The topic of immediate concern in Washington is the nation’s fiscal crisis.  Nothing is more important.  But not long thereafter, the time for immigration reform will arrive.  What does immigration reform mean?  When will the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress draft and propose legislation?  Is the intention to build on the last proposal that went nowhere?  Is there a legalization component?  President Obama should be involved directly, but will he engage?  Who in Congress and within public interest organizations will be central to this drama?  Is there a cost to the Treasury?  What terms are acceptable to discuss in public?  Will the fight be as bitter as over healthcare?  What steps are being taken to assure that the public accepts proposed legislation?  Will all come to naught in the face of Republican opposition and predictable Democratic angst?  Will hard political capital on both sides of the aisle be used to get this done?  Or will one party use it to set up the other in time for November, 2014?

Listed in this fashion, the questions frame the sheer difficulty of what is demonstrably easier said than done.  No one has answers for most of them, except that the Administration will need every tool to achieve success – and develop new ones.

One would think that newly chastised Republicans – who could not crack 30 percent of HispanicLatino support for their presidential candidate last week – might be seeking a back channel to begin discussions.  But that might be too generous of an assumption, though there are late-breaking cracks in the anti-reform monolith.  The immediate danger, of course, is that immigration reform be seen as political payback for HispanicLatinos – although Republicans themselves need cover for the next round of elections.  Having watched the back and forth on this issue since my days as a young congressional staff assistant when Ronald Reagan pushed the IRCA reforms of 1986 and then later as a special assistant to the commissioner of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1997, I suspect this is not going to be easy.

Politics in the raw can botch this post-election opportunity. The fact that immigration by individuals crossing the border illegally has all but ceased will not calm the rhetoric from those inalterably opposed to immigration of any kind.  Leaders who desire real progress can ignore the critics if they arm themselves with a larger vision.

The larger vision should include, in some form or another, the overarching principle that the individuals already here – most of them from the country next door – are citizens of the economy and part of the permanent HispanicLatino population that forms the country’s lifeline to the future.  The geography of the Southwest is a blessing Americans do not appreciate.  Without the higher birth rates of HispanicLatinos, the United States would collapse and disappear over time since non-HispanicLatinos have stopped having babies.  In that vital sense, Mexico is inarguably the most important nation in the world to the United States, and the importance of Washington’s ambassador to Mexico City should be considered on par with any member of the Cabinet.

My view is that the Obama Administration in its approach to immigration reform ought to have the longer view in mind and use the ambassadorship as part of a longer-term strategy.  It certainly needs to improve upon the performance of the ambassador who preceded the current placeholder – an appointment always considered temporary.  As such, it might be advantageous to appoint a new ambassador for the second term that initially can help persuade Congress to enact an immigration package appropriate to the times but also be able to work with Mexico to make sure that any new law is properly understood and implemented.  Without co-operation and assistance from Mexico, any new law is bound to falter.  Immigration cannot be successfully managed by only one of the two governments that have equal stake in the back-and-forth flow of their people and an ever-conjoining economy.

As soon as the economy turns around, immigration will uptick.  And if the United States is serious in the years ahead about developing its natural gas resources safely and cleanly then there will be more work than workers – a discrepancy which would distort future economic growth through accelerating wages that would trigger inflationary cycles.

An individual, then, with a current background in Congress and an intimate knowledge of Mexico and Texas, the state that dominates more than half of the border the two nations share, and someone who is a part of the young HispanicLatino population ought to be considered.  In an earlier day, someone like Congressman Solomon Ortiz might have fit the bill.  Now, someone like the energetic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar who represents a district based in Laredo or someone from academia like the president of The University of Texas at San Antonio, Ricardo Romo, perhaps might be persuaded to take on what is not an easy job.

Historically, the ambassadorship to Mexico – for better and worse – was intriguingly involved in relations between the two countries when geographic considerations were paramount.  For far different reasons these days, geography is again decisive, and the ambassador needs to be as much an emissary to it as to another nation.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.