If you had a one-time opportunity to fix your country's most serious flaw, what would it be? That was the question facing Barack Obama after the success of his mission to kill Osama bin Laden. You can argue about the value of the al-Qaeda leader's death for foreign relations and on international terrorism, but its effect on domestic politics was profound. Overnight, Mr. Obama had created a moment of bipartisan goodwill that almost rendered him untouchable - albeit temporarily.
How would he spend this injection of "Osama equity"? He'd have one shot to use it. Would he push for a new economic-recovery bill, for a repeal of the Bush tax cuts, for education investments?
On Tuesday, he answered that question with a speech in El Paso, Tex., his first major policy announcement since the Abbottabad raid. To the surprise of many, he devoted it entirely to the single cause of immigration reform, and in particular to an effort to give the at least 11 million "illegal aliens" in the United States a pathway to full, legal citizenship, as well as reintroducing a bill, the DREAM Act, to allow "illegals" to attend university and receive scholarships.
To outsiders, it may have seemed an obscure choice. But there are few things that are as destructive to a nation as the presence of a large population who are needed by the economy but who have no pathway to citizenship.
It has been more than 10 years since the U.S. Congress ended a decade of amnesties granting citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants. Since then, the mood has turned against these non-citizen residents: Several states have passed bills forbidding them or their children from attending school or university, from getting drivers' licences, from getting health care.
By erasing this large and socially mobile slice of the population from the official economy and denying them a place in public life, the United States has provoked an intergenerational economic and security threat that could soon rival any fiscal or terrorism menace. George W. Bush once understood this, which was why he campaigned in 2000 on a promise to give eventual citizenship to the undocumented - a promise that was ultimately scuppered by his party's extreme flank.
This is not a narrow slice of Americans. Undocumented immigrants make up between 3 and 4 per cent of the United States' population, 5.4 per cent of its work force and 6.8 per cent of the students enrolled in its primary and secondary schools. They represent about a third of all foreign-born Americans. They are more likely than native-born Americans to form families, so their numbers are growing fast.
Undocumented immigrants are not, contrary to myth, people who show up to take advantage of social assistance. The risk and expense of migration are too great to make idleness an ambition. Since the downturn of 2008, there has been a net outflow of Central Americans from the United States and of North Africans and Middle Easterners from Europe. When the opportunities aren't there, people don't arrive. Conversely, when the economy needs people, it finds ways to supply them, legally or otherwise. And the United States will, by 2030, need 35 million more workers than its working-age population can provide: Immigrants, legal or otherwise, will be the answer.
What happens when they're not legal? I've just finished a tour of the cities of the southwestern United States, and what I found at the core of every city were scores of thriving Central American neighbourhoods, many of them former African-American ghettoes. These are identical in appearance and purpose to the bottom-rung neighbourhoods where millions of Irish, German, Italian and European Jewish Americans made their start and built their fortunes during the 20th century (usually without legal citizenship papers themselves).
But these neighbourhoods are becoming stuck: Adults told me they'd saved money to buy their house, but they aren't legally allowed to; they didn't pay business taxes, because their company couldn't legally exist. Children told me they were dropping out of high school because it was illegal to attend college or get a scholarship. Community leaders told me those kids were joining drug-trafficking gangs because they had no access to the legal economy or education system. Politicians told me that this was depriving the state tax coffers of tens of billions of dollars a year.
Multiply that by 50 states and 11 million or more people, and you have a crisis of huge proportions. Allow it to continue into the next generation, and you have a national emergency not unlike the one Germany faced after it made it difficult for two million Turks to get citizenship, forcing them underground.
The President has at least realized that his is a nation of immigrants that is being decimated by a crisis of non-citizenship; he ought to make it a battle as intense as the war on terrorism.
Doug Saunders