Time to tackle realistic immigration policies
As usual, our leaders in Washington are getting a lot of attention for spending time arguing about our nation’s racial and ethnic divisions while doing nothing to bridge them.
President Donald Trump bears the brunt of the blame, having invited four Democratic congresswomen — Ayanna Pressley, a Chicago-born African-American; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx, N.Y. native of Puerto Rican heritage; Rashida Tlaib, a Detroitborn daughter of Palestinian immigrants; and Ilhan Omar, a Somalian who came to the United States as a child — to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded, saying the tweet showed that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign theme “has always been about making America white again.”
The Democratic-majority U.S. House voted two days later to condemn the president for “racist comments that have legitimized increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump has denied that the July 14 tweets sparking the controversy were racist, framing the argument as one over who loves America more: the Democratic left or his brand of GOP conservatism.
This immigration debate has descended into something all too common whenever the topic comes up in Washington: a political show that, far from producing good public policy, poisons the well and endangers any hope of bipartisan compromise on the issue. While both parties have no doubt enjoyed a fundraising bonanza from the recent exchange of invective, the voting public would no doubt equally reward positive action on the issue driving this dispute.
Whatever one thinks about Trump’s approach to immigration, his 2016 win proved it’s an important issue to many Americans. And it’s difficult to defend Washington’s inaction on the issue. According to the Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of the 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017 had been here more than 10 years, up from 41% in 2007. Pew’s research finds that unauthorized immigrants’ percentage of the labor pool has remained a roughly steady 5% through the Great Recession and the more recent period of low unemployment. These immigrants might be more accurately described as economically welcomed guests than the illegal invaders portrayed by the president.
This is not an easy problem to fix, but charges of “amnesty” that have doomed past attempts to get people out of the shadows ignore the obvious fact that many of them are contributing to our economy. We need them, and no amount of roundups, raids or other enforcement efforts is going to send 10.5 million immigrants back to their nations of origin.
Facing the fact that the vast majority of the undocumented immigrants in our nation are otherwise law-abiding contributors to our economy should lead to further fact-finding. And to policies aimed at moving our nation forward, both culturally and economically.
Economically, we need to figure out how many immigrants our economy needs, grant legal status to the law-abiding who are already here and offer sufficient work visas to permit migration back and forth to workers who keep our economy humming. To that end, Trump’s recent promise to use existing federal databases to count the number of non-citizens in the U.S. could be productive. And it could well undermine the president’s contention that “We’re full” and need no further immigration.
On the cultural front, it would be nice to hear Trump acknowledge something President Ronald Reagan said in his farewell address:
“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world, and by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams, we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.
“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Reagan was right. A majority of Americans welcome newcomers. They want them to follow the rules and contribute. The best immigration reform would both acknowledge the contribution of those many now sometimes brand “illegal” and make the rules match our need for them, economically and culturally.