Immigration bill buried; lessons and questions

Tram Nguyen

Immigration bill buried; lessons and questions

Today the Senate bill died, after failing the cloture vote needed to cut off debate and move toward passage.

This effectively means that immigration reform legislation is buried this year. Those of us watching the debate and working toward comprehensive reform have ridden a political roller coaster this month as the legislative process lurched back and forth between pushing through and falling apart.

The situation has been extraordinarily difficult, requiring a high level of sophistication, focus and unity from the immigrant rights movement. As many immigrant leaders said, inaction from Congress was an unacceptable alternative for our communities. This meant that we had to work a strategy on the Hill, while keeping a focus on the ground.

But the process surfaced many divisions, and begs a better analysis of how we will assess the political terrain and make decisions as a movement for immigrant rights in the future. Immigration will continue to be one of the most important issues this country faces for a long time to come, and we need a clearer understanding of what interests, goals, and realities will come into play at the next stage.

Driven by a clearly corporate agenda, along with restrictionist aims, the attempted Senate Grand Bargain this time drove the debate toward an excruciating choice. For the millions of undocumented present in the country, it offered long and difficult hurdles but nevertheless a path to legalization. For the rest, it called for the scrapping of family visas in favor of an elitist point system tilted toward rich, skilled applicants; an expanded guestworker system; and the requisite expansion of detention beds, border agents and militarization.

It’s clear that the enforcement and guestworker issues will remain part of the immigration debate for the forseeable future, and we must tackle it through increased media exposure, bottom up organizing, and expanding the coalition of allies.

Immigration detention is the nation’s fastest growing form of incarceration, as the New York Times reported in a recent investigation and editorial about the growing number of people who have disappeared into or even died inside the ever expanding detention system.

The guestworker program, as we’ve already seen in the Gulf Coast, is a recipe for disaster. Workers imported from Mexico have been held captive in hotels; others from Bolivia were sold from one employer to the next for a few thousand dollars. “The guestworkers of the Gulf Coast who arrived after Katrina can testify to the fact that the guestworker program is a human rights disaster,” said Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. “It’s fundamentally exploitative and no amount of retooling will change that.”

Millions of families suffering under the current policies need legalization. It’s our moral and political challenge to protect families while not accepting a tradeoff that changes the immigration system for the worse.

Posted at 12:05 PM, Jun 28, 2007 in Permalink | View Comments

Comments

The same day the immigration bill died in the senate the Supreme Court ruled to limit the use of race in school integration plans. These two events indicate our government’s inability to abandon political rhetoric, grasp reality, and deal with the consequences of its own actions. The Supreme Court’s decision to greatly limit the use of race to promote a just outcome on the make up of schools is a blow to the long held struggle against segregation. The Court’s ruling is a decision to sacrifice history in the altar of a color blind society. Even a superficial look at drop out rates, prisons, and poverty can reveal that this country’s color lens is in sharp focus and far from sightless.

The primary reason behind the defeat of the immigration bill is also race, a reaction against the cultural and racial shift this country has experienced in the most recent wave of migration. This recent wave of migration, that has been predominately Mexican and Latin American, began to reach America’s shores in the years after the 1993 decision to declare a North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the United States. NAFTA's design completely ignored the impending human impact of the liberalization of trade policies. Heavily subsidized American corn invaded the Mexican market and what followed were unprecedented levels of migration from the collapsing agricultural economy of rural Mexico to American cities that were hungry for service workers. In fact, the economic bonanza of the 1990’s was in great part possible because of the influx of new immigrants into the service industry.

Instead of acknowledging this reality and deciding to play to growing nativist fears of a brown invasion, the Clinton administration passed restrictive immigration and public welfare reforms in 1996. But immigration continued and ten years later, as immigrant families sought to be reunited, there were an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Yesterday, the senate decision proved that Washington is unable to reach logical consensus and repair broken laws that will keep millions in the shadows and generations in poverty. I am too disgusted to end this comment with a positive remark. We will continue organizing and hopefully in the days to come we will develop a better analysis of our struggle.