Of fences and visas

[cato2]

Of fences and visas

May 24th 2007 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The latest attempt to fix America's broken immigration system has come under attack from all sides

AP


WHEN Ted Kennedy gazes from the windows of his office in Boston, he can see the harbour's “Golden Stairs”, where all eight of his great-grandparents first set foot in America. It reminds him, he told his Senate colleagues this week, that reforming America's immigration laws is an “awesome responsibility”. Mr Kennedy is the Democrat most prominently pushing a bipartisan bill to secure the border, ease the national skills shortage and offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 12m illegal aliens already in the country. He has a steep climb ahead of him.

Last year a bill with similar aims was rejected in the House of Representatives by Republicans who thought it too soft on lawbreakers and passed their own, far more restrictive version, resulting in stalemate. This year, with Congress in Democratic hands, Mr Kennedy has been trying again. On May 17th he unveiled a plan he had cooked up with John Kyl, a Republican border-security hawk, and eight other senators. It is tougher than last year's bill on those who cross the border illegally and on those who hire them. George Bush says he will sign it. But first it must pass through Congress, which is trickier than slipping across the Rio Grande.

As drafted, the bill seeks to mend America's broken immigration system in several ways. First, and before its other main provisions come into effect, it would tighten border security. It provides for 200 miles (320km) of vehicle barriers, 370 miles of fencing and 18,000 new border patrol agents. It calls for an electronic identification system to ensure employers verify that all their employees are legally allowed to work. And it stiffens punishments for those who knowingly hire illegals.

For the 12m illegals already in the country (or at least, those who arrived before January 1st 2007), the bill offers an excellent chance to become legal and a convoluted path to citizenship. They would be fingerprinted and given a background check to make sure they have broken no laws besides the immigration rules. They would have to pay a $1,000 fine. They would then be allowed to remain and work in America on a new “Z” visa. They would be allowed to apply for a green card (permanent residence), but family heads would have to go home to lodge the application—though they would then be allowed to return to America while they waited (and would pay another $4,000).



For those already in the queue, the bill calls for shorter waiting times. It promises to process all 4m families who applied before May 2005 within eight years. And it promises, over time, to favour skills more and kinship less. Currently, most green cards go to relatives of American citizens, many of them recently naturalised. Firms that want to hire skilled foreigners with no family ties find it excruciatingly hard. The quota for temporary visas for such people was only 85,000 this year. Nearly twice as many applied on the first day applications were allowed. The Kennedy-Kyl bill seeks to satisfy some of this pent-up demand by allowing 380,000 permanent merit-based visas a year, using a points system that takes into account job-related skills, education and fluency in English. Family reunification visas will largely be restricted to spouses and children below 18.

Finally, the bill proposes to issue some 400,000 visas a year to temporary workers, who would be allowed to stay for two years at a time, up to three times, with a full year's break between each visit. These would typically be the modestly-educated workers who keep American farms, building sites and restaurants functioning.

As soon as the bill was unveiled, it was stoned from all sides. Nativists, mostly Republicans, denounced it as an “amnesty” that would encourage further waves of illegal immigration. Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman running for president (without hope of success) on an anti-illegal-immigration platform, demanded that all but the border-security clauses be scrapped. Even these he derided as “so limited it's almost a joke”. Conservative talk-radio echoed his call. No one is seriously proposing mass deportation, but Mr Tancredo says the illegals will all go home if the laws against hiring them are vigorously enforced.

Most labour unions are sceptical, too. The AFL-CIO denounced the guest-worker programme, which it said would give employers “a ready pool of labour that they can exploit to drive down wages, benefits, health and safety protections” for everyone else. Two Democratic senators tried to gut the programme. One failed to abolish it entirely; another succeeded in slashing it from 400,000 to 200,000 people a year.

Employers like the idea of more legal migrants but worry that the new system will be cumbersome. Many object to the idea that they will have to check the immigration status of all their employees. The proposed federal computer system to sort legal from illegal workers is bound to make mistakes. Even if only one employee in a hundred is falsely labelled illegal, that will cause a lot of headaches. And the points system has drawbacks, too. Employers are better placed than bureaucrats to judge which skills are in short supply. That is why the current mess has advantages—illegal immigrants nearly always go where their labour is in demand.

Other groups have complaints, too. Immigrant-rights groups say that the path to citizenship would be too long and arduous and too few Hispanics would qualify. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, fretted that the new stress on skills would hurt families, adding that her party is “about families and family values”. Some people worry that House Democrats will kill it to prevent Mr Bush from enjoying a domestic success.
Despite the furore, public opinion favours the underlying principles. At least 60% of Americans want to give illegals a chance to become citizens if they work hard and behave. No final Senate vote is expected for several weeks, and then the House will weigh in. It is a gentler House these days, so the bill still has a chance.


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