Political Paralysis on Taxes and Immigration

Imigration and the Federal budget are two problems that will never be solved. The current situation on both is unsustainable. The deficit is massive and will continue to spiral upwards and more and more Mexicans emigrate here every year illegally. There's a general consensus that both need to be fixed, but there's no way to accomplish a fix.

On immigration, both sides have interests pushing to maintain the status quo. Businesses like cheap labor that, in red states at least, have to live in fear of being discovered and sent back home. Democrats dream of someday turning those illegal immigrants into Democratic block voters (aided by nativist Republicans--the nativist uproar over Bush's comprehensive immigration reform led McCain to do very poorly among Hispanics). Beyond that, the anti-immigration crowd themselves killed said immigration reform during the Bush administration because they didn't trust that the border enforcement would actually happen. There was nothing you could give them that would appease them. Of course the problem is that getting rid of the many millions of illegal immigrants already here would not only be a massive undertaking, it would look like a pogrom at this scale. So nothing much was done.


Likewise conservatives refuse to compromise one iota on taxes, so any budget deal is impossible. We get repeated apocalyptic showdowns and the deficit remains enormous both in the short-term and in the long-term. It's unlikely anything much will be done. Many on the right have been complaining for years that the budget process includes a baseline that causes every part of the government to grow every year automatically. Does the right offer tax hikes in exchange for changing the baseline? Of course not. Tax hikes are from the Devil. Nothing, no matter how monumental, is a good enough trade to get them. Besides, they reason, no matter what they get in return, it will turn out to be a trick. Of course it stands to follow that whatever they extort from the Democrats by threatening to shut down the government or send the nation into default will also be a trick, so what's the point?