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Immigration
Immigration is an issue
that is very personal for me. Having suffered
under the British, my grandparents came here
from Ireland in the 1920s. They then suffered
discrimination here, greeted by signs that read
‘Irish need not apply.’ But it is also a
difficult issue with no easy
answers.
There are perhaps as
many as 12 million undocumented aliens in our
country, more than half from Mexico. A Mexican
government report last year predicted that
Mexicans will continue to migrate to the U.S.
at a rate of half a million a year for the next
15 years.
We need to begin by
addressing the reason so many people risk their
lives to enter America illegally. Primarily, it
is the rampant poverty in their countries of
origin. As Fareed Zacharia of Newsweek
has pointed out, “The income gap between
the United States and Mexico is the largest
between any two contiguous countries in the
world.”[i] One
reason for the gap is Mexico’s economy, which
has been growing more slowly than that of other
Latin American countries. Another is the income
gap between Mexico’s rich and poor – those with
the highest salaries receive 300 times the
salary of a poor person (the ratio in the U.S.
is 52 to 1).[ii]
What Americans often
don’t realize is the role we have played in
producing the current situation. A major
contributor has been the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In 1994, while
proponents of NAFTA argued that it would
decrease the flow of immigrants from Mexico to
the U.S., the opposite has proven to be true.
As Jeff Faux, the founder of the Economic
Policy Institute has written:
Imports of food by
highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian
agribusiness have driven millions of people out
of Mexico’s rural areas. In the absence of jobs
in the cities, many moved north in search of
work…. Mexico’s problem is that it is ruled by
an oligarchy of rich families in a system of
hyper-crony capitalism. By facilitating
business partnerships between the rich and the
powerful in all three countries, NAFTA
reinforced that system, putting off the need
for the Mexican elite to share the benefits of
growth with their country’s people.[iii]
______________________
A major contributor has
been NAFTA.
In 1994, while proponents of
NAFTA argued that it would decrease the flow
of immigrants from Mexico to the U.S., the
opposite has proven to be
true
_______________________
Legal immigration
itself is a mess, and illegal immigration is,
in part, a response to a failed legal
immigration system riddled with red tape and
bureaucracy. There are already a lot of legal,
documented aliens here who have been pursuing
citizenship and waiting, sometimes for more
than a decade, to become citizens. Currently
there is a backlog of over 300,000 cases,
largely because the process for background
checks has broken down.
remains divided on what
that reform should look like. The current
presidential campaign has seen a lot of
demagoguery on this issue by most of the
Republican candidates. At the state legislative
level, there has been no shortage of posturing
by Democrats and Republicans alike. And when
Leonard Boswell, my opponent in this race, was
challenged by Jeff Lamberti in 2006, Boswell
ran an ad portraying Lamberti as “soft” on
immigration, yet never did either candidate
attempt to initiate an intelligent, substantive
discussion on the subject.
Among politicians,
various ‘solutions’ are promoted, but they are
typically one-sided and inadequate. We hear
about the need to strengthen our borders. I
agree, not simply because of illegal
immigration, but because of overall national
security. But this doesn’t mean erecting a
700-mile long fence. As Bill Richardson said
last year, if we build a 10-ft fence, there
will be a run on 12-ft ladders! But we can and
should increase the number of border patrol
agents, make better use of the most modern
surveillance technology, and work with the
Mexican and Canadian governments for greater
cooperation in managing our
borders.
____________________________
Whatever we do, it is
simply naïve to suppose that we can effectively
address the problem by just doing things on our
side of the border –immigration reform
invariably necessitates hard work on both sides
of a
border.
________________________
We are told we need to
enforce the current law. I agree, and the place
to start is in the workplace. But simply
enforcing the law will neither stop the flow of
immigrants nor provide the workers we need.
Over the next decade, 25 million Americans will
retire. According to Iowa Workforce
Development, about half of new jobs created
between 2004 and 2014 will be lower-paying,
low-skilled jobs. Who will take these new
jobs?
We are told we should
deport all undocumented workers. While I agree
that we should deport undocumented workers who
commit crimes, it is unrealistic to think we
can round up and deport the 12 million
undocumented workers already here. They are a
big part of our economy – they pay an estimated
$162 billion in federal, state, and local
taxes. This includes Social Security taxes that
they will never benefit from. The Social
Security Administration has a ‘suspense file’
consisting of taxes paid that can’t be matched
to legitimate Social Security numbers. Between
1990 and 1998, the amount in the suspense file
grew by $20 billion. In addition to the goods
and services they produce, these workers pump
money into our economy through goods and
services they buy.
Not only do they
contribute to our economy, they also send a
good deal of money back to their families in
their countries of origin. In the case of
Mexico, for example, the amount of these
remittances by Mexicans living abroad, is
roughly equal to all direct foreign investments
in Mexico and are second only to oil exports in
foreign income. These are probably some of the
best development dollars being spent. Unlike
foreign aid funds that are sent to governments
and often misappropriated, this money is
getting directly into the hands of poor people
who need it.
We are told we need a
guest worker program. But I wouldn’t want a
guest worker program (other than for seasonal
workers) that doesn’t provide a path to
citizenship; this has proven to be a bad idea
in Europe. There, they have created a permanent
underclass of guest workers, and immigrant
communities have become a breeding ground for
resentment and terrorists. As broken as our
immigration system may be, the simple fact is
that America does a much better job of
assimilation than most other
countries.
Whatever we do, it is
simply naïve to suppose that we can effectively
address the problem by just doing things on our
side of the border –immigration reform
invariably necessitates hard work on both sides
of a border.
The
Solution
We need fair trade, not
NAFTA and similar so-called ‘free’ trade
agreements. These treaties need to be revised
or scrapped. And we need development policies
that reduce the incentive for people to come
here illegally. We need to pressure Mexico and
other countries for policies that better manage
population growth and that assure fair wages,
good working conditions, and safe environmental
laws.
When the European Union
was in the works, there were many critics in
the wealthier nations who worried that open
borders there would result in a flood of
immigrant workers from poorer nations. To head
off the problem, they made a major investment
of funds in the poorer countries in order to
stimulate job growth. As Faux writes, “It
worked. Despite the EU’s provision for free
movement of labor across the borders, when
offered reasonable economic opportunities,
workers in the poor countries stayed home.”[iv]
I would support a
renegotiation of NAFTA that “would provide for
a similar fund for Mexico in exchange for
changes in Mexican law and institutions that
would allow the income of Mexican workers to
grow as their economy grows. These would
include guarantees for free trade unions,
enforceable minimum wages, and an increase in
education, and other social spending.”[v]
We need to reform the
legal immigration system to allow for faster
processing of applications and an end to the
backlog.
Big business – in the
U.S., Mexico, and Canada – has a stake in
maintaining the status quo. But for average
workers, the status quo is disastrous. As your
congressman I will work for real solutions that
will improve the lives of average citizens both
here and across our borders.