Clinton's Family Values

It's an unusual day when Senator Clinton is criticizing the Bush administration on "family values" and may actually have a point, but the immigration demonstrations scheduled for tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles are designed to highlight one of them. The latest leaks out of the Bush administration indicate that the administration is prepared to pare back some categories of "family unification" visas in connection with the comprehensive immigration reform it has been seeking. Mrs. Clinton last week wrote to Mr. Bush, citing reports that a new administration proposal would "place caps and waiting periods on the parents of U.S. citizens applying for green cards, force all applicants who have been waiting in a family visa backlog to start again and pay a $500 fee, and create a point system that would deny visas to family members based on their schooling and skill levels."

Said Mrs. Clinton, "While we need to attract skilled workers to this country, we should not do so at the expense of our families and communities. If these reports are accurate, your proposal would tear families apart and exact a lasting toll on the lives of citizens and lawful immigrants in this country. Your proposal would separate husbands from wives, and parents from children. Parents would be denied the opportunity to play an active role in raising their own children, and children would grow up not knowing one of their parents…Separating these families is an affront to our nation's rich immigrant heritage and inconsistent with our principles which value the sanctity of families."

She called on the president to reconsider. Our own sense of the president on the immigration issue is that he is a leader in his party, who, left to his own devices, would expand immigration. But Mr. Bush is trying to get a bill past a Congress that, even with a Democratic majority, has resisted liberalizing the immigration laws. Even so, Mr. Bush is a shrewd enough politician that we'd bet he'll be able to see how silly it would be to back any proposal that would allow Mrs. Clinton to attack him as anti-family with even a scintilla of truth to the charge.

We give Mrs. Clinton credit for calling attention to the issue. It is part of a series of actions she has taken in the past week that have lifted our assessment of her. In the presidential debate, she emphasized the importance of a swift military retaliation against terrorists while Senator Obama maundered on about the importance of making sure the disaster response was better than that which greeted Hurricane Katrina. Also last week, she offered a bill aimed at strengthening American economic sanctions on Iran, a country that she nonetheless says America should negotiate with. These are steps in the right direction.