Thread: Dust Up: Who’s the immigration candidate?

Dust Up: Who’s the immigration candidate?
How should Californians concerned about immigration be voting today? Tomás R. Jiménez and Mark Krikorian continue their debate.
February 5, 2008

Today, Jiménez and Krikorian weigh the candidates' stances on immigration. Yesterday, they debated the effects of tougher immigration enforcement. Later in the week, they'll discuss Real ID, the future of the immigration debate and more.

Good choices in both parties
By Tomás R. Jiménez

As millions of Californians vote to nominate their party's presidential candidate, it appears that fewer and fewer are relying on their beliefs about immigration to make their decision. The souring economy and the war in Iraq are weighing much heavier on their minds. Still, as I'm sure you would agree, Mark, immigration is an important issue and one about which many voters are nonetheless concerned.

Who are the right candidates on immigration? Let's start with the Democrats. As with most of the issues, there is little daylight between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both favor comprehensive immigration reform that looks a lot like the proposal the Senate voted on in 2006: increased border security, a pathway to citizenship and an electronic employment verification system. Much has been made of their disagreement over whether to allow undocumented immigrants to have a driver's license. Becausse this is a state matter over which our next president will have little power, it is not a relevant point of difference.

I think that Obama has the slight edge. Obama was one of the four members of the Senate who was deeply involved in negotiations on the 2006 comprehensive reform bill, so he knows the political side of the issue as well as anyone. He has gone on record as saying that he would address immigration reform in his first year in office. This should attract voters who actually want to see progress on immigration reform. Central to his immigration plan is a restructuring of the federal bureaucracy to reduce backlogs for green card applications and to make our immigration system more responsive to labor demands. Backlogs are the elephant in the room that everyone in the immigration debate seems to ignore, and Obama's emphasis on this issue makes him a good choice.

For those picking up a Republican ballot at the polls, Sen. John McCain is the clear choice. Republican nominees have been playing a game of bloody knuckles to prove who can be tougher on "illegals." McCain has admirably stayed out of this game. Lately, he has placed much more emphasis on border security as a prerequisite for other aspects of immigration reform, but he nonetheless believes in a comprehensive program that includes a pathway to legal status and a way to meet labor demands. He was the Republican driving force behind the 2006 comprehensive Senate bill. This, combined with the fact that he represents a border state, means that he knows how to navigate the political minefield that is immigration reform.

What also separates McCain from his competitors is his consistency on the issue and his pragmatic approach. He avoids fear-mongering, favoring instead a reasonable approach that takes account of the complex mix of economic, social and political forces that shape migration patterns. He also sees the need for reform vis-Ã*-vis labor rights and human rights. McCain readily notes that lacking documentation opens up immigrants to labor abuses, and he sees the mounting number of deaths along the border as a tragic consequence of a failed policy. For these reasons, McCain stands head and shoulders above his Republican competitors when it comes to immigration.

If McCain is the Republican nominee, it will be interesting to see whether immigration is a factor in the general election. McCain's stance and that of both Democratic contenders are very similar. Given that campaigns tend to silence debate on issues that do not highlight differences, immigration may not receive the attention it deserves. Silence on such an important issue would not be good.

Tomás R. Jiménez is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego and a fellow at the New America Foundation.


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Don't buy McCain's tough-enforcement conversion
By Mark Krikorian

Tomás:

Your assessment that supporters of amnesty and open borders should vote for Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama today is correct. I also agree that, if McCain is the nominee, "immigration may not receive the attention it deserves" in the general election campaign, mainly because McCain holds the same beliefs as either of his likely opponents, so there's nothing to debate. That would be a repeat of the 2000 and 2004 races, in which President Bush had the same views on immigration as Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry.

But your version of the developing conventional wisdom that "fewer and fewer [voters] are relying on their beliefs about immigration to make their decision" doesn't ring true. Obviously the Iraq war and the economy are important factors in everyone's thinking, but there's a story line being developed by elite commentators that the outcry over immigration was a flash in the pan, driven by a noisy minority, and now there's a voter backlash against it.

Baloney.

The best evidence of the resonance of the immigration issue is the primary campaign itself. Every Republican candidate is now ostensibly supporting tough enforcement. Other than Reps. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter, most of the field was not especially hawkish on immigration, but they changed fast. Mitt Romney, after seeming open to amnesty in 2005, came out against it and repeatedly attacked Rudy Giuliani for presiding over a sanctuary city while mayor of New York. Giuliani saw that he needed to sound tough, so he came out against the Senate amnesty bill last summer and told audiences, "I could end illegal immigration in three years." Mike Huckabee's comments as Arkansas governor in support of illegal immigrants led me to think he'd be a McCain clone on the issue — but instead he modeled his current immigration platform on an article I wrote in the National Review. Fred Thompson explicitly promoted "attrition through enforcement" and, along with Huckabee, actually proposed significant reductions in legal immigration, the first time that's happened in a presidential campaign in generations.

Even "Amnesty John" McCain is saying that he "got the message" from voters last summer who opposed his amnesty bill and that he realizes now that he has to "secure the borders first." This is a transparent lie, as his prominent supporters understand, but it's a lie that many voters coming late to the campaign are falling for. McCain is succeeding despite his decades-long track record in favor of amnesty (and bilingual education, racial quotas and the rest) precisely because of this change in rhetoric, and also because those voters who do see through his prevarications are divided among the other candidates.

Even on the Democratic side, where there's little disagreement, Hillary Clinton felt she had to back away from her support of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants to preserve her political viability in the general election.

How should immigration hawks vote? If they're Democrats, Clinton is the least-bad choice because she's a tiny bit better than Obama and less likely to expend political capital pushing amnesty in Congress. On the Republican side, whoever is the strongest candidate opposing McCain is the obvious choice — Romney in California, for instance, but Huckabee in Alabama or Rep. Ron Paul in Alaska.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and author of the forthcoming book, "The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal."
http://www.latimes.com:80/news/opinion/ ... 0671.story

DUST-UP: Tougher enforcement, better results?
Border crossings are down, a wall is being built and some anecdotes suggest people are self-deporting: Are immigration restrictionists happy?

All week, Mark Krikorian and Tomás R. Jiménez debate.

Today, Krikorian and Jiménez debate the effects and future of tougher immigration enforcement. Later in the week, they'll discuss immigration as an issue in the presidential primaries, Real ID and more.

All we are saying is give enforcement a chance
By Mark Krikorian

Illegal aliens are people too.

And precisely because they are people like any others, they respond to incentives just like anyone else. What we've seen over the past year or so is that when government changes the incentives that illegal immigrants face, they change their behavior.

In other words, immigration enforcement is working.

By the end of this year, about half the additional border fencing mandated by Congress should be complete. Deportations and detention beds are up significantly. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing ahead with efforts to expose illegal workers who provided fake or stolen Social Security numbers to their employers. Sometime this year, all federal contractors will be required to check the legal status of new hires using the online E-Verify program. And virtually every state legislature in the nation is considering tough new immigration control measures, following in the footsteps of Georgia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado.

The results are starting to come in. Fewer people are sneaking across the Mexican border. Some illegal immigrants are deporting themselves, while others are moving to less-inhospitable states, ensuring crackdowns there as well. Workplace enforcement is forcing employers to reach out to unemployed and underemployed American workers, as well as to turn to labor-saving technologies.

Are immigration restrictionists happy? You bet. But regaining control of immigration is a process, not an event. Our approach cannot be to focus intensively on enforcement for a few months or a year and then declare the borders secure and return to business as usual. This is has happened in the past — for instance, after the 1986 immigration law making it illegal for the first time to employ an illegal alien, crossings from Mexico fell until it became clear we didn't mean it, at which point they started rising again. This would appear to be what Sen. John McCain has in mind when he has spoken of a one- or two-year period of enforcement before implementing his amnesty.

Instead, the goal must be to change the climate surrounding the issue, to "define deviancy up," to adapt former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase. Specifically, this would mean things like making legal status a labor standard that is internalized by employers and ensuring that visitors from abroad have good reason to fear that if they overstay their visas, they'll be identified.

Reducing the illegal population by cutting the inflow and increasing the outflow is not a pipe dream; we've seen self-deportation work on small scales before. For instance, after 9/11, Pakistani illegal aliens, the largest group from the Islamic world, got the message that circumstances for them had changed, and for every one detained by immigration authorities, 10 self-deported.

My own institution has modeled that consistent enforcement with a modest increase in resources over existing plans could reduce the illegal population by half in five years. In the event, maybe the reduction will be only 30%, or maybe 70%. But we can be quite sure that such a strategy of "attrition through enforcement" will work in significantly reducing the illegal population — but only if we keep it up.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and author of the forthcoming book, "The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal" (Sentinel).


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The great pull of economic forces
By Tomás R. Jiménez

Dear Mark,

Good of you to acknowledge the humanity of undocumented immigrants. It's too bad you make unrealistic assumptions about the forces that shape their behavior.

You are right to note that efforts employed by the federal government and states have made life more difficult for undocumented immigrants. But the pull of jobs and the demand for labor are really what drive recent trends.

Let's start at the border. As you point out, we have to think about these things as processes, not events. We should thus be careful about the conclusions we draw from current "events." The history of very complicated processes tells a clear story. Beginning in the early 1990s, we fortified urban border crossings with officers, walls, lights and the latest detection technology. There was an initial drop in clandestine crossings, but it didn't last long. Migrants found ways to evade detection, usually by heading for the hills or the dessert, where thousands have tragically died in the unforgiving heat and cold.

Because the journey got tougher and more dangerous, human smugglers became indispensable for migrants, making smuggling big business. From 1982 to 1992, before stepped-up enforcement, migrants could expect to pay an average of $924 (in real dollars).Today, they are charging between $2,500 and $3,000. As a result, undocumented migrants are staying on the northern side of the border because going back and forth is too dangerous and costly. In short, border fortification keeps migrants in, not out. This unintended consequence reduces the number of apprehensions being made at the border, because fewer return trips to Mexico means fewer migrants at risk of being detained when they return to the U.S.

Furthermore, the data suggest that the supposed disincentives to migrate are not as effective as you imply. Migrants are fully aware of stepped-up enforcement, but it is not factoring heavily into their decisions to migrate. According to 2007 data collected by the Mexican Migration Field Research Program at UC San Diego, 91% of veteran and first-time migrants know about approved new fencing, and 73% are aware of National Guard deployment on the border. Yet only 29% cite the U.S. Border Patrol, fences or the National Guard as their single greatest concern about crossing. Fully 69% cite natural hazards, Mexican bandits or Mexican police as their primary concern. Increased border security certainly makes it difficult but not impossible to cross; 92% who tried to cross eventually made it, even if it took multiple attempts. So, even if we build it, they will still come as long as they can increase their wages eightfold by moving to the United States.

I'm not sure you have fully thought through other very plausible explanations that might account for recent migration and settlement patterns. Incentives do indeed shape behavior, but it's really the availability of jobs that is the biggest incentive. The economy is slowing, and jobs in sectors that rely on undocumented labor are drying up. Nearly one in five undocumented migrants in the labor force work in construction and mining. The construction industry has shed 284,000 jobs since September 2006. As Americans' wallets shrink, so too will jobs in the service sector, in which 31% of undocumented migrants work. A decline in the availability of work may explain much of the recent decline in border apprehensions.

"Attrition through enforcement" is made much more complicated by that fact that there are families involved. About 30% of all unauthorized families (1.96 million) contain children who are U.S. citizens. Should we count on these people to "self-deport" themselves and their U.S.-citizen children? It's not likely to happen.

My point is not that undocumented immigration is good or that migrants' tenacity and cleverness render anything we do ineffective. My point is that we are fighting against powerful economic forces that we helped create. We have a free trade agreement with Mexico (NAFTA), which allows for the free movement of capital and goods. Yet we continue with a schizophrenic policy that fights the movement of labor that tends to follow capital and goods. It would make more sense to move our resources and energy from trying to restrict immigration to trying to manage it so that we maximize the benefits to all.

Take care,
Tomás

Tomás R. Jiménez is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la- ... 1910.story