Learning to live with others
Most Americans are deeply unhappy about immigration and troubled by President Bush's new program. In a USA Today/CNN/ Gallup Poll out this week, 55 percent opposed the plan, two thirds believe that immigrants hurt the economy by driving down wages for Americans, and 74 percent oppose making it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens. That last number is up from 67 percent just two years ago. Many in the Hispanic community, on the other hand, regard the Bush plan as half a loaf and not the full amnesty program they seek.
There's no easy answer to the gravitational pull of the American job market that now has attracted somewhere between 10 million and 14 million undocumented workers--illegal immigrants whose numbers are growing at the rate of almost a half a million people a year. They can make as much in a half an hour as a migrant can make at home in a day. So they put up with conditions and wages that most Americans would never accept, to do work that needs to be done. This is a market force that will always overwhelm the obstacles to border jumping, a force that will only expand as the native labor force grows older and more middle-class workers will be even less willing to work as busboys and gardeners and in household services. Just what we have to face was brought home to me when, some 10 years ago, I spent a night with the Border Patrol in a helicopter flying along Texas-Mexico frontier. Thousands were captured every night and sent back, only to return again and again until they were able to evade the border patrols.
Honesty. America isn't going to deport this sub rosa population. We simply wouldn't take on the moral, political, and financial burden of expelling millions of people and disrupting or ruining the lives of millions of otherwise law-abiding, hardworking people. Immigration is, after all, the history of America. Yet, America cannot be a healthy society when there are so many millions of illegal immigrants living in the shadows, ignoring the law, and living under conditions that expose them to exploitation. Nor can we afford the luxury of a southern or even a northern border to be so loosely controlled while "coyote" networks smuggle in illegal immigrants in a pipeline that can also be used to ferry in terrorists and provide fake documents.
But if we can't stem the tide, what can we do to control it and minimize the bad consequences? President Bush's proposal has the merit of bringing honesty to the issue. Those now here who can prove they have a job and qualify to get work permits will have the right to work legally for three years, a right that could be renewed an unspecified number of times. It is essentially a guest-worker program that would feed the migrants into a legal channel where they become taxpayers and meet the other obligations of citizenship.
Foreigners who have job offers from American employers that cannot be filled by Americans could also participate in this program. All would be able to travel back and forth to their native countries and not be precluded from applying for a green card, which grants them permanent residency. The president also recognized that we must increase the number of green cards. If we don't, illegal immigrants who fear they might not receive a green card before their guest-worker status expires simply won't participate in the program.
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