Thread: Bigger fences make more felons

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?a ... L-04-12-06




Bigger fences make more felons

By JOHN HALL
Media General News Service
12-APR-06

WASHINGTON -- House-passed legislation to fence off the Mexican border and declare illegal immigrants felons now awaits Senate action. With Congress in recess, Hispanics are in an uproar.

This week, they filled the nation's public squares, literally wrapping themselves and their children in the American flag, pleading with this country not to do it.

The scenes that played out in marches all over the country were said to be unprecedented in the history of immigration policy. Children with big brown eyes surrounded by more flags than you'll see in a John Wayne cavalry movie gazed quizzically at the U.S. Capitol.

Latinos have been among the least visible of the newcomers here partly because of their legal status. Now they are going all out to win the battle for public opinion, getting some good advice over the radio to put their Mexican and Salvadoran flags away this time and show only Old Glory.

Some analysts are likening the mood in Congress toward all aliens as that which produced the 1882 Chinese exclusion act. The size of the demonstrations was what was needed to match the xenophobic mood that is rising in Congress and across the nation.

Large as this week's demonstrations seemed on tiny television screens, most of the illegal immigrants _ a number believed to be approaching 12 million _ stayed home or went to work, dodging the law and the vigilantes who tape them and their van-driving employers in front of convenience stores.

Here, if they all had turned out, there wouldn't have been room for them on the National Mall in Washington.

This is the home office for the sprawling successors of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has now split into three new agencies under the Homeland Security Department.

The big Latino neighborhoods in the Virginia suburbs and the District are particularly careful. So are their employers, big and very small.

One retiree in a well-to-do suburb put out a note on a neighborhood computerized listserv recently asking how much he should pay for yard work for one of the dozens of workers waiting to be picked up each day at a local convenience store. After several people sent in wage estimates, a participant put out a big "SHHH!!" What they were talking about was, after all, illegal, he said.

Whether that's really true or not, the subterranean economy has created a competition for low-cost, hourly labor that sometimes hurts newly arrived Hispanic and other immigrants who may qualify for citizenship. Some Latino housekeepers, nannies, stonemasons, landscapers and yard workers are employed by those who pay competitive salaries and benefits and charge near-market rates for their services. But low-wage competition from illegal newcomers, who do not have the burdens of Social Security and social welfare taxes, threatens to cost some of them jobs.

None of this got reflected in the emotion of the massive nationwide Latino marches. What did come through was that Hispanics were tired of living in the shadows, one step ahead of immigration authorities and the police. They gave notice they will not be rewarded, as a people, with a fence and a felony summons.

The immigration problem is partly a humanitarian crisis, created by rapacious traffickers in human merchandise who are bringing vanloads of workers and their families across the border and sometimes leaving them stuffed in houses without proper sanitation.

It is also partly an economic problem that could be serious if left untended. The growing underground economy of illegal labor is bound to be a drag on wages and benefits for entry-level workers.

The solution, however, was not to chisel away the Statue of Liberty's words, "Give me your tired, your poor." Bigger fences and more felons, the cure adopted by the House, is worse than the disease and _ despite the thundering television voices for it _ was favored by only one in five Americans, according to a Washington Post poll this week.

This week's demonstrations probably gave a lift to President Bush's "guest worker" program and the Democratic plan to offer a place in line to undocumented aliens for U.S. citizenship. The plan for legal status and eventual citizenship has majority support, according to the Post poll.


(John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. E-mail jhall(at)mediageneral.com.)

John Hall needs to get a clue. Another empty suit in the media.