Today, following President Obama’s speech on immigration reform at American University, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) went on Fox News to share his reactions to Obama’s remarks. One of Kyl’s bones of contention was that the American people want to see a “really strong effort to secure the border” before undertaking comprehensive immigration reform. However, Kyl immediately followed-up his attack by stating, “I’m not suggesting that this administration isn’t doing a lot on the border — we have a lot of border patrol folks there and there are other efforts under way.” However, according to Kyl, securing the border is like the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s not enough to say ‘gee, we have a lot of people down there’ — the question is but are you succeeding,” explained Kyl. Kyl believes it boils down to “different strategies that need to be employed.”

Yet, in his speech Obama pointed out that many of the strategies his administration has employed have in fact been successful:

Contrary to some of the reports that you see, crime along the border is down. And statistics collected by Customs and Border Protection reflect a significant reduction in the number of people trying to cross the border illegally. So the bottom line is this: The southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years. That doesn’t mean we don’t have more work to do. We have to do that work, but it’s important that we acknowledge the facts.

And while Kyl insists that the border needs to be airtight before Congress can undertake immigration reform, Obama pointed on in his speech that, in the absence of immigration reform, the border will never be truly “secure”:

Even as we are committed to doing what’s necessary to secure our borders, even without passage of the new law, there are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders. But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work. Our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists, but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work.

Kyl’s quality versus quantity criticism in reference to border security also does not square with his claim that the President essentially admitted to him that Democrats are refusing to secure the border because then Republicans “won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform.” It seems hard to believe that the Obama administration would dump $11,449,283,000 into customs and border protection and “send a lot of people down there” as Kyl admitted on Fox all while undertaking a deliberate attempt to not secure the border. What seems more likely is that Republicans use “securing the border” as an unachievable benchmark that riles their base and guarantees that immigration reform never becomes a reality if the GOP has its way.

Watch Kyl vs. Obama:

Back when Kyl sponsored his own immigration reform bill, he agreed that the immigration system itself has to be fixed in order to enforce the law: “The answer is of course if you don’t have a good law to enforce, you can’t work that strategy. The law has got to be changed.”

One of the key problems of the U.S.’s approach to dealing with the Middle East — particularly with the Palestinians — has been to focus on persons and personalities at the expense of politics and institutions. Rather than cultivating and supporting democratic habits and procedures, successive U.S. administrations and the media alike have tended to focus on individual leaders who could deliver various goods, usually broadly defined “stability” or “progress,” and often ignoring the longer-term implications of how exactly those goods were delivered.

Tom Friedman’s fixation on Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad is a case in point. Like many, Friedman is deeply enthralled by Mr. Fayyad — so much so that he awarded him with his own “-ism”: Fayyadism (defined as “a nonviolent struggle [against the Israeli occupation]… building noncorrupt transparent institutions and effective police and paramilitary units.”) This is understandable. Fayyad has accomplished quite a bit in a few years, first as Palestinian Finance Minister and since 2007 as acting Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, taking the initiative and delivering both vastly improved security and economic growth in the West Bank.

In his column yesterday, Friedman credited Fayyad with “unleash[ing] a real Palestinian ‘revolution’“:

It is a revolution based on building Palestinian capacity and institutions not just resisting Israeli occupation, on the theory that if the Palestinians can build a real economy, a professional security force and an effective, transparent government bureaucracy it will eventually become impossible for Israel to deny the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. [...]

The Abbas-Fayyad state-building effort is still fragile, and it rests on a small team of technocrats, Palestinian business elites and a new professional security force. The stronger this team grows, the more it challenges and will be challenged by some of the old-line Fatah Palestinian cadres in the West Bank, not to mention Hamas in Gaza. It is the only hope left, though, for a two-state solution, so it needs to be quietly supported.

During a visit to Israel-Palestine last week organized by Israel Policy Forum, I had an opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Fayyad, and I agree that he’s a very impressive man, with a clear vision of how to achieve the statehood that has eluded the Palestinian people for over sixty years. But while he clearly deserves credit for what he’s done and is doing, it was unclear from speaking to him and other Israelis and Palestinians whether actual political development is tracking with economic and security improvements, and whether Palestinian civil society is being bolstered, or, as has usually been the case in the region, is being left for some undefined “later.”

That would be a huge mistake. As Michele Dunne wrote in a recent report Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Fayyad’s plan for creating the foundations of a Palestinian state “is laudable but has significant limitations”:

That plan, and Palestinian decision making, suffer from a common problem: the suspension of normal political life since the 2007 rift with Hamas and Gaza coup. Without a presidential election, legitimacy is draining away from President Mahmoud Abbas; without a functioning Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and its ability to make laws, institution building is severely limited.

The United States should move beyond the short-term thinking — that inconvenient Palestinian politics can and should be delayed because a negotiating breakthrough is just around the corner — that has afflicted its policies for decades. This does not mean that the United States should engage Hamas directly, which would have the unfortunate effect of validating the group’s violent and rejectionist tactics. Instead, the United States should develop a strategy that patiently supports Palestinian institution building and tolerates the internal Palestinian political competition and bargaining that must accompany it; seeks breakthroughs in negotiations with Israel; and holds the Palestinian Authority to a commitment to prevent violence against Israel.

Without taking anything away from Mr. Fayyad’s accomplishments, his Third Way party won only two seats in the 2006 Palestinian elections, not much of a mandate. While there is progress being made in the West Bank, focusing state-building efforts on a small cadre of elites who say and do what we (the U.S.) want while ignoring the important underlying issue of political legitimacy threatens to keep us on the same treadmill that the U.S. has walked for decades in the Middle East.

Barry Wong (R-AZ), a candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission — which is responsible for final decisions on granting or denying utility rate adjustment, among other things — wants to save utility customers from future rate hike by shutting off the power, and other utilities, to undocumented immigrants. Wong, who is the grandson of Chinese immigrants, explained that his plan would require utility companies to verify the immigration status of new customers and weed out existing customers in the country illegally:

“We shoulder and we all share the costs,” said Wong, who is running for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission. “Granted they pay for it, but as we use more electricity overall then utilities will have to eventually build more power plants.” [...] “The [state] constitution gives the Corporation Commission specific authority to deal with rate-making which is setting the price that we pay for the electric, natural gas, telephone service, private water companies,” Wong said. [...]

Wong said he would give customers plenty of advance noticed before any utilities are shut off. “You wouldn’t shut down somebody’s power the next day. You put people on notice,” Wong said. “I think they have to make their own decisions. It’s an individual responsibility of how they’re going to take care of it themselves without the utility.”

Watch it:

Wong’s opponents, two Republicans and three Democrats, have said that asking utilities to check customers’ immigration status is “inappropriate.” Even state Sen. Russell Pierce (R-AZ), the man who sponsored Arizona’s new immigration law and wants to deny citizenship to “anchor babies” doesn’t necessarily back Wong’s proposal. “That’s not an argument I think we’ll involve ourselves in,” said Pierce. The president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce had harsher words to offer. “Today is the third day in a row when Phoenix-area temperatures will reach 110 degrees or higher. Since you’re a native Phoenician, I don’t need to remind you of the peril our state’s most vulnerable residents face in our summer heat. To deny someone access to electricity based on his or her immigration status is not only a wrongheaded policy proposal, it’s just cruel,” wrote Glenn Hamer.

A spokesman from APS, the state’s largest electric utility, has stated “we are not even sure how we would implement a policy like this.” Chances are implementation would involve providing utility companies with highly sensitive personal identification information such as social security numbers. Privacy concerns aside, Wong has also not considered the costs associated with verifying the legal status of utility customers. When Colorado passed a series of stringent measures requiring applicants for most state benefits to prove their immigration status, it cost the state $2 million in its first year alone. Checking the immigration status of utility customers would cost astronomically more since almost every resident is probably a user of electricity. And if the recently approved law, SB-1070, succeeds in driving out the state’s undocumented immigrants, such a measure would generate little to no cost-saving effect.

In order for Wong’s proposal to be implemented the plan would have to be analyzed, go through a public hearing, and be approved by the majority of the five member commission.