THE MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT in the immigration reform debate occurred not in the Senate’s debate on immigration, but rather in the Senate’s debate on prescription drugs.
The back-and-forth on immigration overshadowed the passage of the first major deadline in the new Medicare prescription drug benefit program. But the coincidence of these two political events could not be better timed: The government’s response to pressure for relaxing of the drug program’s deadlines today might foreshadow the government’s commitment tomorrow to immigration deadlines and standards.
In late 2003, the president and Congress reached a bipartisan consensus on the question of whether and how the federal government would solve escalating public angst over the cost of prescription drugs with he Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act. Like any massive piece of legislation, it was a creature of compromise. Among the compromises necessary to ensure the administrative practicality of the program, the legislation set forth a series of schedules and deadlines for enrollment. Section 102 of the act provided that senior citizens seeking to claim the benefit would need to enroll by Monday, May 15, 2006, or risk being shut out until the following November,–hen they’d be required to pay an extra one-percent increase in their premium. (That would, reportedly, amount to a couple of dollars per month.)
These deadlines were easy enough to legislate back in 2003. But as that deadline arrived this week, and newspapers reported the chaotic last-minute rush of senior citizens signing up for the program, politicians and commentators raced to eliminate the deadlines. Senator Ted Kennedy demanded that Congress “extend [the] arbitrary enrollment deadline at least through the end of the year.” Senator Charles Grassley cited insufficient time for seniors to research the plans and organized a bipartisan coalition to waive the deadlines: “Good policy makes good politics, and I think this is good policy.”
The New York Times editorialized that “Now that the chaotic sign-up period for the new Medicare drug program is over, it surely makes sense to extend the deadline to allow more people to join and to avoid the penalty for lateness.”
But what “makes sense” to the Times and like-minded legislators today certainly did not “make sense” to Congress and the president when they enacted actual deadlines in 2003, and for good reason: Deadlines and schedules were the only assurance that a massive welfare program could be administered with any possibility of success. Hastily erasing those deadlines in order to achieve momentary political gains undermines the credibility of similar endeavors in the future. As the Washington Post sensibly opined, “[t]here is little chance now that the deadline will be extended, which is probably a good thing: For actuarial and other reasons, it makes sense for an insurance program to have a time-limited enrollment.”
OF COURSE, this week saw another bipartisan block of politicians at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue attempting to convince skeptics that illegal-immigration problems could largely be solved by creating . . . a complicated set of deadlines and schedules.
If the Congress and the president successfully legislate a solution to the illegal immigration problem, the compromise bill will involve some set of rules to determine which illegal aliens will be entitled to various protections. The Hagel-Martinez plan, for example, would deport illegal immigrants arriving after January 2004, would grant some protections to those arriving between January 2001 and January 2004, and would allow those arriving before January 2001 to remain in the States and seek citizenship. And like 2003’s prescription drug benefit legislation, the Hagel-Martinez plan would require that illegal aliens eligible to remain in the United States complete a registration form within six months after the Department of Homeland Security makes such a form publicly available, or be deported.
A compromise that combines tough border enforcement with a program allowing some illegal immigrants already in the country to remain and eventually earn citizenship may very well be the most practical, equitable, and popular resolution. But the arrival of the Hagel-Martinez six-month registration deadline would surely be far more explosive than the prescription-registration deadline. The stakes at issue in immigration-registration will be incalculably higher. Seniors risk a minor increase in their insurance premiums and perhaps a short gap in their coverage. Next year, illegal immigrants failing to register would risk outright deportation. The arrival of the deadline would be met by protests comparable to last month’s marches; such high-profile pressure would far exceed the tactics employed by dissatisfied senior citizens.
And the excuses cited for waiving the Medicare deadline would far more applicable in the immigration context. Senators argued that senior citizens lacked sufficient opportunity to research and understand various benefit plans. It would be difficult to imagine that illegal immigrants–largely uneducated and non-English-speaking–would arrive at a deadline next year better informed.
In short, for every reason that Congress would have to disregard the prescription drug benefit deadline this week, it would have far greater reason to disregard immigration registration deadlines next year. Conservatives skeptical of immigration reform proposals yet open to the possibility of accepting compromise will find in the Senate’s resolution of the drug-benefit deadline controversy perhaps the best evidence of whether the federal government would make good on its end of the bargain.
Adam J. White is an attorney living in Northern Virginia.
