Failing Our Future Immigrants

Posted By: Carolyn Hileman* on May 31, 2007

(The Nation) This column was written by the editors of the Nation.
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No one more urgently wants to see a comprehensive immigration reform package emerge from Congress than the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are living and working in this country today — the massive May Day marches of the past two years were a vivid testament to their fierce determination to win official recognition of their lives and rights. For them, the legislation currently on the table in the Senate holds much appeal. But any attempt to reform our immigration system must grapple with the flow of immigrants destined to arrive in the future. It is this second group that the Senate’s plan sells out.

For today’s undocumented population, the Senate’s “grand bargain” is far from perfect, but it is better in many respects than what they face now. They’ll have to scrounge up at least $5,000 to pay fines, and travel back to their home countries at least once, before becoming full legal residents. Still, for many undocumented immigrants longing to establish normal lives, the effort may prove worth it. The petty punishments they must endure along the path to citizenship were included as a sop to the right, but that increasingly vocal and restive minority still isn’t satisfied, decrying the plan as “amnesty” and threatening to sink the whole bill.

It’s for the immigrants of tomorrow, though, that the grand bargain is truly a raw deal — little more than indentured servitude. It would create an underclass of temporary workers with few rights, who must return to their home countries every two years with no hope of ever belonging here. Not only does this amount to an abuse of human rights; it’s also a surefire way to undercut American workers and their unions, providing employers with a cheap, vulnerable alternative workforce and placing downward pressure on the wages of U.S. workers. It’s not even clear, moreover, that it would work: Businesses that employ a low-wage labor force are complaining about the two-year limit and the red tape involved in complying with the law. The danger is that the bill could be amended somewhat to respond to those concerns, leaving the basic structure intact, which would be disastrous for both native and immigrant workers, pitted against each other in an ever-intensifying race to the bottom. The tragedy is that immigration reform could have been the occasion for improving the entire low-wage labor market, protecting the rights of all workers and preventing the exploitation of the undocumented that thrives in the shadows.

aaahhh Ya Gotta love CBS, their name says it all…

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