"By ignoring the role of Immigration policy in our economic situation, Americans are actually hurting themselves."

Cristina Jiménez

Shortly after the November election, a few congressional offices privately acknowledged that it would be smart for the Obama administration to try to include pro-immigration provisions in the upcoming stimulus package. Some policy staffers were reading studies and hearing testimonies about how hardworking immigrants drive productivity and job creation across many different sectors of the economy. But as the stimulus bill gets finalized in conference this week and heads to Obama's desk for a signature, immigration will be debated only in the narrow terms of E-verify, the Bush-mandated system that all businesses benefiting from the stimulus may be required to use to verify the immigration status of their employees.

What more can we expect? After all, immigration reform is a tougher sell in a recession. That’s the blunt observation Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib recently offered: "Pushing any kind of immigration reform, particularly one that includes a path toward legalization, is a lot harder in an environment in which Americans are losing jobs."

Yet the political difficulty predates the Wall Street collapse and job-loss figures. For years, there has been little analysis of how a path toward legalization would increase the positive economic contributions of undocumented immigrants. Instead, conservative critics have found willing partners in the media and government to turn immigration reform into a zero-sum game, a war of us-versus-them in which every job performed by an "illegal" must have been stolen from a more deserving American.

The politics won't change until the real economics of immigration reframe the debate.