http://langamp.com/borderblog/?p=2555

May 23, 2006
Wednesday Column Draft

If hubris stank the Senate these days would require nose plugs, a bipartisan decontamination chamber and air-tight doors sealed to protect greater Washington D.C. from the noxious stench of immigration reform.

Since the United States has enjoyed immigration as a great boon, most Senators seem unaware that immigration policy can utterly transform a nation for better or for worse. Social conflict, civil wars and even genocides have resulted from flawed immigration and integration policies.

We must tinker. Our system has serious flaws that ought to be addressed. But shouldn’t we tinker carefully?

I think so.

That’s why “comprehensive immigration reform” is a slur in my book.

I’d rather have narrow, un-ambitious reforms that target specific problems one at a time. Are illegal immigrant border crossings a problem? Hire more border patrol agents. If that doesn’t work build a fence. If that doesn’t work invest in some new technology. Attack the problem like a savvy mechanic who replaces one part at a time to fix that mysterious coughing and pinging rather than taking the whole car apart and rebuilding it from scratch.

The latter approach is favored by the Senate, where a sweeping guest worker bill is all the rage.

If our current immigration system is a late model sedan with broken door locks, a busted window and a sputtering engine, the Senate approach seems a bit like installing a noisy though ineffective car alarm, ignoring the busted locks and relying on crossed fingers to ensure the new spark plugs, pistons and drive shaft fit the model.

And then promptly departing on a long road trip on unfamiliar roads.

They ought to know better.

American immigration reform efforts in 1965 and 1983 proved utterly unpredictable, producing results wildly different from what Congress expected at the time.

Guest worker programs the world over have proved utterly unpredictable, transforming whole countries wherever they’ve been tried in ways that those who began the policies never imagined.

But government officials seldom learn humility from the constant failings of government, so Senators McCain, Kennedy, Feinstein and others believe they can anticipate the ramifications of their comprehensive reform bill.

Never mind that the totality of the system they propose is without precedent in human history.

They confidently assert what will happen if a guest worker program and comprehensive reform passes, confident that if they’re proven wrong it will take so long that no one will blame them anyhow.

Just ask Sen. Kennedy, who helped sell the 1965 immigration reform bill by asserting that “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,” a statement proved wrong in record time when 1966 saw more than 1 million legal immigrants alone.

Can it bode well that this same man is a driving force behind current comprehensive reform efforts in the Senate? I’m cautious enough that I’d bet on only one thing: whatever happens with regard to immigration this year, neither Ted Kennedy nor John McCain nor Dianne Feinstein nor any of the rest have any idea what things will look like 5 years from now, let alone 10 years or 20 years.

Whatever your views on immigration, the best approach is slow, deliberate and incremental. We ought to adopt policies that attack the problems we see in the most predictable ways possible, avoiding unforeseen and unintended consequences whenever we can.

A piecemeal approach is a great check on the ideological blindness that plagues so many of our senators on both sides of the aisle, because piecemeal reforms are about fixing specific problems rather than laying out grand schemes that look good on paper but flounder in real life.

General Eisenhower believed that losing generals focused on strategy, while winning generals focused on logistics. If the Senate does pass a guest worker program into law, the matter of implementing it will prove a logistical nightmare amid all the rest of the comprehensive reforms.

Meanwhile the enforcement first House bill focuses on the logistics of ending illegal immigration. If it passes into law, tomorrow’s Senators will be in a much better position to see the best strategy for handling those aspects of the immigration system that are still broken.
Filed under:Immigration— Conor Friedersdorf @ 12:09 am