Just when you thought national politics couldn’t get any duller, same ol' war in Iraq, same ol' deficits, same ol' Republican lying and corruption, along comes the Bush administration’s push to reform immigration policy.This one’s great, a true breath of fresh air. It’s got everything.
It’s got liberal churches offering to shield illegal immigrants and liberal labor unions wanting to stop them from undermining wages.
It’s got economic conservatives insisting that guest worker status provides needed labor at affordable rates and social conservatives seeing us turn into “Alta Mexico”.
It’s got moderates who oppose driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants but who support granting access to public health for heath’s sake and moderates who support granting driver’s licenses but don’t want to punish businesses who just didn’t know they were hiring someone illegal.
It’s got blacks and Hispanics talking about South Central L.A. then and South Central L.A. now.
It’s great political drama. Whether it goes anywhere is anyone’s guess.
My guess is that something will happen just because it’s an election year and the GOP needs something to declare victory on. Make illegal entry a felony and they please the Hard Right. Offer a guest worker pass appeases business when you’re also enacting mandatory employment verification checks with the gum’mint. Best of all for the GOP, it splits the Dems while not pissing off their own base enough (like, where are they going anyway?). Demos who support a harder line risk alienating their own base but opposing it loses the moderates.
The bottom line is that without some form of real employment verification, no fence or anything makes a difference. I’ve actually seen the future of employment verification, at a conference I attended in 2004. It’ll work like this.
At some point in the near future, everyone who wants to work will be required to own a state I.D. or driver’s license. That card will have a specific code detailing your work status. When you apply for a job, the card will be read into a computer system which log on to a national network which will do a comprehensive background check across all fifty states and the federal government, and participating foreign governments as well.
This process will record whether or not the employer has performed an actual check. If they have employees on the payroll who haven’t been recorded as verified, then the gum’mint slams the door on the employer. This would address the biggest hole in immigration control, the lack of any incentive for employers to not hire illegal immigrants.
State driver’s licenses were the ticket, it was felt, because they’re something everyone already knows and feels comfortable with. Put in a national work I.D. and everyone screams “Big Brother.” Just up gun the ol’ driver’s license, the national medal of ascending adulthood and no one will say a thing except the usual cranks.
I’ve seen the future and it’s coming on the back of a plastic card. I hear the present and it sounds like a lot of maneuvering for the 2006 midterm elections. Where will it end? We’ll know manana.
4 comments:
The same logic that drives the War on Drugs is at work in the War on Immigration. The best way to deal with the social impact of either is legalization and appropriate regulation.
In this case, "Illegals" form the customer-base for the nasty, business of "coyotes". People pay these scumbags through the nose in order to cross the border.
Far better for the State of California to charge a sliding fee, (say 2,000.00 max), pegged to whether the immigrant has a firm job offer and liklihood that she will use local services.
This would offset some of the cost of absorbing "illegals". They would prefer this option to being ripped off by coyotes.
Imagine not criminalized for crossing deserts, dealing with criminally negligent guides, or avoiding Nazi vigilantes? Instead you simply pay a fee and cross the border. The Border Patrol would be out of work in a week.
Those of us who reside in the United States of Reality know that the border with Mexico is a legal fiction. It bifurcates a contiguous landmass with no natural bounderies, save one eminently passable, muddy creek. It cuts through a region that is settled by the same kind of folk on both sides.
People have always crossed it without regard to necessary papers since it was drawn up. They will continue to do so.
We may as well sucumb to this fact; save everyone the headache of the xenophobic demagoguery that surrounds the issue; and make a couple of bucks to boot.
As your gov has said, "Hasta la vista, baby!"
It's an interesting predicament for Bush & Co.: go with their "racist slave wages" business buddies or snuggle up to their "racists xenophobes" who want to put up a two thousand mile wall.
As usual, they'll talk a good game down the middle but nothing will get done before November - a few million protesters always make politicians nervous.
Don't you love Georgia proposing (since dropping) provisions to tack on a 5% surcharge on out of country wires of money for folks who couldn't verify their immigration status? Kind of reminiscent of poll taxes, but I'm just sensitive.
It's interesting to see areas that once went to enormous lengths to create a large, tractable workforce through right-to-work legislation, and black codes concerned about having a large, tractable labor force driving down the wage-scale.
It's difficult for me to talk about this objectively, because these have been my neighbors, my co-workers, and my students. I liked this discussion of terms used in the debate:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5340507
with the apt quote from Max Frisch "We called for a labor force but it was human beings that came."
Thanks for picking our vegetables...now leave!
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