Thread: The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making in Congress

Five Blogs by David North posted by the Center for Immigration Studies from earliest to latest. Links are embedded at the sources of each.

The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making
By David North, September 21, 2009

Immigration policy is usually made by politicians, and not presidential ones.

As the Obama Administration shows signs of tackling the subject, it might be helpful to sketch the players who have strongly influenced the immigration policy scene in recent years, which I do in this the first of several blogs on the subject.

Unlike foreign policy and macro-economic policy, in which presidents and cabinet members dominate, immigration policy is usually crafted by members of the Congress, and more specifically by the members of the immigration subcommittees of both houses. Until a couple of decades ago, the executive branch made little input into immigration policy.

A good example of this reality took place around the kitchen table in a Capitol Hill town house about 24 years ago. The three players -- all of whom are still in Washington, and two in key immigration policy positions -- were then young Democratic members of the House, all interested in immigration policy, and all willing to spend time and emotional energy on putting together an immigration policy. All were batching it when Congress was in session, all were friends (two were housemates), and all had rock-solid Democratic seats so they had little need to travel home every weekend. (The kitchen table was in one of the trio's houses, but I forget which one.)

The three were: Congressman Howard Berman of Los Angeles, who spoke for the farm workers, Congressman Leon Panetta who had a rural district in central California and who represented grower interests, and the third was Congressman Charles Schumer of Brooklyn, who cast himself as the deal-maker. He knew that if the Democratic members could not agree on how to deal with farmworkers in the pending immigration reform bill, nothing would pass.

You will notice that the restrictionists did not have a seat at that table; nor did the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have a chance to comment. The trio's complex formula for legalizing many of the farmworkers was inserted whole into the pending Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, without the usual expert testimony or committee mark-up.

The only reason that Howard Berman is not now chair of the House immigration subcommittee -- he is by far the senior member -- is that he is chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and multiple chairmanships are discouraged. Panetta is back in Washington, with his hands full of CIA matters. Schumer has moved from the House to the Senate where he is -- surprise -- chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee, a position long held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

Schumer and Berman are sure to play major roles in the unfolding immigration policy debate, though the farm worker program they created subsequently appeared to have many flaws.

That program was for the legalization of formerly illegal farm workers, or Special Agriculture Workers (SAWs); the requirements created by the trio were loosely drawn, and many of the 1.1 million SAWs who got legal status were probably ineligible for the program, including many of the thousands that secured this status while filing in New York City.

Another major problem in the program (which I reviewed for the Ford Foundation) was that INS was something less than enthusiastic about the laborious task of sorting out the invalid applicants from the valid ones. As I reported at the time, INS took $20 million that it raised from the SAW applications and, instead of using it on fraud detection, spent the money on a new set of computers for its offices.

Next: thumbnail sketches of the key immigration players in today's House of Representatives.

http://cis.org/north/whoswho1


The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making – the House Democrats
By David North, September 23, 2009

A congressional subcommittee may sound like a minor entity, but when it comes to lawmaking it is where much of the action takes place. Most of the provisions of any bill emerging from a subcommittee are likely to be in place when the parent body, the House or the Senate, takes final action on it.

There are two reasons for this, one more praiseworthy than the other. First, other members recognize that the subcommittee members are the experts on the subject, so Democratic members tend to support bills passed by Democratic subcommittees, and vice versa. The second reason, often working on the subconscious level, is that majority members of the fisheries subcommittee, for example, want other members to support their handiwork, so they tend to support the work of other subcommittees –- all else being equal.

If the devil is in the details, then the devil dwells in the subcommittees; that's where the hearings are held and the mark-ups take place. The latter is the section-by-section writing of the bill in question.

These processes are presided over, in the House, by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. There are ten Democrats on the subcommittee and six Republicans.

The Democratic part of the subcommittee is one of the most ethnically diverse in the House; it includes four women and six men; there are two Chicanos, two Puerto Ricans, two Blacks, and four Anglos, with two of the latter being Jewish. (All six of the Republicans are Anglo males.)

There is no diversity on the Democratic side, however, when it comes to immigration policy. According to the grading system of Numbers USA, a restrictionist organization, all the Democratic members are awarded an F, with the exception of Maxine Waters (D-CA), who gets a D minus. Waters sometimes speaks out against illegal immigration, something that causes severe labor force competition for many of her Black constituents in Los Angeles.

The prospects of getting anything but an open borders bill out of this subcommittee would appear to be appear dim.

One of the reasons for this is the tendency of Black members to vote with the Hispanic Caucus on immigration matters; the politics of the floor (i.e., working with other minority group members) appears to trump the labor market politics of the home district.

The two Chicano members are Linda Sanchez (D-CA) who is sister to Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), and Charles Gonzalez (D-TX), son of former Rep. Henry Gonzales (D-TX). The other Black member is Sheila Jackson Lee, (also D-TX).

The two Puerto Ricans are one full-fledged voting member of the House, Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL), and the new Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi, who sits with the Democrats though on the island he identifies with the statehood organization, the New Progressive Party. While he has no vote on the floor of the House (and hence no rating by Numbers USA), he can and does vote in both the full committee and the subcommittee. Since there is virtually no international migration to Puerto Rico, and since its residents (as native-born U.S. citizens) can freely move to the mainland, it is puzzling why he joined this committee.

Rounding out the Democratic side of the subcommittee are Howard Berman (mentioned in my September 21 blog) (D-CA), William Delahunt (D-MA), and New York City's Anthony Weiner (D-NY).

While the Democrats are universally immigration fans, some of them have specialties. Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley, is a strong backer of H1-Bs, many of whom do software for big employers in her area. Berman, as noted earlier, identifies with foreign farm workers, and Delahunt, also chair of an education subcommittee, is a strong advocate for foreign students.

http://cis.org/north/whoswho2


The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making - the House Republicans
By David North, September 24, 2009

The six Republican members of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law can be expected to struggle, probably in vain, to bring some restraint into proposed immigration legislation. The subcommittee is part of the House Judiciary Committee.

As noted in an earlier blog the ten Democrats on the subcommittee are all open-borders advocates, but all six Republicans get high marks for their restrictionist voting record from Numbers USA, which keeps track of such things. All six drew an A or an A plus on their report cards.

Generally the Republican subcommittee members tend to be newer to the House than the Democrats, with the former group averaging about 8.7 years of service by the end of 2009, compared to 13.8 years for the Democrats. The Democrats are a little stronger on lawyers, with seven of the ten holding law degrees; this is true of half of the Republicans.

The ranking Republican on the subcommittee is Steve King, who represents most of the largely rural western half of Iowa; he identifies himself as an "agri-businessman." He has been a member of the House, and the subcommittee, since 2003.

Two California Republicans bring heft and seniority to their part of the subcommittee: Elton Gallegly, with 23 years of service, and Dan Lungren, with 15. Lungren (not to be confused with Lofgren, the Democratic chair) had an earlier decade in the House before spending two terms as California's elected Attorney General.

Lungren had been the ranking Republican on the House subcommittee back in the 1980s when the Immigration Reform and Control Act, the last major re-write of the immigration law, was being drafted.

Also serving on the GOP side are: Gregg Harper, a Mississippi lawyer and a freshman member of the House, and Ted Poe of Texas, another attorney, who first arrived in the House following the election of 2004.

The other freshman Republican on the subcommittee, is Jason Chaffetz, who represents one of the most conservative areas in the nation, the Third District of Utah. That he is a member of the subcommittee is to be expected, given the history of his campaign for the House.

That Utah district had been represented for years by an otherwise conservative Republican named Chris Cannon. Cannon, however, followed the George W. Bush approach to immigration, and was an advocate of both a legalization program and of extensive use of H-1B non-immigrant workers, most of whom are computer programmers. In both 2004 and 2006 Cannon had hotly contested primaries with his opponents devoting a lot of attention to immigration issues; Cannon struggled to win the nomination both times, and then easily won the general elections that followed.

In 2008, however, Jason Chaffetz, who had been chief of staff to the Governor of Utah, was the restrictionist candidate in the GOP primary which he won handsomely, as he did the general election. Cannon was one of only two sitting Republican House members who lost their primaries that year.

Chaffetz brings an odd distinction to the Republican side of the subcommittee: his father, according to Wikipedia, had once been married to Kitty Dukakis, spouse to Michael Dukakis, the 1984 Democratic candidadate.

http://www.cis.org/north/whoswho3


The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making - the Senate Democrats
By David North, September 26, 2009

There are five Democrats and four Republicans on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, which is part of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

All five Democrats drew grades of F on the immigration policy votes followed by Numbers USA, the restrictionist organization.

The ranking Democrat on the subcommittee for years was the late Ted Kennedy (D-MA), either as chairman in Democratic congresses or the ranking minority member in Republican ones. He has now has been replaced by Charles Schumer (D-NY) who follows similar policies.

Schumer's key role, as a young member of the House of Representatives more than 20 years ago, in the shaping of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was described in an earlier blog of mine. Although the holder of a law degree, he never practiced, having been elected to the New York state assembly, from Brooklyn, shortly after leaving Harvard Law.

The other four Democrats on the subcommittee are:

Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who is also chairman of the parent committee. That his state, unlike those of the other four, has a relatively small foreign-born population does not keep him from joining the solid open-borders majority. He was a county prosecutor before his election to the Senate.

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), one-time Mayor of San Francisco, is another long-time member of the subcommittee. The only non-lawyer on the Democratic side of the panel, she had a full set of four immigrant grand-parents.

Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) is from down-state Illinois and like Schumer had previous experience in the House of Representatives. He was for four years the senior Illinois colleague to now-President Obama; Durbin is also the deputy leader of the Senate Democrats.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is the newest member of the subcommittee, arriving in the Senate in 2007 after defeating the liberal Republican Lincoln Chaffee. A Yale graduate, he is from an old New England family and worked as a lawyer in both the state and federal governments before becoming a Senator.

Although all five members have failing scores, generally, from Numbers USA, three of them -- Schumer, Feinstein and Whitehouse -- all have B marks from the organization for the narrower issue of border control.

http://www.cis.org/north/whoswho4


The Who's Who of Immigration Policy Making - the Senate Republicans
By David North, September 28, 2009

There are four Republicans, compared to five Democrats, on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, a subset of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

While the Republicans serving on the comparable body in the House of Representatives, according to the nose counts of Numbers USA, are solidly and consistently in the restrictionist camp, there are some major disputes among the Senate subcommittee Republicans. Two of these Senators get solid A+ ratings from Numbers USA, while the other two -– both from border states -- have recent scores of B+ and C-.

The four Republicans -– who have served together on the subcommittee for close to seven years now –- are Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the two with the A ratings, and John Cornyn (R-TX) with a B+, and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) with the C-.

Two of the GOP subcommittee members (Cornyn and Sessions) served as their states' elected attorneys general prior to arriving in the Senate; the other two (Grassley and Kyl) had been members of the House of Representatives.

Cornyn, oddly, is both the ranking Republican on the subcommittee as well as the GOP member with the least seniority. This happened only because each of the other three decided that they were more interested in being the ranking Republican on some other body. Grassley, for example, is the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Finance, and has been prominent all this summer as one of the "gang of six", the three Democrats (led by Max Baucus (D-MT)) and the three Republicans trying to devise a bipartisan approach to health care.

Cornyn, for similar reasons, was the subcommittee chair in the last Congress when the Republicans were in control. He secured his less than A rating from Numbers USA by his votes for more temporary workers, and for supporting at least part of the Bush Administration's provisions for legalization of illegal aliens.

Kyl has voted for some amnesty provisions and programs to increase the number of temporary alien workers, while voting against some border control activities. On the other hand he voted with the restrictionists on visa lottery and refugee issues.

Sometimes the issues become convoluted; for instance, in 2007 Kyl voted on the floor of the Senate against an amendment which would have called for triggering mechanisms that would have meant that it was less likely that an amnesty would actually take place.

Grassley, the only non-lawyer among these Republicans, and Sessions, both have consistent pro-restriction voting records, according to Numbers USA.

http://www.cis.org/north/whoswho5

"The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration."

Oh pudding! We will be sunk!
Will start emailing tomorrow. I will hit the Dems first as they are the most pro-illegal. This country is turning into Grand Central Station, except non of the illegals ever get off the trains--i.e., I paid the coyote for my ticket and I am here for the free ride for the rest of my life.

With any further turn of the wheel...i.e. an amnesty... the pro immigration forces will become so well organized it will be hard to stop them. The exception would be a massive turn to the GOP in 2010.

I think these leaders need to be exposed to the gritty reality of what our family reunification and open immigration policies are doing. Vortex, I like to email them some of the more disturbing stories from ICE and the CBP---like the massive drug busts, to the visa fraud rings and the gang round ups. They are a true part of our story...but they hear the sob stories of college students and families. When ICE busts a large crime ring--and there have been many of them---this is a huge expense that will go on for years that we should never have to be paying.

Great idea to include the BP and other reports in emails. And we have a load of them here in the archives. I usually send just polite but strongly worded messages. And the replies range from thank you for your input to thank you for your input. The only senator that emails a monthly letter to me is Bernie Sanders of VT, and Rep. Larry Kissell of NC weekly. My state legislator will email something occasionally.
Kinda makes you wonder what all the staff folks are doing, those that we support with tax dollars. I would hate to hear the orientation for new staff: perhaps, ignore constituents as we already made up our minds.

Kinda makes you wonder what all the staff folks are doing, those that we support with tax dollars. I would hate to hear the orientation for new staff: perhaps, ignore constituents as we already made up our minds.

Surprisingly I am having more answers to my faxes and emails than ever before but it's probably lip service Vortex. Act like you're concerned before you try to bring amnesty in the back door.

2010 Election!

2.1 Special elections held before November 2
2.1.1 Massachusetts (Ted Kennedy vacancy)

2.2 Retiring Democratic Senators
2.2.1 Roland Burris of Illinois
2.2.2 Ted Kaufman of Delaware
2.3 Retiring Republican Senators
2.3.1 Kit Bond of Missouri
2.3.2 Sam Brownback of Kansas
2.3.3 Jim Bunning of Kentucky
2.3.4 Judd Gregg of New Hampshire
2.3.5 George LeMieux of Florida
2.3.6 George Voinovich of Ohio

2.4 Democratic incumbents
2.4.1 Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas
2.4.2 Barbara Boxer of California
2.4.3 Michael Bennet of Colorado
2.4.4 Christopher Dodd of Connecticut
2.4.5 Daniel Inouye of Hawaii
2.4.6 Evan Bayh of Indiana
2.4.7 Barbara Mikulski of Maryland
2.4.8 Harry Reid of Nevada
2.4.9 Kirsten Gillibrand of New York
2.4.10 Chuck Schumer of New York
2.4.11 Byron Dorgan of North Dakota
2.4.12 Ron Wyden of Oregon
2.4.13 Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania
2.4.14 Patrick Leahy of Vermont
2.4.15 Patty Murray of Washington
2.4.16 Russ Feingold of Wisconsin

2.5 Republican incumbents
2.5.1 Richard Shelby of Alabama
2.5.2 Lisa Murkowski of Alaska
2.5.3 John McCain of Arizona
2.5.4 Johnny Isakson of Georgia
2.5.5 Mike Crapo of Idaho
2.5.6 Chuck Grassley of Iowa
2.5.7 David Vitter of Louisiana
2.5.8 Richard Burr of North Carolina
2.5.9 Tom Coburn of Oklahoma
2.5.10 Jim DeMint of South Carolina
2.5.11 John Thune of South Dakota
2.5.12 Bob Bennett of Utah