What’s the Supreme Court’s Title 42 Case About? Hint: It’s Not the Pandemic

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 1, 2023

And no issue in these times is more politically divisive than immigration and border security.

The last time Washington had enough agreement to seriously discuss broad, comprehensive immigration reform was in 2005 in a bill introduced by Sens. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.

It incorporated legalization, guest worker programs and border enforcement. But the bill never reached the floor for a vote.

Now both sides are so dug in to their respective positions that even a narrow procedural matter like Title 42 takes on mammoth importance, defining different sides and political tribes — and making political pawns out of millions in continuing episodes of political theater.

Both sides do it. Republicans tend to keep churning the waters as immigration is almost unbeatable as a motivator for their voting base. Democrats push back with an agenda of reforms that, no matter how measured or moderate, their political rivals blast as “open borders.”

Yet the challenges continue. Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, founder of the “Dreamer” movement, fights for permanent protections for youths brought to the U.S. illegally, but like former President Donald Trump’s “wall,” Congress keeps kicking that issue down the road.

Yet, record numbers of people continue to come across the border, many of them seeking asylum to which they are entitled under law, but the backlog of cases has grown to keep them waiting for months or years to be processed.

And that doesn’t even begin to deal with updating policies for temporary visas for agricultural workers and high-tech workers, whom employers desperately want to have.

Those are just a few of the serious challenges that our White House and Congress need to face amid changing times and problems too complicated to be solved by something so simple, impractical and inadequate as a border wall.

Memo to Congress and the White House: Don’t lean on the courts to solve all of our problems. That’s not what we elected you for.

And happy new year.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)