Thread: Immigration Reform: Two Plans in Congress, One Solution

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Immigration reform: Two plans in Congress, one solution
By Roger E. Hernandez
August 1, 2005

Two plans kicking around Congress try to fix an immigration system everybody knows is broken. Some good things, some bad things in each one. A lot is still on the table, awaiting political compromise that only comes from twisted arms and kicked butts. The president should be in the thick of it.

But the White House is sitting down, arms folded.

The latest reminder of the unwillingness to get involved came last week at a Senate committee hearing on immigration reform, when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao abruptly decided not to testify. After the hearing, it was reported, Republican senators, including John McCain of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas, co-sponsors of the two rival bills, went to the White House to meet with Karl Rove and other officials.

What do you want us to do, they must have asked.

But there's been no guidance, at least not publicly. Maybe the Bush administration is biding its time. We've been hearing that immigration will soon be a priority since January 2004, when President Bush announced the general outline of a plan that was supposed to be filled in over the following months. Those two bills do fill in the details, which is why the silence from the White House seems so loud.

What he should do is combine the best features of each of the two bills: the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act introduced by McCain and Ted Kennedy five weeks ago, and the legislation introduced by Cornyn and Jon Kyl, McCain's fellow Arizonan.

Kyl-Cornyn is the tougher of the two. McCain-Kennedy calls for unmanned patrol planes and tighter coordination among U.S. agencies as well as with Mexican and Canadian law enforcement, but does not fund more border patrolmen. Kyl-Cornyn does -- 10,000 new border cops, 10,000 more agents to investigate employers who hire illegal immigrants, $5 billion over five years for new technology like cameras and sensors.

It also increases penalties for employing illegal immigrants and requires issuance of tamper-resistant Social Security cards in one year. The proposal is pretty good at preventing illegal crossings by sheer strength of enforcement. What's more, by making it harder to get a job without permission, it may discourage some illegal entries.

Where Kyl-Cornyn fails is in dealing with the 11 million illegal immigrants living here now. The measure requires workers who are here illegally to return to their countries of origin. There they can apply to come legally through a new temporary-worker program with no cap on the number of people allowed to enter, as long as applicants show they have a job waiting that no American citizen wants.

The idea, I guess, is that people will be willing to return home because they are almost sure to get back in and never again have to worry about being deported as an "illegal alien."

Fat chance. It may be well-meaning, but it's hallucinatory to expect that this will make a dent in the number of people here illegally. It's unrealistic to expect a lot of people to voluntarily get on an airplane and fly back to Poland, India or Colombia. And what about those who can drive back -- Mexicans or Canadians?

Those who arrived recently just want to keep their heads down and work; those who've spent years here are unlikely to trust government enough to risk leaving the country.

One option is mass deportation -- prohibitively expensive, ruthlessly inhumane. The other is in the McCain-Kennedy bill: People here illegally would pay back taxes plus $2,000 and undergo a background check. Those who are not criminals or terrorists could stay and work for six years, then either return to their country of origin or apply for permanent residence.

It's the amnesty that dare not speak its name -- and is not substantially different from what Bush proposed a year and a half ago. Call it what you will. Combined with the tougher enforcement in Kyl-Cornyn, and with an increase in the number of legal entries as both bills propose, it's the best way to solve the problem of illegal immigration.

-- Roger E. Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

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all they want to do is put a bandaid on a growing cancer so it can't be seen