A Bad Bill Goes Down
Yesterday, Senators voted against cloture for the "grand compromise" immigration bill supported by the Bush administration and a bipartisan coalition of Congresspersons. The cloture vote effectively filibustered the bill and tosses the legislation onto the ash heap of the 2007 session....where it belongs. Allow me to put it bluntly. Supporters of this bill had universally cynical intentions. When George Bush said that this legislation's opponents "didn't want to do what's right for America", he had the analogy exactly wrong. This bill was a strategic disaster that would have portended an even larger "amnesty" debate the next time Congress addressed the issue....and was a Molotov cocktail in the faces of the American working class to boot.
There was so much insincere spin, by both the politicians supporting it and the "open-minded" mainstream media, used to sell this legislation that public opinion was difficult to accurately gauge. All too often, the debate was framed within the false choice of either "supporting comprehensive immigration reform" or "deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants back to Mexico." When put into such artificially black and white terms, the public overwhelmingly supported the goals of the legislation. Unfortunately, this Grand Compromise was neither "comprehensive" nor "reform", failing to take seriously the most important aspect of solving our immigration problem....securing the damn borders. It's abundantly clear that the framers of this bill had no intention of making serious overtures towards border security, just as they didn't 20 years and 40 years ago, respectively, when immigration reform was last addressed, also with unfulfilled promises of border security and cracking down on employers who hire illegals.
And when it became clear to voters that border security was not a priority of "comprehensive immigration reform", public support for the bill fell apart, so much so that the phone lines of the bill's Congressional supporters were jammed by angry callers warning their elected officials to vote against this reform bill. And I concur with the majority here. The status quo on illegal immigration policy may be unacceptable, but this legislation all but ensured that a bad situation would be made worse.
Even without the lack of emphasis on border security and enforcement, I still couldn't support this bill. The idea of instituting an apartheid-esque "guest worker program" with a deliberate endgame of driving down wage levels for domestic low-skill and semi-skill workers, and of codifying a disenfranchised class of temporary workers whose humanity is reduced to a set of hands on the plantation or factory floor, made the "reform" a nonstarter for me. Hats off to North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan for being one of the few Senators who took a lead role in pointing out the devastating economic consequences that a "guest worker program" would have on an already-struggling working class. Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders also got on board in attacking this deliberate attempt to grow poverty in America later in the debate.
There are no easy solutions to the immigration debate, but a long time ago I outlined an approach that seems painfully obvious, but which no legislative leaders mimicked in their own proposals. A number of columnists skeptical of McCain-Kennedy also endorsed a close variation on my suggestion, which amounts to prioritizing border security first and building a fence, then granting a path to citizenship to the illegal immigrants already here, scrapping any plans for a dehumanizing guest worker program that would recycle Mexican workers in and out of America like cattle, and adjust legal immigration quotas accordingly, targetting skilled immigrants while avoiding an influx of unskilled workers so large that it allows entirely industries to be dominated by immigrant workers, which is a recipe for exploitation and permanent wage suppression. If Congress was to propose a plan like this, I suspect 75% of the public would support. The Sean Hannity types outraged at any proposal to legalize lawbreaking undocumented workers already here would almost assuredly be in the minority, as most people see little value in having a population larger than Ohio living in America illegally and undocumented.
Nonetheless, don't expect such a proposal to ever make it to the floor of Congress. Our elected leaders have only two priorities when it comes to "comprehensive immigration reform". Its supporters on the right, such as the Bush administration and Grover Norquist, supported the odious bill killed yesterday because of the limitless pipeline of cheap labor that it allows the GOP's business peeps to permanently exploit.....while its supporters on the left, such as Ted Kennedy, supported the bill based on a simplistic embrace of "diversity" and because they believe these future immigrants will become Democratic voters. These may be the highest priorities of our elected officials in the immigration debate, but I highly doubt they are the highest priority of voters.
There was so much insincere spin, by both the politicians supporting it and the "open-minded" mainstream media, used to sell this legislation that public opinion was difficult to accurately gauge. All too often, the debate was framed within the false choice of either "supporting comprehensive immigration reform" or "deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants back to Mexico." When put into such artificially black and white terms, the public overwhelmingly supported the goals of the legislation. Unfortunately, this Grand Compromise was neither "comprehensive" nor "reform", failing to take seriously the most important aspect of solving our immigration problem....securing the damn borders. It's abundantly clear that the framers of this bill had no intention of making serious overtures towards border security, just as they didn't 20 years and 40 years ago, respectively, when immigration reform was last addressed, also with unfulfilled promises of border security and cracking down on employers who hire illegals.
And when it became clear to voters that border security was not a priority of "comprehensive immigration reform", public support for the bill fell apart, so much so that the phone lines of the bill's Congressional supporters were jammed by angry callers warning their elected officials to vote against this reform bill. And I concur with the majority here. The status quo on illegal immigration policy may be unacceptable, but this legislation all but ensured that a bad situation would be made worse.
Even without the lack of emphasis on border security and enforcement, I still couldn't support this bill. The idea of instituting an apartheid-esque "guest worker program" with a deliberate endgame of driving down wage levels for domestic low-skill and semi-skill workers, and of codifying a disenfranchised class of temporary workers whose humanity is reduced to a set of hands on the plantation or factory floor, made the "reform" a nonstarter for me. Hats off to North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan for being one of the few Senators who took a lead role in pointing out the devastating economic consequences that a "guest worker program" would have on an already-struggling working class. Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders also got on board in attacking this deliberate attempt to grow poverty in America later in the debate.
There are no easy solutions to the immigration debate, but a long time ago I outlined an approach that seems painfully obvious, but which no legislative leaders mimicked in their own proposals. A number of columnists skeptical of McCain-Kennedy also endorsed a close variation on my suggestion, which amounts to prioritizing border security first and building a fence, then granting a path to citizenship to the illegal immigrants already here, scrapping any plans for a dehumanizing guest worker program that would recycle Mexican workers in and out of America like cattle, and adjust legal immigration quotas accordingly, targetting skilled immigrants while avoiding an influx of unskilled workers so large that it allows entirely industries to be dominated by immigrant workers, which is a recipe for exploitation and permanent wage suppression. If Congress was to propose a plan like this, I suspect 75% of the public would support. The Sean Hannity types outraged at any proposal to legalize lawbreaking undocumented workers already here would almost assuredly be in the minority, as most people see little value in having a population larger than Ohio living in America illegally and undocumented.
Nonetheless, don't expect such a proposal to ever make it to the floor of Congress. Our elected leaders have only two priorities when it comes to "comprehensive immigration reform". Its supporters on the right, such as the Bush administration and Grover Norquist, supported the odious bill killed yesterday because of the limitless pipeline of cheap labor that it allows the GOP's business peeps to permanently exploit.....while its supporters on the left, such as Ted Kennedy, supported the bill based on a simplistic embrace of "diversity" and because they believe these future immigrants will become Democratic voters. These may be the highest priorities of our elected officials in the immigration debate, but I highly doubt they are the highest priority of voters.
posted by Mark at 5:05 PM
2 Comments:
Good, lets hope that this is the last we see of this awful bill.
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