The United States has a fantastically complicated system of immigration law. It provides for more new residents each year than occur in all the rest of the world’s nations combined. America also has sizable illegal immigration, which creates serious practical problems for those few states in which it is most heavily concentrated. Agreed? Good.
Now, then. Republican-sponsored omnibus immigration legislation is quickly wending its way through Congress. The Judiciary Committee will take up the Senate’s version beginning February 29. House floor debate on an almost identical bill is scheduled for mid-March. If these measures are eventually approved in their present form, congressional Republicans will have produced the most sweeping overhaul of American immigration policy in 30 years — and the sharpest immigration crackdown and restriction since the 1920s.
Forget for a moment all the furious academic debates about whether existing levels of immigration are culturally and economically “good” or “bad.” Those debates all too often dump issues of legal and illegal immigration together (as the House and Senate measures do) into what is, for non-experts at least, an indigestible and clarity-destroying porridge. Forget also, if you can, the mesmerizing intensity of Pat Buchanan’s anti-immigration pitch — and the feeble response it has earned from his competitors — in the current Republican presidential primary campaign.
Ask yourself, instead, a simple, political question: Will passing this immigration legislation help the Republican party? If your instinctive answer is yes, think again.
Consider the legislation’s most notable feature targeted at illegal immigration. Jobs, more than anything else, are what draws illegals to America. We now have a system of sanctions against employers who hire illegals. It is a universally acknowledged failure. So it’s proposed that we give teeth to these sanctions by the addition of “automated employment eligibility verification.” Shortly after any American takes a new job, his company will check his name and Social Security number against a federal list drawn from databases at the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Social Security Administration. Initial discrepancies must be cleared up in 10 days.
Supporters of this plan offer bland assurances that it will first be carefully pilot tested in five (gigantic) states, and will ultimately inconvenience no one whose legal status is secure. But internal Social Security Administration documents contain long-term forecasts that verification will fail 5 percent of the time. That’s 3,250,000 glitches each year — or, to put it indelicately, roughly 600 per congressional district each month. Can average citizens resolve such problems in 10 days, long- distance, with a Washington bureaucracy?
And what happens if they don’t? Here’s Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, lead House sponsor of the bill: “In that situation, the individual has had his day in court. If he cannot prove that he has a Social Security number and the name and number don’t match, then he should not be employed.” Oh.
To ensure that Social Security numbers used in this system are not obtained fraudulently, the Senate bill mandates that state4ssued “breeder documents” required for Social Security processing — birth certificates and driver’s licenses, for example — be embedded with “a fingerprint or other biometric data.” The “biometric” business is code for the new science of counterfeit- proof identification: Retina scans (eyeball prints, if you will) are the most commonly cited procedure. It doesn’t take a fevered libertarian to worry over this development. And the entire scheme raises questions of simple justice. Every American’s next job will now be made contingent on the perfect functioning of a government computer system ostensibly designed only to root out illegal employment.
A bad idea. And, it must be said, pretty much the only controversial idea among the legislation’s many provisions to control illegal immigration: restrictions on public benefits for illegals, expedited exclusion and deportation mechanisms, beefed-up border security, and expanded investigations of criminal aliens and people who overstay their visas. Everyone opposes illegal immigration. These are popular initiatives. And their popularity is one big reason why their sponsors want them in this omnibus legislation in the first place. The illegal immigration crackdown serves as cover for a series of legal immigration proposals that would be far more controversial if they were voted on separately.
Legal immigration to the United States is now limited, for the most part, to relatives of American citizens or other legal permanent residents, to employees sponsored by American businesses, and to refugees. Most of these categories have elaborate and interrelated numerical ceilings and floors, which change each year according to overall demand and other factors. The category of highest preference goes to spouses, parents, and minor children of U.S. citizens; they are admitted to this country without limit and without delay. There are also five lower categories of family-based immigrants. All of these latter categories have numerical quotas. And all of them have waiting lists, in some cases many years long.
Parents of U.S. citizens would no longer be freely admitted under either the House or Senate bill. The bills are slightly different here, but both would require immigrant parents to have Medicare- and Medicaid-quality health and long-term-care insurance before they come over. Such insurance does not exist. Neither would this class of immigration.
Two “unmarried adult children” categories are abolished in the Senate measure. The House version would allow a very small number of annual immigrants from both categories, provided they were between 21 and 25 years old and were already claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns — which, as it happens, restricts this category to people from Canada or Mexico. Both bills would also eliminate the current categories for married adult children and siblings of U.S. citizens.
All told, there are now almost 2.5 million people on waiting lists in the family immigration categories these bills would kill. All of them have already-approved visa applications. They have paid their fees and queued up — sometimes for a decade or more. The vast majority of them are related to full U.S. citizens, people who can vote. And almost none of them, if this legislation becomes law, will ever settle in the States.
Why? Proponents of this “reform” use a clever argument to thwart their critics. The one non-citizen family category that would survive in the new system-spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents — is vastly oversubscribed, with a waiting list more than a million names long. It is inhumane, the legislation’s advocates say, to keep the nuclear families of a million “moms and dads and little kids” separated like this. We need to get them in. And it is unfair to admit more-distant relatives in any other immigration category until we do.
Maybe so. But it’s not as unfair as it might first appear. Eighty percent of the people now “languishing” on this particular waiting list are relatives of once-illegal aliens amnestied by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. More than 400,000 of them are already living with their families in the United States. And all their amnestied relatives are now eligible for naturalization, which would win them immediate and permanent visas. Even allowing for delays in naturalization, a small number of additional visas each year would quickly erase this entire waiting list. And all without busting the bank of overall legal immigration, which has lately declined precipitously — by itself, under current law — from 1.8 million in 1991 to under 800,000 last year.
Why, then, must we permanently bar from our shores so many relatives of U.S. citizens in order to solve a relatively small, temporary problem involving the relatives of former illegal aliens? Because, truth be told, proponents of this pending legislation think America now has “too much” legal immigration. And killing most current family-preference categories would significantly reduce overall future immigration numbers — as would the legislation’s questionable new restrictions and regulations on employment- based and refugee admissions.
It’s a point of view. It happens to be a point of view this magazine does not share. Current U.S. immigration rates are modest by historical standards. And for the most part, if the issue isn’t maliciously confused with the problem of illegal aliens, we’re managing that immigration quite well — and to good effect.
Be that as it may. Back to raw politics for a moment. Asians and Hispanics have increasingly Republican partisan inclinations. Three-fourths of all current immigrants come from Asia and Latin America. An equal proportion of them arrive and stay in some of the biggest electoral-college states. In other words, the legislation now before Congress would infuriate a lot of important voters by wiping their families off existing waiting lists. And it might not make the rest of us too happy, either — what with those dicey job verifications, fingerprint requirements, and all.
This should be a no-brainer for most congressional Republicans. Critics of this legislation will shortly move to split the bill into discrete “legal” and “illegal” halves. They want to drop the employment verification system from the illegal side and pass what’s left. They want to defeat the major legal immigration provisions outright. In its narrow self-nterest, at very least, the GOP should pray they succeed.
–David Tell, for the Editors
