Solving the Immigration Dilemma

The immigration dilemma and us -- how do we decide?

We seem faced by stark alternatives: One is to despair of effective controls, to grant blanket amnesty for the 11 million or so immigrants who broke the law by entering the U.S. illegally. After all, they wouldn't be here if we weren't taking advantage of their ultra-low-cost labor -- from maids to farm workers, gardeners to dishwashers -- in benefit-bereft jobs most Americans now spurn.

Indeed, if every undocumented worker disappeared from the country tomorrow, big sections of the U.S. agriculture machine, unable to compete in the global commodity market without cheap labor, would collapse. We'd become as dangerously reliant on food imports as we are on oil imports today.

But wait a moment, say others: These folks broke the law to enter America. They're swelling the costs for our schools, they're putting big burdens on health care and criminal justice systems. We want them gone.

The U.S. House under its Republican leadership feels that way: in December it passed a bill requiring deportation for every undocumented worker caught, big fines for employers who give illegal immigrants jobs, and a stunning $2.2 billion to construct double-layer border fences in Arizona and California -- America's 21st century version of the Berlin Wall. Senate action is expected this month.

Can there be a middle ground here?

It's tough. One senses a certain hatefulness, 21st-century xenophobia, in the anti-immigrant camp. Check the individual illegal immigrant and you often find a worker from a pitifully poor rural village, desperate for a better life, sending money back to family. He or she lives in constant fear of arrest and deportation, subject to raw exploitation by employers. Yet this so-called "illegal" may be more hard working and responsible to family than many affluent, take-it-all-for-granted middle-class Americans.

Amazingly, we grant only 5,000 permanent visas for low-skilled workers annually. And no matter how many walls and laws we erect, borders remain tough to seal. Recent crackdowns -- doubling our border patrol forces to 10,000, spending billions in added enforcement -- have backfired seriously by discouraging undocumented workers from returning to their home countries, because re-entering the U.S. can be so dangerous.

President Bush and Sens. John McCain and Edward Kennedy, among others, have proposed guest worker programs as middle ground -- only to see House Republican leaders swear total opposition. Maybe a political shift in Congress will have to come first.

But a Republican businessman from Fresno, Calif., is proposing a truly thoughtful formula we might start debating. He's Peter Weber, himself an immigrant from Lima, Peru, in 1959. Now retired from CEO-level positions in several major corporations, Weber has plunged into civic leadership roles in Fresno -- a city especially heavily impacted by immigration.

Weber's plan includes a guest worker program, but one specifically offering the prospect for long-term U.S. residency, even citizenship, for workers who demonstrate a serious, long-term track record of job-holding and responsibility.

First step -- all undocumented immigrant workers would be given four months to make a choice: sign up for the new guest worker program, leave the U.S., or risk deportation and lifelong ineligibility for U.S. residence. Those electing to sign up would be offered tamper-proof identity cards and told they can stay for up to three years, or six more years with renewals, with a big "if" -- if they can show they have a specific "guest worker contract" with an employer or labor contractor.

Employers, for their part, would have to assure some type of health benefits for all guest workers. Fines would triple for any that then hire illegal immigrants.