Walden needs to reveal views on immigration reform

Oregon voters who are concerned about illegal immigration have a good reason to suspect the next round of “comprehensive immigration reform.” By remaining vague about its definition of the word, “reform,” the GOP wants to avoid alerting its voters in advance.

Senate Democrats did the same last year when they passed S. 744, a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill to legalize most illegal aliens and raise legal immigration levels. It awaits a House version for comparison and compromise.

Oregon Congressman Greg Walden has a good reason to tiptoe through this immigration minefield. He not only faces a primary challenge from an enforcement-minded candidate, Dennis Linthicum, but Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, (ALIPAC), has placed him on its list of 25 most concerning congressmen. Walden knows he needs to mute the leadership’s agenda until he returns to a sixth term in office.

Consider his remark about immigration legislation in Slate Magazine from Jan. 30:

“It’s probably months out. … Most of the primaries will have faded by then anyway. By the time you get to June most of them are behind you.”

What are Walden and the GOP planning? In January, Roll Call reported that Speaker John Boehner plans a “pathway to legalized status” for illegal aliens, but rejects Nancy Pelosi’s goal of “citizenship or nothing.”

Walden confirmed this much in Slate Magazine when he said, “What we need is a legal system that makes both the worker and the employer legal. It doesn’t mean that all the people who come here to work need to be citizens.”

He’s more open about the safer topic of improving the guest worker program, which currently ignores whether guest workers return home or stay to take American jobs in other areas.

Walden has not said how he’d deal with the millions of illegal aliens who never came as guest farm workers, but unfairly competed with entry-level Americans in restaurants, hotels, factories, warehouses, service jobs and construction.

However, the Republican establishment intends to pass several small legalization bills to prevent the national furor that S. 744 created. Currently, the House is trying to slip a trade of military service for citizenship into the Defense Authorization Act.

As tight-lipped as Walden has been, we can deduce that he agrees with the pro-legalization stance of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which he chairs. Recently the NRCC invited Condoleezza Rice to speak at its annual banquet, where she warned members not to oppose “immigration reform.”

The goals of the NRCC mesh with both Speaker Boehner, who supports legalization, and the RNC, which recently spent $10 million to promote “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Although Congress is supposed to represent citizens, it increasingly champions the illegal labor depressing wages in nonfarm jobs. Predictably, the U-6 unemployment rate tops 16 percent in Oregon, and the U.S. Department of Labor reports that our real wages have dropped 10 percent in the last four years. As a result, Americans who know they’re being marginalized like Ukrainians inside our country have an important stake in current legislation.

This primary, Oregonians must decide if Walden has been in the D.C. clubhouse long enough, a decision that would be easier if he revealed more about his definition of “immigration reform,” but as he said, the primary will be over by then.