Can You Stand Another Round of Immigration Debate?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 11:55 AM on June 27, 2007.

I don't know if I can survive another round of the immigration "debate" -- it's a stretch to even use the word. But it looks like we're heading there after the Senate voted to move on to a raft of amendments to the "compromise" measure that was buried, temporarily as it turns out, two weeks ago.

Interestingly, five Dems who had originally voted for cloture voted against it this time, and seventeen Republicans crossed over under pressure from the White House, even though their base is absolutely frothing at the mouth over the bill. As Oliver Willis put it, "I am amazed by how the right just spits in the face of their base - the combined effort of talk radio, rightie blogs, and more leads to zip."

Meanwhile, on the left I'm hearing that maybe we should just wait until 2009 for a better environment in which we might pass a good and comprehensive immigration reform. I think we're likely to end up with little choice in the matter. There were provisions in the draft released last month that were simply unacceptable for progressives to get behind, and now the bill is going to become even more punative and less logical as the leadership makes a vain attempt to bring the hardliners on board. That's certainly no cause for celebration.

It will mean a patchwork of silly "English-only" laws at the state and local levels, laws depriving immigrants of access to emergency healthcare, laws requiring that cops turn immigrants who report rapes or assaults or other crimes over to immigration authorities, laws regulating how many people can share a home and laws making it a crime to give illegal immigrants any kind of assistance or charitable services. The issue will continue to feed into the all-too-common belief that government is simply incapable of constructive action on an issue most Americans say is important, which is always helpful to the right. And finally, with all the rhetoric about Mexican "Reconquistas" bent on annexing Texas on behalf of the Mexican government, it's only a matter of time until we get a raft of serious hate crimes against Latinos -- so far, we've barely dodged that bullet.

And, of course, there's no gaurantee that the environment will in fact improve in 2009. Letting the issue fester for a couple of years isn't likely to help.

I expect to see a cherished right-wing talking-point play out in the Congress this summer: in scuttling the Senate's first try at a comprehensive reform bill earlier this month, immigration hardliners -- the vocal minority whose views on immigrants is significantly more negative than the population as a whole and who are vehemently opposed to any measure that would allow undocumented workers to become legal -- have become emboldened. Congressional leaders never really challenged them -- never called bullshit on them for describing the bill as an "amnesty" -- and, in failing to do so, they appeased the Tancredos and Coburns like Neville friggin' Chamberlain after Hitler grabbed Czechoslovakia. The chance of getting a decent bill that progressives could support is now almost zero.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who inundated lawmakers' offices with venomous calls and letters opposing the compromise before it was even close to being final -- the good folks who scuttled the legislative process before it could begin in earnest -- is also the group that is most dismayed by the status quo. A good way to think about what's going on in terms of immigration is this: the hardliners wanted 700 miles of new fences so badly that they raised hell over a proposal that would have given them 370 miles of fencing. So now they will get zero miles of fence out of the deal -- just as they won't get their 4,400 new border patrol agents or their biometric ID cards or their employer database -- and they're still celebrating their victory. What rubes.

The sad thing is that the basic structure of a deal is there: Large majorities favor tighter border security, more enforcement against employers of illegal immigrants, a path to earned citizenship for those who learn English and pay their taxes and oppose policies that separate families. In a functional democracy, that might lead to everyone giving a little bit and meeting in the middle. But, as Trent Lott put it last week, talk radio is calling the shots when it comes to the issue of immigration.

Tagged as: immigration, immigration reform, immigration bill

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.