigners, the thinking goes, can be co-opted for votes as easily as they can be scapegoated – often and eventually, by the same politicians.

‘It’s going to be a long 25 months in America’, I summed up for the Bulgarian Londoner.

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