Zakaria: After Election, Can U.S. Reform Its Immigration System

Zakaria: After Election, Can U.S. Reform Its Immigration System?

After Nov. 7, it will make enormous political sense for all sides to come together.

By Fareed Zakaria

Newsweek International

Nov. 13, 2006 issue - If Iraq was the dominating topic of the election season in the United States, immigration is the issue that wasn't. Despite the efforts of populist and nativist politicians and pundits to whip up hysteria about a looming catastrophe, Americans didn't bite. In a news-week poll taken last week, voters listed immigration a distant fifth on their list of concerns—after Iraq, terrorism, the economy and health care.

Polling on immigration has been remarkably consistent over the past few years. The American public wants tighter enforcement of the laws but also realizes that the system now in place is unworkable. Consistent two-thirds majorities favor a comprehensive overhaul that would include tighter enforcement, but also guest-worker visas and a path to citizenship for illegal workers already in the country. This compromise package has the potential to be realized after the elections. After all, how many issues are there today on which George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ted Kennedy and Rudy Giuliani all agree?

The great obstacle to immigration reform has been a noisy minority. Only about 20 percent of voters, mostly but not exclusively Republican, are dead set against a guest-worker program as well as any path to citizenship for illegals. But they are active primary voters, which means that their influence has been vastly enhanced (and exaggerated) during the campaign season. Come Tuesday, the party will be over. CNN's Lou Dobbs and his angry band of xenophobes will continue to rail, but a new Congress, with fewer Republicans and no impending primary elections, would make the climate much less vulnerable to the tyranny of the minority.

On the contrary, it will make enormous political sense for all sides to come together and cut a deal. To start with, President Bush needs to accomplish something. He has given only two Oval Office addresses on domestic policy—one on Social Security reform, the other on immigration. The first is dead. If he cannot enact his immigration plan, his second term will be void of any achievements.

John McCain, the Republican front runner in 2008, needs to get the issue off the table before the Republican presidential primaries heat up. The maverick senator can fudge almost every other issue on which he disagrees with the Republican base. He can signal greater warmth toward the religious right. Global warming is an abstraction. The torture debate is over. But on immigration, McCain is the author of a bill that has at its heart provisions for guest workers and citizenship. He needs to get the issue resolved.

The same logic applies for Rudy Giuliani, who sometimes polls even higher than McCain among Republicans. Giuliani supports Bush's position on immigration (which is essentially the same as McCain's) even though he makes the requisite noises about defending the border. For the Democrats this is an unusual opportunity. They could get most of what they want, while a Republican president gives them cover on the right.

But for any of this to happen, Bush has to decide that he wants immigration reform enough to change his political style. He will have to craft a bill that relies on Democrats to pass, not Republicans. It's been done before. Bill Clinton supported the North American Free Trade Agreement knowing full well that he would not have the support of his Democratic base. He did so because he believed it was the right policy for the country.

Bush faces a similar choice. Like trade, immigration is an issue on which the instinctive, emotional position is simple, powerful and wrong. The evidence is overwhelming that the United States benefits hugely from immigration—and that it needs all the immigrants it's now receiving, legal and illegal. Alone in the industrialized world, America has a rising population, which means a faster-growing economy and new supplies of young workers who can sustain the needs of the economy and of retirees. Without immigration, America's growth rate has not been much different than France's over the past 20 years.

The only point on which there has been serious academic debate is whether immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans. Recent research by Professor Giovanni Perri at the University of California, Berkeley, proves that previous models have been wrong and that the net effect of immigration is positive for all workers. Perri says he's been conservative in his estimates and that, taking into account other side effects of immigration, the boost to wages may be even higher.

Comprehensive reform is the only way forward. Enforcement only or first will not work. Laws that pay no heed to the forces of supply and demand end up as costly failures. (Think of Prohibition.) The good news is that this is a rare case where good policy and good politics could come together.

ICE Enforcement Action Subject of Civil Rights Law Suit

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-raid2nov02,1,4101534.story

On November 2, 2006 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the federal government Wednesday on behalf of five Latino U.S. citizens who say they were detained and harassed by agents carrying out raids targeting illegal immigrants in south Georgia. ICE agents searching for undocumented immigrants who worked at the Crider Corp. poultry plant in Stillmore, Ga., arrested more than 125 people in September.

 

The LA Times reported that:

 

"The class-action suit seeks not only compensatory damages for the plaintiffs — who include a landlord whose property was damaged — but also a court order preventing the agency from conducting similar raids across the country.

 

"This was a widespread sweep, based largely on racial and ethnic profiling, in violation of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the United States Constitution," Mary Bauer, attorney for the plaintiffs, said at a news conference here. Those amendments pertain to the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to due process.

 

"Agents saw brown skin," Bauer said, "and made a presumption of illegality."

 

Marc Raimondi, an ICE spokesman, said the raids were conducted legally. "We don't conduct random sweeps," he said, noting that the agency had spent a month investigating the area and had compiled a targeted list of illegal immigrants who had worked at a poultry plant using fraudulent documents. "Race or ethnicity played no role," he said.

 

Federal agents searching for undocumented immigrants who worked at the Crider Corp. poultry plant in Stillmore, Ga., arrested more than 125 people in September. No U.S. citizens were arrested, but the suit claims that agents "trampled on" the constitutional rights of "every person of Hispanic descent unfortunate enough to get in the way."

 

Marie Justeen Mancha — a 15-year-old who was born in Texas and lives in Reidsville, Ga. — says she was in her bedroom getting dressed for school when she heard men inside her home yelling "illegals" and "Mexicans." In the living room, she says, she saw five men, one with his hand on his gun holster.

 

"My heart just dropped," she said.

 

Nearly two dozen armed agents roamed her house and yard without presenting a search warrant, the lawsuit said. Mancha's mother, Maria Christina Martinez, is a U.S. citizen who previously worked at the chicken plant.

 

According to the suit filed in federal court in Atlanta, agents stopped one plaintiff, Maria Margarita Morales, as she was driving home, repeatedly called her "Mexican," grabbed her arm and ordered her to get out of her vehicle. Agents also surrounded another plaintiff, Ranulfo Perez, outside his home, the suit said, grabbing him by the shirt, pressing a gun into his side and throwing him against his truck. Another plaintiff, Gladis Alicia Espitia, says agents broke down her front door and threatened to throw gas into her home if her family did not come out of a bedroom.

 

Georgia has the nation's fastest-growing population of illegal immigrants. According to the federal government, the number of undocumented immigrants in the state more than doubled, to 470,000 from 220,000, in the last five years. ICE's Atlanta office — which covers Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — arrested 4,633 suspected illegal immigrants in 2006, more than any previous year.

 

Bauer said the Southern Poverty Law Center filed the suit — which lists Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, six ICE administrators and 30 unnamed ICE agents as defendants — to warn federal agents against conducting similar raids.

 

"If immigration is a problem, this isn't the solution," she said. "We want to send out a strong message that if they do this in other communities, they are going to be sued." "