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Can We Fix Our Immigration System?
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by Rose M. Grengs, W A M M
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Photo provided by Rose M. Grengs. |
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Francisco will be 32 this year. He runs a thriving business in the Twin Cities. He is married and has two children, nine and seven, who are U.S. citizens. They want to go to Disneyland. But they can’t. Why not? Because Francisco and his wife are “undocumented.” Francisco came here from Mexico over seventeen years ago with his father to help support a family of eleven. He has been here ever since. Francisco’s father, who himself has been back and forth since he was 22, was able to get his green card through the 1986 legalization program. He is Francisco’s hope. If Francisco’s father can become a citizen, he can petition for his son. But even then, under our current system, there would be a waiting period of over nineteen years before Francisco could use that petition to apply to become a permanent resident. Meanwhile Francisco’s kids can’t visit Disneyland and Francisco lives with a nagging fear.
Mario and Robin just got married. Mario is from Mexico and undocumented. He came here with his parents when he was nine years old, went to school here, and speaks fluent English. Mario and Robin are nineteen years old and have a six-month-old baby girl. Robin wants to petition for Mario, but is afraid to because Mario will have to return to Mexico to get his U.S. residency and when he does, he will be barred from returning here for ten years, unless the U.S. Immigration Service grants him a waiver of the bar, which is very difficult to get.
As an immigration attorney, I’ve heard hundreds of these stories over the years, and they break my heart. When people say, “But they’re illegal,” I realize with frustration that the public is just not aware of the legal barriers in our immigration laws. Instead, they often swallow the line that we must build fences to keep out the “illegals,” who jeopardize our security.
Last year President Bush signed a bill to build a 700-mile fence along the border between Mexico and the U.S. The Army Corps of Engineers—which helped build the existing fourteen-mile-long fence in San Diego—estimates the cost of this fence to be $49 billion over the next 25 years. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, even then the fence really would not be effective in preventing people from crossing the border illegally.
The fence is long on politics and short on effectiveness. It is an expensive bill of goods designed by congressional conservatives to assure Americans that they are protecting our national security. A fence alone is the worst possible scenario for addressing immigration reform. It represents a huge outlay of money without any measures to address the growing issue of millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.
What the fence is more likely to do is add to the already unprecedented increase in the number of deaths among border crossers. Since the mid-1990s, when the U.S. government’s “prevention through deterrence” approach to immigration control resulted in the militarization of the border and a quintupling of border enforcement expenditures, between 2,000 and 3,000 people have died along the border. According to Professor Wayne Cornelius, a leading scholar of immigration issues at the University of California, San Diego, this migrant death toll “has been more than ten times deadlier to migrants from Mexico during the past nine years than what the Berlin Wall was to East Germans throughout its 28-year existence.”
This enforcement mentality is also being played out in the growing number of immigration raids around the country. In recent months Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stepped up its detention and removal of undocumented immigrants following a congressionally approved 17 percent increase in its budget last year. The dramatic increase in raids has also produced more visible humanitarian consequences. Families are being separated and children left with friends and relatives. Parents are afraid to send their children to school or even to leave home for work for fear they might not return.
Unauthorized migration into the United States is the result of many factors: economic disparities, modern-day globalization, a desire for families to be together, and the long, complicated historical relationship between these two adjacent nations. NAFTA, for example, has facilitated the existence of over a million Mexican workers laboring in U.S. maquiladora manufacturing plants located a stone’s throw from our southern border for an average of only 50 cents/hour. U.S. employers, who need unskilled workers, often recruit them from Mexico. Economists say that immigrants are our key to economic growth in the future as our population ages and our work force declines.
With these push-pull factors in play, migrants will continue coming even if the wall is built, despite the growing dangers. As a result there are 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working here now whose lives are in limbo. Draconian enforcement policies address none of these problems. They are political puffs of smoke.
Polls show that there is a consensus among the American public that our immigration system is broken and that the undocumented living and working here should be given a chance at residency. What is required to fix it?
The U.S. needs comprehensive immigration reform that will make immigration safe, orderly, and legal. Such reform must provide:
• an opportunity for people already living and working here to earn permanent legal status;
• a new temporary-worker program with adequate labor protections so that needed workers can enter the U.S. safely, legally, and expeditiously;
• backlog reductions in family-based immigration so that families can unite in a timely way.
• due process protections
Proposals that fail to embrace these components and seek only to increase enforcement will merely exacerbate existing problems.
The momentum for immigration reform is currently at a standstill. A comprehensive immigration reform bill was introduced in the House by Representatives Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in March. This bill (the STRIVE Act) is bipartisan and contains many solutions to the present system. In part, it would provide legal protection to over eight million undocumented immigrants that would last six years.
The White House says it wants reform, but not without Republican support. Republicans, however, have shifted even further to the right with the start of the 2008 presidential nomination process. The Senate has yet to act.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration and Republican and Democratic Senators, knowing that any bill must be bi-partisan because neither has enough votes to pass what it wants, have been meeting behind closed doors to try and reach a “compromise.” That compromise raises dire concerns, containing proposals that would severely limit family-based immigration; create a new point system to determine future migration; prohibit new workers from adjusting their status; and dilute due process. These proposals should be rejected.
We do not just need reform; we need GOOD reform. Please contact Congress and the Administration and tell them to get it right and “work in support of GOOD comprehensive immigration reform now.” For more information on the debate, please go to: http://www.ilrc.org/
Rose M. Grengs is a WAMM member, mother, grandmother, immigration lawyer, and advocate. While she has recently retired from her private law practice, she continues to represent low-income clients as a volunteer and is actively involved in trying to change and improve immigration laws. |
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The Cost of War
This indefinite, unnecessary war in Iraq is costing America $275 million a day, according to the National Priorities Project—money that could easily solve America’s healthcare crisis.
McClatchy Newspapers reports that the cumulative $564 billion allocated for the war by Sept. 1 could pay for pre-school for every 3- and 4-year-old in the country for the next eight years.
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© 2007 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete June 2007 Index - click here
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