A First Step, but Not the ‘Whole Enchilada’

In the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, when immigration reform was at the top of the White House agenda, it seemed that we might see dramatic change. Action appeared certain, even if President Bush was unlikely to agree completely with Mexico’s then-Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who insisted that “the whole enchilada” of border policy needed to come under bilateral review, and that the two countries should adopt a comprehensive new approach to immigration that would lead to legalization for the millions of undocumented Mexicans living and working north of la linea.

The terrorist attacks abruptly blew any reform plans off the national policy agenda as U.S. policymakers turned their attention to tightening borders rather than opening them. The undocumented workers who’d hoped to achieve legal status were among the collateral damage from Al Qaeda’s assault.

Now, as he enters an election year, and with his advisors’ eyes cast longingly toward the growing Latino vote, the president says he’s preparing to send Congress his outlines of a new immigration policy “that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee.” Bush’s surprise end-of-the-year announcement that he’s ready to make it easier for immigrants to work in the U.S. came just days after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said he favors “some kind of legal status” for the 8 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living among us.

Some will see the president’s new initiative as stemming from genuine humanitarian concern, or at least plain common sense. Others will discount it as hollow electioneering. But whatever the president’s motivations, any forward movement on making immigration policy more flexible and realistic should be welcomed. Certainly, the White House plan will fall considerably short of the “whole enchilada” envisioned by Castaneda. But to many who are dealing with the problem, incremental change seems better than none. As Miguel Escobar Valdez, the Mexican consul general in the beleaguered border town of Douglas, Ariz., told me a few weeks ago, “At this point we’ll settle for a few chilaquiles.”

How scanty or hearty Bush’s border reform recipe will be is still unknown. The details are expected to be revealed when Bush travels to Monterrey, Mexico, to meet with President Vicente Fox and other Latin American leaders Jan. 11 and 12. But in broad strokes, the Bush policy menu will have similarities to legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would create an Internet-based, federally run job registry. Employers would post jobs that would be available first to American workers, and only then to prospective immigrants, who could apply to fill the slots and receive temporary visas. Even sketchier are plans to provide legal status for undocumented workers already here.

Bush has already said he’s “firmly against blanket amnesty,” so his plan is likely to be more restrictive than those being floated by several of the Democratic presidential candidates. It also won’t begin to satisfy organized labor, which has proposed a mass legalization of undocumented workers. And it is unlikely to address what many critics of current policy consider to be a central point of effective reform: significant U.S. economic development aid for impoverished “sender” communities in Mexico. No major American politician has shown the courage to go that far, to try to solve the problem of illegal immigration at its source.

Indeed, on the matters of immigration and border policy, both major political parties have a shameful record, and neither one can claim the moral high ground. Bush’s new efforts can hardly worsen things.

The situation that currently reigns along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border is one of inhumanity, hypocrisy and denial. A full decade’s worth of revised border strategy, vigorously implemented by President Clinton in the early days of his first term and subsequently sustained by Democrats and Republicans alike, has been an abject failure. Pandering to xenophobic pressures on the right, the Clinton administration spent billions of dollars over the course of the ‘90s, salting the southern frontier with stadium-strength lights, heat sensors and infrared cameras and virtually blockading traditional illegal crossing routes with squads of armed Border Patrol units.

The results have been disastrous. As a product of the heightened U.S. clampdown -- concentrated on the handful of key urbanized border areas between Brownsville, Texas, and San Diego -- desperate Mexican immigrants have been effectively funneled into treacherous routes through freezing mountain ranges and parched, unforgiving deserts. Before the current policy, no more than a few dozen crossers a year perished in their quest. Last year, nearly 400 people died trying to make the crossing into the U.S. That’s 50% more than the total number who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall over its entire three-decade history. During the last 10 years, more than 2,500 have died trying to get into America from Mexico.

Neither this staggering death toll nor the border lockdown has put as much as a dent in the actual flow of illegal immigrants. Last year, according to U.S. government statistics, about 1 million crossers were apprehended along the border -- virtually the same number as before the Clinton strategy was put in place. That strategy has produced other, lamentable, unintended consequences. The increased difficulty in crossing has snapped the traditionally cyclical and circular patterns of illegal migration, encouraging an estimated half-million more undocumented Mexicans per year to permanently reside in the U.S. instead of periodically returning home. The business of human trafficking has boomed, producing a windfall for the “coyotes” and polleros whose ranks are increasingly dominated by new and violent criminal gangs intertwined with the narcotics trade. Worse, the funneling of the immigrant flow into nontraditional areas has stoked the rise of nativist border vigilante and militia groups, especially in southeastern Arizona.

What’s been lacking in U.S. border policy is official recognition of the most basic and incontrovertible facts. A full 25% of Mexico’s able-bodied male workforce already resides in the U.S. -- with or without official documentation. Today, almost anywhere in America, from the apple orchards of Washington, to the poultry plants of the Carolinas, to the meatpacking factories of Iowa and Nebraska, to the restaurants and gardening routes of Southern California -- wherever there is a labor-intensive industry, there is an immigrant and mostly undocumented workforce.

As long as Mexico’s endemic economic inequities persist, the gravitational pull of the thriving American job market will always overpower physical and bureaucratic impediments to border crossing.

No matter how modest, the upcoming Bush proposals face rough going in Congress, especially from the president’s own party. Bush may feel a need to court the Latino vote, but few GOP legislators who hail from safe, conservative districts will feel a similar urge. His only help within his party may come from corporate and agribusiness interests, which favor reform as a means of stabilizing and normalizing a cheap labor market prone to immigration-related fluctuations.

Some Congressional Democrats will be tempted to sink the president’s immigration initiative, publicly arguing that it doesn’t go far enough but privately fearing that Bush might be “stealing” what they’d like to claim as one of their traditional core issues.

But given the Democrats’ own dismal record on immigration, something imperfect may well be better than nothing at all. If the president opens the door on this issue, the Democrats should at least get a foot in rather than slamming it shut.

Bush’s unilateral impulses have done considerable damage to U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The new immigration initiative offers him a unique opportunity to not only mend fences with our immediate southern neighbor, but also to meaningfully improve the lives of millions of hardworking and unrecognized immigrant workers and their families. Thirty years ago it took a bitter red-baiter like President Nixon to visit Communist China and open diplomatic relations with the world’s most populous nation. In the current atmosphere of bunkered unilateralism that he helped foster, maybe it will take a George W. Bush to start tearing down the wall of denial between Mexico and the United States.