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CHALLENGES 2006-2007: New Impetus for U.S. Immigration Reform

Peter Costantini

SEATTLE, Washington, Jan 3 2007 (IPS) - As the 110th Congress goes into session in Washington Thursday with newly elected Democratic majorities in both houses, the political landscape for immigration reform has shifted – and fences along the U.S.-Mexico border are less likely to be a major feature of it.

A bipartisan group of senators and representatives has begun work on a draft immigration bill that will probably include a temporary worker programme and a path to legalisation for illegal immigrants, along with provisions for border enforcement.

A November poll by the Tarrance Group found that 75 percent of voters expected that in the coming year Congress would address comprehensive immigration reform, which respondents favoured over exclusive border enforcement by 50 percent to 37 percent. Sixty-eight percent favoured providing a path for illegal immigrants to earn legal status by paying a fine, working, paying taxes, living crime-free, and learning English.

Despite the electoral changes, fields and factories across the United States continued to witness high-profile workplace raids and deportations of undocumented workers, leaving a fog of fear hanging over many immigrant communities.

Do good fences make good neighbours when it comes to immigration? The outgoing Republican majorities in the U.S. Congress apparently thought so: earlier this year the House of Representatives passed draconian restrictions on immigration, including construction of 700 miles of double fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and criminalisation of living in the U.S. illegally or helping those who do. Eighteen percent of Democrats also voted for the bill.

The Republican leadership, however, was not able to reconcile the House bill with the one passed by the Senate, which included a guest worker programme and path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants and was supported by President George W. Bush.


Finally in the fall, the Republican leadership was able to pass the Secure Fence Act, which authorised adding 700 miles of border fencing to the fewer than 100 miles that are already fenced. But the bill did not appropriate any money, leaving decisions on how to use 1.2 billion dollars previously approved for border enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Opponents called the elusive fence a prop for the November elections.

While DHS may build some physical barriers, it seems to favour other means of border enforcement. The Boeing Corporation, a major aerospace firm, won what could grow into a two-billion-dollar contract from the agency to develop a “virtual fence,” an array of video cameras with heat- and motion-sensors linked through a communications network to a central database. The first phase along the Arizona border is scheduled to be deployed this year.

In an ironic twist, a southern California fence-building contractor that built part of the border fence between San Diego and Tijuana agreed in December to pay nearly five million dollars in fines, and two of its executives may face jail sentences. The crime: hiring undocumented workers.

In the November Congressional elections, immigration proved largely unsuccessful as a Republican wedge issue. Several candidates for the Senate, House of Representatives and governorships who campaigned on a platform of “getting tough” on immigration lost badly. Polls found that nationally the Iraq war and terrorism overshadowed immigration as issues for voters. House Republicans won only 27 percent of the Latino vote whereas President Bush had won 44 percent in 2004.

Even before the new Congress began its first session, a bipartisan group of lawmakers had begun work on new immigration legislation. Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, authors of an immigration proposal in the last session, are working with Representatives Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, and Luis Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, on a draft law that would reportedly broaden opportunities for undocumented immigrants to achieve legal status.

The 2006 Senate bill would have allowed only undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for at least five years to apply for legalisation, which critics said would have encouraged a market in false documentation. The drafters of the new bill, according to the New York Times, are considering broadening the provision to allow more recent immigrants to legalise their status.

The new draft law may also include some sort of temporary worker programme, which is controversial on both the right and the left. Ana Avendaño, director of the AFL-CIO immigrant worker programme, told IPS that the largest U.S. labour confederation opposed any provision that did not grant full labour rights to all workers. But she believes it is “inconceivable” that the new crop of more labour-friendly Democrats in Congress would approve a massive guest worker programme.

During last year’s immigration reform debate, a few unions led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) supported draft legislation by McCain and Kennedy that included a guest worker programme. SEIU Vice-President Eliseo Molina has said, however, that in any reform bill immigrant workers must have exactly the same rights as other workers.

A Mexican expert on migration, Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara, told IPS that any temporary work programme should also include incentives for Mexican workers to return to Mexico. “Many want to come to work, not to live, and then to return to their homes,” he said, but increased enforcement has made many immigrants’ traditional patterns of coming and going increasingly expensive and dangerous. (Read more about Avendaño and Durand in “Alternatives for an Effective and Humane Immigration Policy” below.)

Among the new House Democratic leadership, some may be predisposed to a more comprehensive approach on immigration. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the incoming chair of House Immigration, Border and Security Subcommittee, is an immigration attorney and has taught immigration law. She represents San Jose and the Silicon Valley, home of many immigrant high-technology professionals.

Other proposals high on the Democratic agenda may also benefit both immigrant and native low-wage workers. An increase in the minimum wage, for example, which has been stagnant at 5.15 dollars per hour for nine years, will likely be one of the Democratic leadership’s first initiatives.

On a local level, however, some governments have passed restrictive immigration measures. States including Colorado, Arizona and Georgia have passed laws barring undocumented immigrants from receiving a variety of public services. Texas legislators have proposed laws that would deny state benefits to the children of illegal immigrants, even if they are U.S. citizens, and tax wire transfers of money to Latin America.

National organisations that track extremist groups have noted a proliferation of nativist groups opposed to immigration. Most are small and have few resources, they say, but their use of the Internet has amplified their influence, and some seem to be connected with white supremacist hate groups. In a bizarre tactic reported by Reuters, an Italian-American immigrant used a sound system mounted on a truck to play loud sounds of wild animals along the Mexican border.

As legal reforms await the new Congress, federal authorities have mounted high-profile workplace raids targeting immigrants, leaving traumatised communities and torn-apart families in their wake.

In the most publicised sweep, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained some 1,282 employees at six Swift & Company meat-packing plants around the central U.S. on Dec. 13, charging 65 of them with criminal violations and the rest with administrative immigration violations. ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, characterised the raids as a strike against “a massive identity theft scheme” to which it said some of the criminal arrests were related.

No charges were filed against Swift for hiring workers illegally. The company had been taking part voluntarily in a pilot government programme to verify worker identities at the plants, which employ around 13,000 workers.

The United Food and Commercial Workers, the union that represents some of the workers, filed a lawsuit against ICE accusing it of abusing its police powers by detaining workers illegally and using 170 warrants for identity theft to intimidate much larger numbers of innocent workers.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association criticised the raids, saying they highlighted the need for more reasonable immigration policies: “Current U.S. immigration law provides just 5,000 annual permanent visas for low-skilled ‘essential’ workers, versus an estimated annual demand for 500,000 such workers.”

Over the course of 2006, stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts nationally have led to a total of 189,924 deportations, an increase of 12 percent over 2005, according to ICE figures.

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Alternatives for an Effective and Humane Immigration Policy

Legislative proposals for immigration reform tend to be circumscribed by political expediency. But many alternative ideas have surfaced that reflect a longer-term and more comprehensive perspective on immigration reform. IPS asked two experts from academia and labour what approaches to immigration issues could make a real difference in improving the lives of immigrants and citizens in the U.S. and abroad.

Jorge Durand

Professor Jorge Durand and his colleagues of the University of Guadalajara have partnered with researchers at Princeton University in the U.S. to create the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which has tracked 6,000 Mexican migrants over the past two decades.

Durand, who is co-director of the MMP, emphasised that traditionally Mexican migration was not just one-way. On the contrary, many Mexicans used to go back and forth repeatedly, working in the States so that they could return and buy a house or retire comfortably in Mexico. Now, though, increased border enforcement has raised the stakes in money and risk, so that more Mexican workers stay for longer periods or settle north of the border.

As a result, he said, any temporary work programme should also include incentives for Mexican workers to return to Mexico. “The U.S. spends a lot of money trying to keep them out, but not a cent to encourage them to return.” he told IPS. “Those who go back should be rewarded, perhaps with a visa or something similar.”

Increased enforcement has made many immigrants’ traditional patterns of coming and going increasingly expensive and dangerous, according to MMP research. “The U.S. has a fairly primitive labour system,” Durand said, one that depends on low wages and exploitation. By contrast Canada and some other countries pay living expenses and the return trip for temporary workers.

In Mexico, according to Durand, the outgoing administration of Vicente Fox took the strongest initiative of any Mexican government to resolve immigration problems, but was stymied in the wake of Sep. 11, 2001. “In return for his efforts, Fox was rewarded by the Sensenbrenner bill, approved by the House, which said in effect: ‘Your people are criminals.'”

For the future, Durand is guardedly optimistic. Public opinion in the U.S., he believes, now gives broad support to the idea that “immigrants have rights, not just in the workplace, but also to live in peace and regularise their situation.”

As to Mexico, it is already very effective at controlling population growth, he said, and as the population stabilises and the economy grows, pressures on Mexicans to emigrate will decline. “In 20 years, Mexico will become a developed country with no interest in sending emigrants to the United States,” Durand believes. “It’s a bit like what happened in Spain and Italy: emigration for centuries, but then when economic prosperity arrives, they just stop leaving.”

“However, this will not solve the problem of immigration for the U.S.,” he says. “Many businesses would fail without immigrant workers. As long as America needs workers, it’s going to attract them from China or Bangladesh, or eventually maybe from Africa. It’s the law of the market.”

Ana Avendaño

The AFL-CIO is the largest labour confederation in the United States, and Ana Avendaño is the director of its immigrant worker programme and associate general counsel.

Immigration reform, Avendaño believes passionately, has to be considered in the context of the broader questions of globalisation and fair trade. “We want trade with standards, trade that benefits workers, trade that benefits the environment,” she said. “Immigration is the same thing: we’re not trying to stop the flow of workers into this country, but we need fair immigration that benefits workers and communities.”

Effective reforms must provide employers with access to workers while guaranteeing those workers full rights, so that working standards for all are not degraded. “We need to revise the permanent employment system so that workers who come in can have full rights and become full partners, part of the middle class,” she said.

Currently, “employers benefit from a corrupt system, they sometimes don’t pay workers’ compensation or other benefits to immigrant workers, and this administration lets them get away with it,” she said. “We need strong enforcement of existing labour laws.”

The AFL-CIO opposes any temporary worker scheme that doesn’t grant immigrant workers the same rights as U.S. workers, Avendaño stressed. Existing temporary worker programmes in her view have often been “part of a scheme to push down wages in certain industries by corporations.”

At the same time, she said, “push factors” for immigration, such as the damage NAFTA has done to the Mexican economy, have to be addressed as part of any reforms. “People in Latin America don’t necessarily want to go to the U.S. to work,” she said, “but they’re driven by economic factors. We have to talk about how Latin American economies can create new jobs so that workers can stay at home and work.” The crisis, she believes, can be addressed only on a multinational basis.

According to Avendaño, the AFL-CIO is working with other unions and non-governmental organisations, including immigrant advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union, to lobby Congress on the reforms. From their first few meetings with Congressional staffs, the different legislators involved in drafting the bill do not yet appear to be “on the same page” with their proposals.

Still, she said, “we’re very energised and hopeful that this year will be much more productive in a framework that will benefit working people.”

 
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