Suman Raghunathan

Jumping Ship on Immigration

Looks like our elected officials in Washington have jumped ship. And I don’t mean Congress leaving the capital for its August recess. I mean the Senatorial stampede to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon by signing on to the latest misguided immigration proposal.

Late last week a group of Republican Senators introduced a bill with its feet squarely planted in enforcement-only thinking that doesn’t even give a nod to legalizing the 12 million undocumented immigrants in our nation - many of them workers crucial to our economy. What’s particularly disappointing is most of those who introduced last week’s bill were architects of this spring’s aborted bipartisan immigration compromise: Senators Graham (R-SC), Kyl (R-AZ), and McCain (R-AZ). As I’ve written before,that bill started out as a mixed bag and ended up so loaded with cheap shot amendments targeting immigrants that it shouldn’t have passed anyway - but at least it gave some lip service to trying to bring the country’s millions of undocumented immigrants out of the shadows (never mind just how complicated the bill would have made this process.)

Now with the latest incarnation of immigration legislation (or at least Washington’s tunnel vision view of what they think the nation needs on immigration policy), the Senate has dropped all pretense of taking a pragmatic approach to immigration that will honor immigrants’ economic contributions to the nation’s economy.

Instead, it looks like Messrs. Graham, Kyl, and McCain have started drinking Lou Dobbs kool-aid (joining Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Sessions (R-AL), who’ve been drinking up for a while now) and jumped into a border enforcement bonanza by introducing a bill that will do nothing to fix our nation’s broken immigration system, honor immigrants’ contributions to our economy, and will definitely not benefit the American middle class. The $3 billion proposal’s highlights include constructing 700 more miles of border fencing; buying four drone planes to monitor the border; hiring 14,000 Border Patrol agents; and mandatory detention of all those who attempt to illegally cross the border.

Analysts are predicting the bill is so far gone in its enforcement haze that it will not even be able to pick up a Democratic co-sponsor to keep it alive in Congress; nevertheless Senator Graham’s press release about the bill touts it as “workable legislation” that “distills many of the lessons [we] learned discussing immigration reform”.

Um, what?

Clearly the enforcement-only approach to immigration is not working. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane over the past 15 years. During that time spending on border enforcement has tripled, even as the number of undocumented immigrants has gone up threefold. Only policing the border is just not going to work unless we come up with real prescriptions for immigration reform that provide an incentive for the nation’s undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows; addresses poor (or nonexistent) enforcement of existing worker protections; and ends a two-tiered labor market that separates immigrants from native-born workers.

The Grahm/Kyl/McCain immigration proposal’s vision of punishing undocumented immigrants with raids, harsh penalties, and mandatory detention will only push them even deeper into the nation’s underground economy and expose them to even worse workplace violations.This misguided enforcement-only approach will further depress the wages and working conditions of American middle class workers who have to compete with the substandard wages and workers rights (or lack thereof) forced upon undocumented workers.

Senator Arlen Specter, who has been supportive in the past of earned legalization through immigration reform to elevate the undocumented out of the nation’s worker underclass, also appears to be sipping (not guzzling, like the Senators who introduced last weeks’ bill) some Senatorial kool-aid. In an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post,Specter opines we need to improve the lives of the nation’s 12 million undocumented residents (no argument there, Senator Specter – you obviously hadn’t sipped too much Lou Dobbs kool-aid when you came up with that one) by providing legal status to the undocumented already in the country.

The glitch in Senator Specter’s new idea is that this new legal status must stop short of a path to US citizenship. Now Senator Specter, tell me how that’s going to make a difference. The whole point of earned legalization is to bring folks out of the shadows and let them get on a path to citizenship – erasing differences between their rights and those of native-born US citizens. Providing a green card to undocumented folks without giving them an option to apply for citizenship will simply transform a two-tiered labor system into a three-tiered one: undocumented immigrants at the bottom, green card-holding immigrants in the middle (still separate but equal from US citizens), and US citizens at the very top.

The National Conference of State Legislatures illustrated just how dysfunctional federal immigration policy is with a report released Monday at their national conference. State legislators at the conference re-enacted the Boston Tea Party to show just how fed up state governments are with federal demands that states enforce federal immigration laws on states’ dimes – just as our nation’s forefathers did over 200 years ago. Except today, instead of being upset about cockamamie British trade laws on tea, state governments are fed u with the feds effectively passing the buck on immigration policy. The result has been over 1400 local and state-based immigration measures this year – a 250% increase from last year. Unfortunately, most of these proposals continue the enforcement-only trend.

Now that’s classy with a K.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:00 AM, Aug 08, 2007 in Immigration
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