How quickly Washington’s conventional wisdom turns. Just last
week, there were reports that 2008 politics had driven a wedge between John
McCain and Ted Kennedy, killing off chances for new immigration
legislation in this Congress. Now Congressman Luis Gutierrez
(D-Ill.) and Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) have introduced a
bill of their own. Activists are said to be cautiously optimistic;
the Washington Post approves.
Comprehensive immigration reform is dead; long live
comprehensive immigration reform.
The Gutierrez-Flake bill — its ostentatious official name is
the STRIVE (Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant
Economy) Act — has two things going for it that its Senate
counterpart did not. For starters, its GOP sponsor is a
conservative standout. While his colleagues were busy loading up
bills with earmarks, Flake remained a vocal proponent of spending
restraint who didn’t mince words about red-ink Republicanism. His
candor (and probably his immigration enthusiasm) got him unceremoniously dumped from the House Judiciary
Committee.
Second, while Senate Democrats excluded Republicans not named
McCain from the negotiations (even if they had voted for last
year’s controversial immigration bill) Gutierrez-Flake contains
several provisions aimed at winning GOP votes. Although the
Democrats control both houses of Congress, many members prefer
bipartisan legislation or none at all to inoculate themselves from
election-year amnesty charges.
So while the bill still transforms illegal immigrants who
arrived before June 2006 into “temporary workers” and offers them a
path to citizenship after six years — if they pay $2,000 plus back
taxes, learn English and civics, and commit no felonies — it also
boasts some new features that make it seem tougher than
McCain-Kennedy. Gutierrez and Flake promise there will be no path
to citizenship until after provisions toughening workplace
enforcement and border security have taken effect.
There’s also a new “touchback” requirement mandating that
illegals exit the United States and reenter the country legally.
Perhaps because they prefer computers to football, the
Washington Post describes this as “rebooting” one’s
immigration status.
Yet the trouble with most comprehensive bills is that their
authors are too clever by half. Many of the hoops illegal aliens
will need to jump through to keep these measures from being stuck
with the amnesty label will either be symbolic or ineffective at
bringing unlawful workers into the mainstream.
If this new touchback idea is seriously enforced, some of the
intended beneficiaries — being poor and having limited English
skills — may find it too difficult to comply and decide not to
bother with the vacation time in Mexico. But if illegal immigrants
are merely required to leave the U.S. for a day or a few hours,
with all their paperwork completed before they depart, the
provision may amount to what Center for Immigration Studies
executive director Mark Krikorian calls a game of “Immigration
Twister.”
Either the touchback is a “critical addition the bill,” as Flake
says, or it is a “political fig leaf that will allow immigration
hawks to claim a symbolic victory,” as the Washington Post
describes it.
Other enforcement measures are susceptible to similar problems.
Strapped immigration bureaucracies, already struggling with a
backlog of over 4 million unresolved cases, will face millions of
new applications. Either the background checks will be strictly
enforced, leading to delays and denials, or the system will be
vulnerable to fraud. During the 1986 amnesty, some 90 percent of
applicants ended up being approved amidst such complaints about
sloppiness.
Finally, what happens to the temporary workers if they don’t
want to go home after six years? The promise of citizenship will
surely be an incentive for many of them to abide by the law. But
for those who don’t, why will deportation be any more feasible six
years from now? And Gutierrez-Flake would admit another 400,000 new
guest workers per year on top of the illegal immigrants seeking to
adjust their status.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times
reports that stepped up enforcement seems to have caused
significant disruptions in illegal immigration: “Previous
crackdowns have served only to shift illegal crossings to new
areas, but so far this year there are no signs that the border has
sprung another leak. Apprehensions have decreased in every area
along the Southwest border, in some places by more than
two-thirds.”
This is what everybody on Capitol Hill claims to be for: better
border security. Maybe Congress would be better served by focusing
on this area of agreement than the contentious issue of how to
handle the 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here. In
the present political climate, a comprehensive solution may be no
solution at all.
