Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft worked with high-level officials from the Mexican government in the first meeting of an immigration committee approved by American President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox. But even as the committee held its inaugural meeting, it was clear that the eventual outcome would be ugly.
The sherpa work for the first Bush-Fox summit in February was done by a high-level bilateral panel on U.S.-Mexico migration and border issues that actually started last year, before either president was elected. Defining the bland consensus of politics without principle, the panel's report proposes a "Grand Bargain" with four components: 1) legal visas for Mexican migrants, 2) crackdowns on smugglers and prevention of dangerous border crossings, 3) a joint effort to build a viable border region, and 4) economic development in Mexico.
What's not to like?
Well, this: What might be called Bush's purposeful drift on immigration policy is headed toward a bad end. Made up of vaguely "pro-immigration" rhetoric and aggressively pro-business action, Bush's approach represents the end of the Ellis Island ideal, the citizenship-oriented model for immigration. With the support of a Congress thoroughly greased with campaign contributions, the Bush administration will subsidize certain industries in the form of cheap labor, ever more solidly built into the U.S. economy -- at the expense of core civic values. Encompassing everyone from stoop laborers to computer programmers, Bush is moving to sever immigration from citizenship on a scale not seen since the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in the era when Jim Crow was established. The Grand Bargain is based on vagueness to the point of delusion, if not dishonesty.
The Bush administration didn't invent the new American guest worker model, but it aims to revise it. The information technology industry has already persuaded Congress (with buckets of cash) to adopt a full-fledged guest worker strategy, bringing in hundreds of thousands of marginal workers on "temporary visas," while effectively blocking them from citizenship or even permanent residency. Likewise, agribusiness has been begging for years to expand a temporary worker program, in effect restoring the infamous "bracero" program that abused Mexican workers from 1942-1964.
The Immigration Morass
A legal "immigrant" who has a green card, has permanent resident status and is on the path to, or perhaps has already achieved, U.S. citizenship. Five years of legal permanent residency is the usual qualification for citizenship. Yet more and more people moving to the U.S. are actually guest workers, that is, people with temporary, NON-immigrant visas. The 2000 Census reports that there are twice as many illegal residents -- 11 million -- as previously estimated, but doesn't explain why. Here is a key reason: Congress promises visas to families of immigrants, including both citizens and green card holders. Yet it refuses to prioritize among literally millions of immigration promises it makes to these families. Many are left waiting indefinitely, so they move to the U.S. illegally. Rather than fix the rules, Congress prefers to make exceptions -- slowly, intermittently, and only as part of bigger deals that reward campaign contributors while making the underlying problem worse.
Self-proclaimed pro-immigration groups are reluctant to revisit family-based immigration, since they bargained away prioritization for nuclear families in 1996 during the welfare reform debate. At the time, the groups chose to block eventual cuts in overall levels of immigration over delivery of a million green cards for nuclear families -- whom Congress outlawed and exiled instead. The National Council of La Raza actually gave then-Senator Spencer Abraham (a conservative Republican, and architect of anti-immigrant provisions that did pass in 1996) the "Defender of the Melting Pot" award for this thoroughly bad deal.
During his remaining years in the Senate, Abraham's principal achievement was to ignore the "family first" immigration rule while delivering Silicon Valley hundreds of thousands of guest worker visas -- none of which provide a path to citizenship. Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas is accelerating the Republican drive to erase the Ellis Island model -- promising to "legalize" Mexican workers but saying they will get access to U.S. citizenship "over my dead body." Under Gramm's proposal, workers would reportedly get one year temporary visas binding them to particular industries, and even specific employers, to be renewed annually and not accumulate toward permanent residency.
Democratic Dithering
The New Democrats have no position on immigration. And the old Democratic thinking has dead-ended. The AFL-CIO, prompted by the service workers unions, has called for repeal of employer sanctions and amnesty for illegal workers -- but labor leaders all but openly admit they have no answer to the "then, what?" question. Howard Berman of California, a Democratic leader on immigration, is committed to an "earn your way to a green card" approach for agriculture workers: They would get "temporary visas" that would become green cards in three years. But Bush's pal Vicente Fox has already preemptively surrendered access to U.S. citizenship in his negotiations with Bush.
So eager are pro-immigration groups to get more people in, they join the Bushes and the Gramms -- refusing to admit that something is missing from the "Grand Bargain." These ostensibly progressive groups are making a devil's bargain with libertarians who want more workers but don't want to give them a shot at citizenship.
Rather than face up to the gravity of severing immigration from citizenship, the groups place their hopes in bland language. At a February 15 briefing to discuss the Grand Bargain proposal, Demetri Papademetriou, who runs immigration programs at the Carnegie Endowment, cheerfully said: "I was very pleased with the discipline of all of us yesterday." Papademetriou noted his group: "didn't say the 'a' word -- amnesty, nor the other 'a' word, agriculture. They didn't say the 'g' word -- guest workers, or the 'b' word, braceros. . . That is the level of specificity that we avoid. It is up to the official negotiators to handle these details." Understandably, Papademetriou fears clarity will cause people to realize the Grand Bargain is a bad deal, so he counsels blandly baffling phrasing instead.
Asked repeatedly for specifics at the briefing, Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, replied: "We want to make legality the prevailing norm. We know that if legalization was to be proposed without a temporary visa program, that was not going to work. So we think that some form of targeted legalization programs may be useful." But a guest worker program can't lead to citizenship for the numbers he's talking about. What it can do is create a permanent employment program for immigration lawyers as "temporary" workers become illegal aliens, under laws made up of exceptions rather than rules.
Given the Democrats' lack of traction in the mud of the Grand Bargain -- not to speak of Republican solidarity in support of big business -- temporarily legal immigration may replace the path to citizenship.
Fuzzy Economics
Not the least of the ironies of immigration politics is the alliance between regulatory lawyers and ostensible libertarians, who concur on a wholly bogus "economic argument" for immigration.
In treating the U.S. as an economy, not a polity, the Grand Bargainers blithely ignore the economic nonsense they're building into the system. When the government supplies a workforce, it's a subsidy. When the workforce accepts sub-standard wages and working conditions, it's a big subsidy. And when the workers want something that can only be supplied by the government, like a green card, workers have to accept substandard wages. That is a huge distortion of the labor market, enforced by the government -- which employers are certainly not motivated to solve.
Grand Bargainers are not ready to consider even simple illustrations of the contradictory economics of pretending that guest workers are part of a free market for labor. For example, some propose the new temporary visas be geographically restricted and include a provision for remittances. That is, a worker from Jalisco might get a one year visa to work at a meat plant in Kansas for $8 an hour, with $2 deducted to be sent back to a government investment fund to create the jobs in Mexico that would keep their workforce at home. Papademetriou describes the potential of the temporary visa to "rejuvenate the circulation" of Mexicans both ways across the border. Why would somebody work illegally when a legal visa is available?
Well, Colorado construction jobs can start at $10 an hour, under the table, without government investment fund deductions. Moreover, Mexicans recall that the last bracero fund was looted by the Mexican government and -- like anybody else -- would prefer to make their own investment decisions. So every time, in every country, "temporary" workers become illegal aliens for the same economic reasons that attracted them in the first place by the millions. That is why the only way to keep "temporary" workers in legal jobs is the Ellis Island model: to offer them -- and their families -- access to permanent residency.
Backed by employers, the organized immigration debate rejects clarity like a baboon heart.
The End of Ellis Island
The model of immigration without political rights creates a dangerously slippery slope. Consider this suggestion from Linda Chavez, Bush's first nominee for Labor Secretary: "The new Bush committee might even debate the thorny issue of whether automatic citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil -- a provision meant to guarantee the rights of former slaves through the 14th amendment -- makes sense today." Immigration advocates dismiss the idea -- even though the 1996 Republican platform called for eliminating birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of illegal aliens.
The arduous process of amending the Constitution seems a stretch. But the 14th amendment refers to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." When Bush identifies it as the key to our relations with a new, democratic Mexico, with the Grand Bargain to explain it, this Congress might just approve a clause in NAFTA that authorizes "temporary" guest workers, and quietly removes them from the sole jurisdiction of the United States. Does anyone really think the Bush Supreme Court wouldn't uphold that constitutional loophole, thereby denying not only millions of Mexicans seeking work in the United States -- but also their U.S.-born children -- the right of citizenship? Without a much more focused, specific, and most of all, principled, alternative, Democrats will not be able to stop it.
For a response to this article see, A Response: Toward a New U.S.-Mexican Immigration Relationship -- Logic and Legality by T. Alexander Aleinikoff.
