Much more than a wall
If you’re looking for a metaphor for America’s immigration policy, look no further than the disconnected pieces of Donald Trump’s southern border wall — barriers that anyone could just walk right around.
The absurdity. The ineffectiveness. The waste of $15 billion and all that national energy that could have gone to dealing with the issue of immigration in an intelligent, comprehensive way.
America can’t get back the last four years of Mr. Trump’s simplistic pandering, or the decades of dead-end debate that did little more than boost the political fortunes and fatten the campaign coffers of politicians cynical and opportunistic enough to milk this issue for all it’s been worth.
But Congress has the opportunity, right now, to finally tackle immigration thoughtfully and effectively.
On the table is President Joe Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would address immigration from a multitude of angles.
It would increase security, with greater use of technology at ports of entry and along the border, better training of border agents, and more focus on narcotics and human smuggling.
It would provide a path to citizenship — eight years long — for millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, including “Dreamers” who were brought here as children.
It would help fund state, local and private programs to promote inclusion and integration, such as Englishlanguage instruction and help for people seeking to become citizens.
It would reverse anti-immigrant federal policy that runs counter to the nation’s interests and seek to grow the U.S. workforce by expanding visas, allowing more flexibility in green card policies to address labor shortages, and making it easier for foreign students who graduate from American universities to remain here. At the same time, it includes provisions to protect U.S. citizens from unfair competition.
It would take a more humane approach than the harsh tactics of the Trump administration that shamed this nation and drew U.N. condemnation, with proposals to keep families together, expedite requests for asylum, and develop formal guidelines for treatment of individuals, families and children in government custody.
And, it would include anti-gang initiatives and invest $4 billion in the economies of Central American countries to address root causes of the surge in migration — poverty and violence.
We know there are plenty of people and organizations with a vested interest in keeping immigration alive as a divisive political issue, from a rightwing media ecosystem that thrives on appealing to fear and white nationalism to politicians for whom a hardline stance is both a cheap test of ideological purity and fund-raising gold to the thousands who enlisted in Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration hiring spree to the contractors who reaped the $15 billion that American taxpayers — not Mexico — were forced to spend on the wall that isn’t a wall. And we know there are people who remember the broken promises of the Reagan era to address both immigration reform and border security.
That was a generation ago. It’s time deal with immigration in the here and now, with an approach that doesn’t stand as one more monument to failure.