April 17, 2006

A Nation of Many, A Nation of One

by Sherry Harbert

One week before September 11th, 2001, Zogby International released a poll detailing the attitudes of Americans on illegal immigration. September 11th would become the catalyst for much of the political debate on immigration and border security. Yet the 2001 poll revealed many Americans held the same views on immigration before that fateful day as they do today.

More than four years later in the midst of debate over House Bill 4437 passed in December, and the subsequent unraveling of a Senate version that failed in a test vote before the Congressional recess, a majority of Americans continue to view immigration as a threat to national security and the economy. The Senate proposal to offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the country appears to counter public sentiment. With the rhetoric of the War on Terror firmly implanted in the minds of many people, there is little room for real debate. Though amnesty is only one facet of immigration, a majority of Americans are anti-immigration in both illegal and legal aspects. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, conducted in March 2006, shows 56 percent opposed to amnesty in lieu of temporary-worker status, even if illegal immigrants work, pay taxes and seek permanent residence

The 2001 Zogby poll concentrated on President George Bush’s amnesty proposal for illegal immigrants. Bush has held onto that view since entering the White House, even when most in his party are opposed to such policies. The 2001 poll results found 55 percent opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants. There was little disparity between Republicans and Democrats. What was most surprising was that 60 percent of union households rejected any amnesty plan, duplicating the percentage of Republican respondents. Democrats opposed the plan by 55 percent.

One of the bills proposed in the Senate that supports Bush’s program was the McCain-Kennedy Secure America Act. The bill would require all illegal immigrants to pay a hefty fine, pass security checks, learn English, work, pay taxes and get in line with those outside the country for guest-worker applications. In the land of the melting pot, it is the nicest out there. It requires stronger border security, an electronic system to replace the form-based I-9 citizenship verification program for employment and require other countries like Mexico to enter into migration agreements to stem future flows of immigrants. The test vote in the Senate failed largely because of its path to citizenship clause, yet it survived as long as it did because Bush has pushed for similar legislation since he entered the White House.

Bush remains committed to his guest-worker program, even though he is at odds with a public majority and his own party. But that position doesn’t make him an immigrant proponent in any way. His proposal would only allow temporary hope at best. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called Bush to provide leadership on the issue. In a statement issued last month, Dean accused Bush of supporting the stringent House bill, then resurfacing his guest-worker proposals in time for his latest summit with the presidents of Mexico and Canada.

Bush carried many Hispanics through his first term and well into his second by floating his immigration proposals when needed. But things changed when the House proceeded with their stark vision of immigration, using much of the Bush’s rhetoric for the War on Terror as fuel for their proposals. As early as 2004, Hispanics were discovering that Bush’s proposals weren’t as beneficial as they believed. In a survey conducted in 2004, only 24 percent of registered Latino voters opposed Bush’s immigration proposals. But when the same respondents were provided with details of the plan that would only give guest-workers a time limit for working in the U.S. and no viable means for citizenship, 47 percent of the same Latino group opposed it. The poll, conducted by Bendixen & Associates, revealed that 63 percent of Hispanics thought that Bush didn’t care about immigrants and only used such mechanisms to get votes.

Taking cue from Bush’s lack of clarity, many 2008 presidential hopefuls like Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee are calling for far more draconian measures. Frist threatened to push for a vote on his enforcement-only immigration bill March 27. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, denounced Frist’s measure as mean spirited and anti-Christian. But her silence on the issue until just recently is being questioned.

Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently introduced his own enforcement bill to the committee. It mirrors much of the House’s version, introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, passed last December. The Sensenbrenner bill, titled the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, outlines the steps the House wants to enact into law. Besides the severe surveillance and border security measures, H.R. 4437 would make being an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. a crime, as well as helping or providing services to an illegal immigrant. If that’s not scary enough, it eliminates judicial review of visa revocation, rescinds any rights of an illegal immigrant to petition for refugee or asylum status and gives the Board of Immigration Appeals final authority.

And that isn’t even the most extreme of the bills introduced last year on immigration reform. Rep. Thomas Tancredo of Colorado, also a 2008 presidential hopeful, would wipe out most immigration altogether. His Reducing Immigration to a Genuinely Healthy Total (Right) Act of 2005 (H.R. 3700), would reduce most immigration levels to zero, besides rescinding many refugee acts already enacted into law. It also sought to prohibit automatic citizenship by birth and make voting in a foreign election a basis for loss of U.S. citizenship. If passed, it would have made all the Iraqis voting in the 2005 Iraqi elections at polling stations set up by the U.S. government in this country loose their citizenship for supporting U.S. policy.

There isn’t many in Congress or the country that seem to mind this extreme take on immigration. Yet, there are those in the U.S. who find such attitudes and policies destructive. Whether for its namesake or coincidence, the month of March saw dozens of protest marches in many U.S. cities to counter the growing anti-immigration sentiment. A March 25 rally in Los Angeles drew 500,000 people. Denver, Colo., drew 50,000 protestors on the same day, while Milwaukee, Wisc., drew around 30,000. Portland, Ore., held a similar march several weeks ago, garnering 4,000 participants. (See Focus In: Immigration).

A Land of Immigrants

Numbers of immigrant populations vary by government agencies and other organizations, as well as advocacy groups for and against immigration. Unfortunately, it is nothing new. The U.S. has always struggled with immigration. Even before the first thirteen colonies were established, new immigrants were unwelcome in many areas. But the draw for freedom has always been the motivation behind the country’s immigration. Since 1820, the first year immigration numbers were officially logged, the tides of people entering this country have ebbed and flowed with world events. Though most of the rhetoric today makes it appear that the numbers are exponentially growing, the first two decades of the 19th Century saw similar numbers of immigrants entering this country as the last two decades. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the years 1905, 1906, 1907, 1913, 1910 and 1914 each recorded over one million immigrants entering the U.S. Many of the immigrants during those years were from Europe. It wasn’t until 1989 that the million mark was matched again. But, this time, immigrants were coming from every country, especially Latin America and Asia. Those levels only lasted three years, before falling throughout the rest of the 1990s. Since then, only 2001 and 2002 saw over a million people legally immigrating to the U.S.

Anti-immigrant proponents use numbers as a way to scare people into believing that immigrants are taking over the country, excluding the fact that this country is based almost entirely on immigration. Thomas Jefferson stated in his Summary View of the Rights of British North America that those willing to make the journey to America “possess a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country which chance, not choice, has placed them.” The Labor Exchange of Portland pleaded with Oregon’s Governor LaFayette Grover in 1870 “…to illustrate the benefits to accrue to the State from large immigrations.” The request went as far as placing a dollar value on immigrants and centered on Europeans in the agriculture. The 1800s marked a century of anti-immigration riots against Irish, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, French-Canadian and Australian immigrants. By the turn of the 20th Century, riots were fueled against African Americans and labor forces. By the 21st Century, most of the riots marked tensions between civil rights and economic disparities in the country.

Throughout the country’s history, the government and media were as much to blame for the tensions as they were in quelling them. War has been used to justify much of the anti-immigrant laws.

Although the extreme proposals of Tancredo and Sensenbrenner are draconian, such ideals have played out throughout the history of the U.S. The government has always fostered anti-immigrant sentiment through legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 repelled all Chinese immigrants for ten years. By 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Exclusion Act barring all immigration from Japan. In addition to excluding new arrivals, the U.S. government conducted surveillance of many immigrants. One month before Pearl Harbor, the FBI and Naval Intelligence submitted a report to President Franklin Roosevelt attesting to the “extraordinary loyalty of Japanese-Americans to the U.S.” One year later, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which effectively interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans as a risk to U.S. security. Portland served as one of the initial detention camps. It took 34 years before President Gerald Ford actually rescinded Executive Order 9066.

The Japanese were not the only immigrants targeted during WWII. 1943 became a pinnacle year for the authorized discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiments against Mexican-Americans. Archives of the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Time Magazine, document the violent clashes in June between U.S. soldiers stationed in Southern California and Mexican-Americans known as “Zoot Suiters.” Time described events that included “caravans of cabs and private cars of soldiers touring the Mexican sections armed with sticks and weighted ropes...looking for zoos-suits. The police practice was to follow the caravans, watch the beatings, and then jail the victims.” It was only because of a potential mutiny that military officials moved to stop the riots.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”

The verse on the base of the Statue of Liberty calls to the hopes of millions of immigrants, but has gone silent in much of the country’s immigration legislation. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the 1965 amendments gave the Congress complete authority of immigration with only policies concerning refugees under the control of the President. The Act set up quotas and guidelines for immigration and wasn’t revamped until 1986 and again in 1990. One of the oddities in immigration quotas is the establishment of a lottery for a group of countries each year. The lottery gives preference for those seeking entry into the U.S. over others.

Refugees are a particular group of immigrants finding it as difficult to seek protection and a new life in the U.S. Although the President Bush signed orders to allow 70,000 refugees per year, most of those slots go unfilled due to an increasingly difficult process. Refugee protections rarely address crisis situations at hand. Cuban refugees are consistently turned back from the shores of Florida. Before and during much of WWII, Jewish refugees were refused entry into the country, only to be turned back to Europe to face internment and death by the Nazis.

Since WWII, the U.S. has enacted legislation giving quotas for refugees from certain countries more opportunities to gain entry into the country, but much of those acts are under threat by Tancredo and others looking to close the doors on even the most desperate around the world. Tancredo is pushing to reject most refugees unless the U.S. can document personal danger inside the country of origin. Unless the government is planning for Homeland Security agents to verify such conditions, the refugees will have little hope of proving their case under the new proposed guidelines.

Since the Bush Administration, many of the judicial freedoms granted immigrants have been slashed. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft initiated new regulations in 2001 that gave the Board of Immigration Appeals the ability to affirm the decision of an immigration judge without an opinion. Think of it as rubber-stamping the judge’s opinion. The result was a flood of appeals to the Circuit Courts. According to the Chicago Immigration Attorney Richard Hanus, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed 40 percent of the BIA’s judgments. In January, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued a memorandum to immigration judges about those reversals. H.R. 4437 further reduces judicial review.

During the recent confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, immigration again surfaced in the judicial arena. Alito was presented with his history of siding against immigrants 88 percent of the time in his capacity as 3rd Circuit Judge. He responded by stating his findings were within the law, but did not elaborate on his decision-making process.

The Other Side of Immigration

Congress hasn’t been without information on the benefits of immigration. Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and visiting fellow at the Urban Institute, testified before the House in November about the economic impacts of immigration. Unlike the rhetoric from many politicians and anti-immigration groups, Holzer’s studies found immigration actually reduces the costs of many basic consumer goods, especially food, clothing and housing—the same industries where many immigrants work. Holzer also found that immigrants take health care jobs that would otherwise experience labor shortages. His findings, based on studies by Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, also show that immigrants in science and engineering fields preserve the U.S. market strengths in those areas. It was only in the low-skill, minimal education required jobs that immigrants could be found to have a negative effect on U.S. citizens also seeking those jobs.

A March 2006 Immigration Policy Center study summarized that “Foreign-born workers do not substitute perfectly for, and therefore do not compete with, most native-born workers.” Unlike the Holzer’s findings, the IPC found most foreign-born workers on the less-educated/low-skill level work mostly in agriculture and personal service jobs, while their native-born counterparts fill jobs in manufacturing and mining.

Daniel Griswold of CATO, a Libertarian Think Tank, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month reaffirming the benefits of immigration in the workforce. Griswold said immigrants played an important part in the success of free-enterprise system by filling important niches and provides needed flexibility in the economy.

Even though a majority of Americans see immigrants taking jobs U.S. citizens would not do, the fear of losing jobs or wages to others fuels the anti-competition/anti-immigrant positions. A Time poll conducted in January found 56 percent of the respondents think immigrants take unwanted jobs. But filling such jobs can have consequences. During the initial clearing and reconstruction phase in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, many Mexican-Americans were vilified for taking jobs that critics said should be filled by displaced New Orleans residents. Many of those jobs were temporary and did not provide the stability of a full-time, family wage that residents so desperately wanted. But, the Mexican-Americans who took the temporary jobs were even more desperate. Both groups were left virtually on their own to sort it out.

Almost every industrialized nation is affected by immigration as employers seek workers to fill their needs. Europe faces similar immigration issues and dilemmas as people in poorer nations seek work in jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. What has erupted in France and other parts of Europe is the lack of integration into the culture for most immigrant workers. The Migration Policy Institute listed integration of immigrants into society as the major challenge for 2005 and beyond, especially in Europe. The Washington think-tank also listed competition for skilled workers driving immigration. It is one of the main justifications for U.S. businesses to outsource work to other countries and work to bring in foreign workers into the country, especially in the high tech industries, medical fields and international trade.

Security in Numbers

The recent increase of immigrants settling in new areas of the country has increased the negative reactions, according to William Frey of the Brookings Institute. He stated at recent forum sponsored by Washington think tank that the fast immigrant growth and its sharp contrast with existing residents in these states have heightened the interest in immigration policy.

Although many immigrants cross into the country through the border with Mexico, those immigrants are heading to more states than staying the traditional destinations of California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. Oregon, Washington, Colorado are a few of the new destination states for immigrants. Oregon ranked 19th in immigration increases nationwide. One in eight residents within the Portland-metropolitan area is a foreign-born resident.

The Migration Policy Institute studies immigration and its affects on the country. It has dispelled many of the myths that continue to fuel the anti-immigrant movement. First, undocumented immigrants do come to this country for welfare, but are here primarily work, and are more likely to take any job. While the numbers are sketchy on how many cross the U.S./Mexico border, the MPI places estimates between 60 and 75 percent. Another myth that continues to circulate is that illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. The U.S. Social Security Administration estimates that 75 percent of undocumented immigrants pay payroll taxes and contribute $6-7 billion in Social Security funds that they will never be able to claim.

The only numbers the anti-immigration proponents want to hear is the numbers decreasing at the border. Even those in favor of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants are pushing for harsh border security and enforcement. The proposals of a 700-mile wall, electronic surveillance, armed guards and narrow checkpoints sound more like reactions between countries at war than between friendly neighbors. While Homeland Security apprehended 1,241,089 foreign nationals in 2004, the department’s numbers combine simply illegal entry with violent crime, drug smuggling and terrorist activities. Without a clear distinction between the masses simply wanting to enter the U.S. to find work and the few who may actually be a national security risk, no credible immigration reform can be found. The U.S. is not at war with Mexico.

Immigration is Important to the U.S.

All the anti-immigration rhetoric from the Congress, government, media and other groups would make some think the U.S. is the largest recipient of immigrants. That is far from true. According to OECD data, Luxembourg per capita is the largest recipient of immigrants, followed by Canada and Australia. It is how well a country receives and integrates immigrants that provide true security. The U.S. has emerged as a leader in the world due to its diverse society and talents.

There is no security in treating immigrants as criminals and second-class citizens. Such tactics open the country to more attacks and weaken its stand throughout the world. James Lindsay and Gregory Michaelidis of the Brookings Institute summed it up perfectly in a 2001 statement, “The lesson of America’s 300-year experiment with immigration is that a society that embraces immigrants and helps them develop the skills they need to succeed will be stronger for it.”

America’s strength has surfaced in business, the arts, education and government because of the multi-cultural foundation of its society. If the country continues to push toward a more isolationist and anti-immigrant culture, its real weakness will the holes left behind in the society.

Contact:sharbert@foreigninterest.com

For more information:

Public Opinion: http://pewresearch.org

Immigrant Opinion: www.newamericamedia.org

Migration Policy Institute: www.migrationpolicy.org

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: www.uscis.gov

© 2006 Foreign Interest. All rights reserved.