A group of nine suspected illegal immigrants died and 12 were
injured in a car crash while fleeing federal agents on Tuesday, in
what has become the latest gruesome reminder of the necessity of
immigration reform. The accident occurred in Yuma, Arizona, where
only three months earlier President Bush made the case for a
comprehensive immigration overhaul. Thankfully, a proposed
compromise gaining attention in Washington offers hope for securing
our borders, reducing illegal immigration, and meeting the needs of
our growing economy.
The plan put forward by Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and Sen. Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas, both Republicans, on July 25th, would
allow Mexicans and Central Americans to enter the United States
through a temporary worker program. Workers here illegally now
would need to leave the country and apply for re-entry. The program
would be administered by private companies operating “Ellis Island
Centers” outside the country.
The compromise has already won encouraging words from President
Bush, and it could bridge the gap between a comprehensive
immigration reform plan that passed the Senate in May and an
enforcement-only bill passed by the House last December. The
Pence-Hutchison plan would cut the Gordian knot of objections to
“amnesty” by requiring that workers leave the country and re-enter
legally after a short period of time rather than legalizing them
while they are here.
Critics of comprehensive reform claim that Congress already
tried legalization in the 1980s and it didn’t work. But the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 failed in large part
because it did not include an expanded channel for workers to enter
the country legally. It legalized 2.7 million workers who were
already here, but because it did not expand the opportunity for new
workers to enter legally, the pool of illegal workers just began to
fill up again.
IRCA did dramatically ramp up enforcement, but without true
reform, it was doomed to fail, and it has. In the past two decades,
the U.S. government has increased spending on border enforcement
ten-fold and actual agent-hours at the border by a factor of eight.
It has built miles of walls into the desert, raided hundreds of
workplaces and arrested thousands of illegal workers, and yet,
there are now 12 million living inside our borders.
Pence and Hutchison recognize that any immigration reform worthy
of the name must meet the legitimate needs of our growing economy
for additional workers. The U.S. economy continues to create
hundreds of thousands of jobs each year for low-skilled workers in
important sectors such as construction, hospitality, retail, and
food preparation. At the same time, the number of Americans ready
to fill such jobs continues to shrink as our population gets older
and better educated. Yet our immigration system provides no legal
channel for peaceful, hard-working neighbors to enter our country
even temporarily to fill this gap in the labor market.
The existing House bill ignores this reality in another
misguided attempt to enforce an unenforceable law. The bill’s
enforcement provisions, which include a $1.4 billion, 700-mile wall
along the Mexican border, would only divert the flow of workers
further into the desert, driving up smuggling fees and the number
of dead bodies found along the border each year. In contrast, the
compromise plan would allow needed workers to enter the country
legally through established ports of entry, allowing border
enforcement personnel to focus their time and resources on
intercepting real criminals and terrorists instead of would-be
janitors and construction workers.
The one critical flaw of the compromise plan is its provision to
delay any temporary worker program until the president has declared
our borders to be “secure.” This is a recipe for frustration. As
the past two decades prove, enforcement alone will not solve the
problem of illegal immigration. Reform of our immigration laws,
including creation of a temporary worker program, must be an
integral part of securing our border. Congress should bolster
border enforcement and allow greater numbers of workers to enter
the country simultaneously.
By accomplishing both objectives, the Pence-Hutchison plan could
break the logjam over illegal immigration. The compromise would
replace illegal immigration with legal immigration without granting
1986-style amnesty to illegal workers already in the country. If
the Republican Congress fails to pass real immigration reform, it
will be repeating the mistakes of the past while perpetuating
illegal immigration and chaos on our borders. Enacting successful
reforms will be difficult, but as we saw on Tuesday in Yuma,
failure comes at a terrible cost.
