This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 4th, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

Republicans have sent out a thin outline of how they envision immigration reform moving forward,

but several sticking points remain.

Alex Narasta, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, says major immigration reforms have

happened in election years past, so why not now?

Well this one page outline they released last week is sufficiently vague that anybody can read

into it, almost anything they want. However, they have all the major

pieces of immigration reform are mentioned there. You have increases in lawful

immigration going forward. You have some sort of legalization program

as well as a path to citizenship for the so-called dreamers.

You also have a lot of talk about border enforcement

and internal immigration enforcement.

So you basically have all the pieces there.

Republicans often talk about enforcement first,

which do you agree that's sort of a ridiculous standard to heap upon

immigration reform that is if we don't meet our targets for enforcement no

immigration reform.

I do think it's a particular standard and the one reason why is a lot of the reform elements that aren't clearly enforcement oriented can help with enforcement just by being in there.

For instance, increasing the pathways for lawful migration going forward,

especially for low-skilled immigrants,

means that fewer of them will be crossing the border in the first place,

which means that you probably don't need as much border patrol.

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