When Sens. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and John McCain, R-Arizona, became the presidential standard bearers for their parties, it raised the hope that we would have a tough but high-minded and substantive race fought on the issues.

In fits and starts, that’s been true. But, like typical campaigns, we’ve also been inundated by lowest-common-denominator sideshows: debates about Obama’s supposed celebrity status, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s wardrobe and the political leanings of a plumber from Ohio. In the midst of this frivolity, one serious issue has disappeared: immigration.
 
I’m not being metaphorical. Both candidates have completely ignored immigration. They managed to make it through three debates without mentioning the issue.

Marshall Fitz, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says he wasn’t surprised that immigration fell off the election radar after the financial market collapse began in mid-September. The first 40 minutes of the initial debate, which was supposed to be about foreign policy, focused on the economy.

Even though it’s quiescent on the campaign trail, the immigration issue continues to loom as one of the biggest for the next president and Congress to tackle. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff touted the efforts of his agency to reduce illegal immigration by increasing border and interior enforcement: “DHS Issues Supplemental No-Match Rule, Pushes Enforcement.”

The enforcement-only approach, however, is not sustainable, according to Fitz.

“That’s not a tenable situation,” Fitz says. “They’re going to have to address the underlying causes of these enforcement initiatives if we are going to stabilize some of these communities across the country that are being affected by these raids.”

Whether Obama or McCain is victorious on November 4, the next president will have enormous political obstacles to overcome.

Obama would have to manage a deeply split party. On one side are conservative Democrats who have joined most Republicans in seeking to crackdown on illegal immigration without countenancing a guest worker program to help businesses that face people shortages even in a recession. On the other side are liberal Democrats and members of the Hispanic caucus who refuse to allow enforcement-only bills to come up. They insist on including a path to legal residency and visa-limit increases.

On the Republican side, McCain would have to deal with a party that has so stridently come down in favor of enforcement that it is driving away the Hispanic constituency— the fastest-growing in the country. But many of the hardliners are in the safest districts and will almost certainly return to Congress.

Tensions remain high after the collapse of comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate in May 2007. Its demise has catalyzed the increased enforcement efforts of DHS.

Business interests and DHS, erstwhile allies on comprehensive reform, are at each other’s throats on enforcement.

“There are many businesses that rely on illegal migration in order to carry out their activities, and it would hurt them if they had to comply with the law,” Chertoff says. “In my experience, making money is not a sufficient justification for violating the law, since most people break the law in order to make money.”

The business community argues that DHS regulations and the E-Verify electronic verification system are ineffective and hamstring law-abiding companies.

Obama and McCain probably won’t be able to ignore immigration after taking office because other parts of their agenda depend on solving the problem.

“It’s going to be very difficult to get a health care plan along the lines of what Barack Obama wants without acknowledging 12 to 15 million undocumented workers,” Fitz says.

After the election, look for immigration to be a prominent issue once again.
 

The next time I meet a typical voter—which, by the way, is difficult to do in Washington—here is a question I want to ask: How much does the promise of tax cuts or a reduction in government spending ease your anxiety about losing your job?

That query is at the top of my list because those seem to be the two prescriptions that the presidential candidates—Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama—are offering to cure what ails the middle class.

Obama talks incessantly about easing the middle-class tax burden, while McCain never misses a chance to rail against pork-barrel spending.

Both topics are beside the point when it comes to addressing one of the root causes of wage stagnation. People make more money the more productive they are.

Their productivity depends in large part on their skills. Workers who are worried about being left behind in global economic competition are probably wondering how they can reinvent themselves to move up the pay ladder. 

The best route to greater productivity is training. McCain and Obama rarely mention the issue.

McCain has gone further than Obama. He spoke briefly about training in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

“We’re going to help workers who’ve lost a job that won’t come back, find a new one that won’t go away,” McCain said. “We will prepare them for the jobs of today. We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities.” 

McCain also made a passing reference to training during the third and final presidential debate October 15. To be fair, Obama also has talked about the importance of community colleges in strengthening the U.S. labor market.

But the candidates generally are silent on workforce development. A professor who specializes in the area gives tepid grades to Obama and McCain. “I would give them both a B-minus,” says Carl Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

I caught up with Van Horn at an October 14 event at the New America Foundation in Washington that focused on a study by Van Horn and Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy, titled “Anxious With Reason: The Future of the American Worker.”

McCain has not gone into depth about his ideas but has set himself apart from his party, according to Van Horn.

“Sen. McCain is much more interested in interventionist workforce policy than many other Republicans,” Van Horn says.

Obama, on the other hand, has concentrated more on job creation in the “green” sector of the economy and on traditional Democratic solutions like raising the minimum wage. He’s also hamstrung by labor union sensitivities over workforce development policies.

Another dimension of the issue is unemployment insurance. McCain endorses reforms in this area but has not provided detail.

“The system does not encourage people to retrain and support themselves,” Van Horn says.

The federal government spent more than $50 billion in fiscal year 2006 on a hodgepodge of training programs, according to the Workforce Alliance, a Washington advocacy organization.

But those efforts are disjointed and require presidential leadership to be shaped into a program that is truly helpful to the worried middle class, according to Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center (www.workforcestrategy.org).

When I talked to Alssid in early September, he hoped the candidates would spend time during the fall campaign outlining how they would prepare workers for better and higher-paying jobs.

“Both McCain and Obama have to have a much more clearly articulated vision and plan,” Alssid said at the time. “It runs to the heart of what people are concerned about in this country.”

Unfortunately, over the course of three 90-minute debates, neither Alssid nor the anxious middle class got the answers they were seeking.

Of all the cameras covering Capitol Hill hearings this week, it’s a wonder that not one of them belonged to the Food Network.

Congressional Democrats—and some Republicans—did so much filleting and grilling of Wall Street executives at two meetings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on October 6 and 7 that I expected Emeril Lagasse to stride up to the dais and explain how best to serve hapless millionaires.

The oversight panel’s exercise was illuminating and cathartic. The committee is known for obtaining thousands of pages of documents from its quarry in advance of their public floggings. Chairman Henry Waxman, D-California, did not disappoint.

On Monday, October 6, he pressed Lehman Brothers chairman and CEO Richard Fuld Jr. on why the investment firm’s compensation committee had recommended $20 million in “special payments” to departing executives four days before Lehman declared bankruptcy.

On Tuesday, October 7, Waxman revealed that the compensation committee of the giant insurer AIG gave CEO Martin Sullivan a bonus of more than $5 million for 2007, a year in which AIG lost $5 billion in the final quarter. This is a firm that received an $85 billion federal bailout in September and another $34 billion from Washington this week.

These egregious examples of excessive Wall Street pay will no doubt inspire Congress to press for executive compensation reform next year that goes beyond the strictures placed on firms that sell their toxic mortgage-based assets to the government.

But the oversight committee won’t be doing the legislating because it does not write bills. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was possible to see the beginnings of a legislative response to the economic downturn caused by collapsing financial markets.

At a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee that afternoon, there was more marinating than grilling on the topic of retirement security.

The thoughtful, lively discussion included only one Republican. Attendance in general was down at the hearings because Congress is in recess. And Republicans are sensitive about the hearing series becoming political theater.

But the members who were present heard Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, deliver some sobering news. He said that pension funds—public and private—lost roughly $1 trillion, or 10 percent of their assets, between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008.

Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-New York, said that her Brooklyn constituents are “reeling from what is happening to them. They are in a state of shock.”

Their dwindling 401(k) accounts may make them rethink their retirement plans.

“One dimension of the response may be in longer working lives and later retirements,” Orszag said.

Another witness, Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, offered an idea to help people who have seen their 401(k) savings evaporate. She proposes a federal program that would swap toxic 401(k) assets for government bonds.

Labor committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, doubted the ability of 401(k) accounts to bounce back from the recent pounding they’ve taken.

“My sense is that this is somehow different,” he said. “I don’t know how you get well tomorrow the same way you did yesterday. This starts to look very catastrophic for middle-class families.”

The hearing was a preview of how Congress will review retirement policies next year, giving larger Democratic majorities a chance to make their imprint.

Rep. Robert Andrews, D-New Jersey and a labor subcommittee chairman, said that a new balance must be found between a dynamic economy and a strong safety net. He said President Theodore Roosevelt did it with antitrust regulations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the New Deal; and President Lyndon Johnson with the Great Society.

“It’s our time to answer that question now,” Andrews said.