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Thursday, May 05, 2005
 
THE TACIT COMPROMISE OF AMERICAN IMMIGRATION POLICY:
Seems like every week, the LA Times publishes letters from citizens irate that nothing is done to stop illegal immigrants from living in the country, educating their children, obtaining gainful employment, and using public hospitals. Nor is this attitude unique to California. Similar letters make their way into the New York Times on occasion. And voter initiatives to crack down on immigration are wildly popular, dating from California's Proposition 209 in 1994 to the recent Arizona initiative to deny benefits to illegal immigrants. The Minutemen, a ragtag militia that is really something of a joke (if not worse), is popular with a lot of people who should know better. And rabidly anti-illegal immigrant Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo may run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.

Yet despite the fact that there seems to be a national consensus against illegal immigrants, little gets done and nothing really changes. Why? The conventional political narrative is that pro-immigrant liberals and pro-business conservatives are able to stop anti-immigrant measures from getting through Congress (and courts invalidate state initiatives on the ground that only the federal government has the power to set immigration policy).

I think this conventional wisdom is probably true as far as it goes, but doesn't really get at the tacit compromise, unspoken, that is at the heart of America's immigration policy.

That tacit compromise is essentially as follows. First, there is no practical way of expelling the millions of illegal immigrants who have established strong ties to the United States. Their kids go to school here, and some of them speak little Spanish, are American citizens, and have never set foot outside the United States. If their jobs (including farming, childcare, and manual labor) were vacated, it would do tremendous harm to the American economy, which relies on this labor force because of the increasing skills, education, and specialization of the American workforce.

Second, there is insufficient political support for resetting American immigration policy to accurately reflect this country's needs and the realities of our economy and the economies of Mexico and Central America. Simply put, Mexican and Central American immigrants are not allowed to legally emigrate to the United States (except if they are lucky enough to marry a citizen or they already have a close relative who has a green card or citizenship). The quotas for those countries are set ridiculously low, given their proximity, the ease of crossing into the United States, and this country's need for additional workers. (The next time a person complains to you about how illegal immigrants shouldn't "break the law" and should come here legally, point this out.) There are also millions already here who have the abovementioned ties to the US (including jobs and young American citizen children) who effectively cannot be made to leave, but whom the political system will not legalize because that would be considered an "amnesty" and a "reward for lawbreaking".

It doesn't get said enough, but our current system is an almost inevitable result of those two facts. The fact that many of the illegal immigrants already here are effectively undeportable, and the economy needs a continued influx of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, means that measures that would kick such persons out of the country and prevent them from returning cannot be enacted. The fact that the public opposes raising the quotas for legal immigration from Mexico and Central America and opposes "amnesty" for those who "broke the law" to come here means that measures that would allow the flow to occur legally cannot be enacted either.

One would think that post-September 11 security concerns might have affected the debate, and they have, but not in any positive manner. The positive effect of the concern about terrorism would have been to recognize that we want to know who is crossing the border and to legalize and register the flow of migrants. Instead, anti-immigration advocates have cynically linked the terrorism issue to illegal immigration, even though the 9/11 hijackers crossed our insecure border with Canada and Mexican workers have nothing to do with terrorism.

Another thing that is not often remarked upon, but has something to do with why we don't get any farther than the Tacit Compromise on this issue, is that many of the opponents of illegal immigration are actually simply opponents of immigration generally. They don't say this flatly, of course. Rather, they often talk about a "skills based" immigration policy, which would mean that "unskilled" farmworkers wouldn't be able to get in, only skilled computer programmers from the far east. But, of course, those computer programmers can get in legally now, because their prospective employers or universities can sponsor them. The whole point of such proposals is to try to stop immigration of manual laborers across our southern border.

It should be noted that in economics, the willingness to work for low wages in extreme heat in bad working conditions is a "skill" just like computer programming is a skill. In both cases, you have something that employers need and Americans cannot provide in sufficient numbers. To that extent, the distinction between "skilled" and "unskilled" is meaningless.

The other thing that should be noted, and is noted often enough, but is always denied by anti-immigration advocates, is that race and ethnicity definitely have something to do with this issue. The best way of seeing that is to note that during the same period when anti-immigration initiatives have done well at the polls, "English only" laws have also done well. People are afraid of Spanish-speaking people taking over the country, or at least the West. They are afraid of changes to the culture. They are afraid that Latinos have more children.

This doesn't mean that everyone who is opposed to illegal immigration is a racist. Many aren't (although the argument that such people are simply concerned about lawbreaking is ludicrous-- illegal speeding is far more harmful than illegal immigration, and speeders' conduct directly relates to driving, and yet these people are not calling for the denial of driver's licenses to speeders, but rather illegal immigrants). But what it does mean is that because these "cultural" concerns about the growing Hispanic population motivate many anti-illegal immigration advocates, they will actively oppose compromises that allow for additional legal Hispanic immigration into the United States.

This is an issue that will probably never be solved. George W. Bush, who is loved by Republicans, can't bring his party together to support a plausible guest worker system-- superficially because anti-illegal immigration conservatives are concerned about "rewarding" illegal immigrants already in the country, but more deeply because anti-illegal immigration conservatives want to reduce Hispanic immigration into the United States. So we will continue to live with this status quo that nobody likes, but which represents the unspoken compromise between reality and a large group of Americans who will not accept it.

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