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Illegal immigration
Amnesty and assimilation, not guest-worker underclass


Last update: August 22, 2005

Between 1990 and 1994, an average of about 650,000 immigrants entered the country legally each year, while just over 400,000 entered illegally. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of legal entrants dropped slightly, while the number of illegal immigrants almost doubled. In the last four years, illegal immigrants continue to outnumber legal ones. The nation's immigration policies were not working in the 1990s, when border controls were progressively tightened as the decade wore on. They're working even less now.
Neither stricter controls nor a guest worker program is the answer. Easier pathways to legal immigration and, more crucially, assimilation, are.

The Bush administration has always been interested in reforming immigration policies, but it has neither committed to such reforms nor stuck by its earliest and most promising proposal: an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in the United States. President Bush is preparing to launch another attempt at reform. But the centerpiece of the proposal is its weakest point. It aims to give the half-way legal status of "guest workers" to immigrants entering the country from its southern borders while tightening policing of illegal immigrants within the United States. It is, in effect, a chamber of commerce proposal, and the president is depending on the business community to lobby for it, as businesses desperate for low-wage labor stand to gain most from such reform.

But what do immigrants themselves gain? Not much, besides a working pass that takes advantage of their labor now while attaching two- or three-year deadlines to their stay. One proposal would require those individuals to leave the country before becoming eligible for a new visa; another proposal would let them renew while in the United States. But every proposal sets a quota on the total number of such visas. That won't prevent workers from overstaying or looking to circumvent the system altogether, especially when such guest-worker programs provide no incentives for permanent residency and citizenship.

Creating colonies of foreign workers within the nation's borders is a short-term blurring of the illegal immigration problem. It incubates a long-term crisis -- the creation of a guest-worker underclass no different from slum-like colonias, those improvised towns of recent immigrants, legal and illegal, that line the U.S.-Mexico border.


Europe is a cautionary tale of guest-worker programs' failures. To help rebuild the continent after World War II, western European nations invited workers from Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa by the droves. But they were invited strictly as laborers, not as prospective citizens. While much was done to take advantage of the immigrants economically, virtually nothing was done to integrate immigrants culturally, politically and socially. The result is today's ghettos of resentful, entirely separate communities of mostly Muslim immigrants whose total European population is estimated to be between 15 and 20 million. Some among them, including the recent London bombers, are turning to radical Islam. The problem was not mass immigration. It was Europe's indifference to assimilation.

Europe doesn't have a tradition of immigration. The United States is all about immigration -- which is what makes the current problem on the nation's southern borders so distinct: It runs against the grain of the nation's traditions by grafting the worst of the European model on Latin American immigrants. Integration and assimilation are relegated to afterthoughts when the primary concern of an immigration policy is how to take advantage of immigrants as workers, rather than as prospective citizens. That leaves no great incentive for immigrants to comply with rules designed to temporarily profit from them, then shunt them over the border again.

A semi-open border, rather than a semi-legal status, is the more likely solution: Grant those willing to work the open-ended legal status to work, but with an invitation to permanent residence after so many years, and citizenship after that. With the complicity of business and the consumer economy (none of us is innocent in this equation), illegal immigrants will keep pouring in anyway -- and, barring reasonable reform, swelling an underclass of separatism and bitterness. Better ratify their self-invitations with measures that welcome them in and integrate them. Permanence works. We're all its product.