Let’s think this through

In the fiscal year that ended in October, U.S. authorities deported almost 370,000 immigrants, continuing a record-setting pace begun late in the Bush administration and sustained by the Obama administration.

Something is very wrong with the administration’s approach. It has stressed its muscular enforcement efforts, which include a record number of apprehensions along the Mexican border, as evidence of the president’s toughness. The hope was to persuade reluctant Republicans to support a sweeping overhaul of immigration policy, including a pathway to citizenship for long-term illegal immigrants who held jobs, paid fines and proved they were law-abiding residents.

That strategy has failed. GOP lawmakers, beholden to the most xenophobic elements of the party’s base, have barely budged on immigration.

Given the human costs, what is the point of maintaining such a rigid policy? In particular, why continue to expend scarce law enforcement resources on deporting undocumented immigrants with no criminal records or whose offenses involve loitering or minor traffic violations?

Under pressure from advocacy groups, which have taken to referring to the president as only the “deporter-in-chief,” Mr. Obama has ordered a review of deportation policy. Any shift toward leniency will prompt more cries of selective enforcement from Republicans. Yet it is the GOP that has helped create the crisis in immigration policy by refusing, year after year, any reasonable reform. Such reform would recognize America’s need for a steady supply of low-skilled labor and for some sustainable status for the millions of immigrants who are ineluctable parts of U.S. communities.