State Of The Union: The Prospects For Comprehensive Immigration Reform In 2007
Now back in control of Congress, Democrats pledge a revival of
comprehensive immigration reform (CIR).
Should we believe them? Now, that is a question to ponder. If they mean
what they say, why did Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) leave CIR out of the "must
pass" agenda that the House Democrats pushed through in their first 100 hours?
If they are kidding us, why did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada lay down a marker
by introducing S. 9 in the first days of the young 110th Congress?
What will the GOP do following their fall from power? Will they embrace CIR to
show they are not anti- Latino or embrace enforcement to show they are tough on
border security? Will the Democrats want to give President Bush a domestic
achievement in the run-up to the 2008 elections or will they hold back out of a
desire to weaken the White House at all costs? Beyond all that, what message
about immigration, if any, did the 2006 election deliver on immigration? Lots of questions; let's look for a few
answers.
Let's read the mid-term tea leaves first. The 2006 elections
delivered a mixed message on immigration. On the plus side, several high-profile
enforcement-only Republicans like Congressman J.D. Hayworth and candidate Randy
Graf of Arizona were defeated, along with
Henry Bonilla's loss of his House seat in Texas to Democratic challenger Ciro
Rodriguez who attacked the incumbent's endorsement of a wall along the
Texas/Mexican border. Exit polls in 2006 showed Democrats gaining 11% from
Hispanic voters compared to 2004 totals according to the Pew Hispanic
Center; other surveys
were even more disturbing for the GOP revealing a drop of 15% from 44% to 29%. John Conyers, the liberal firebrand from Detroit has replaced R.
James Sensenbrenner, the die-hard Wisconsin conservative, as Chair of the House
Judiciary Committee. House Republicans took out their anger on the unfortunate
Mr. Sensenbrenner, architect of their "get tough" strategy on immigration, by
refusing to grant the Wisconsin Republican any slot on a major House committee
for the next legislative session. Senator Mal Martinez of Florida, a stalwart champion of CIR, has
become the Republican National Chairman. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from
Silicon Valley and former immigration lawyer, now heads up the House Immigration
Sub-committee with Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts wielding the gavel over the
Senate Immigration Sub-Committee. If the
voting record of Democrats in the last Congress is any indication of how the
110th Congress might behave, CIR might happen. Some 82 % of House
Democrats opposed the draconian GOP approach in 2006 while 90% of Senate
Democrats backed the McCain-Kennedy version of CIR, a bill deemed so heinous by
the House GOP leadership that it refused to even go to conference with the
Senate. So, on one hand, things look
good, right?
Trouble is, there is another way to look at the election that is
significantly less encouraging. Several pro-immigration Republicans lost in
2006, such as former Senators Lincoln Chafee in Rhode
Island and Mike DeWine in Ohio,
not to mention Representative Jim Leach in Iowa. Their defeat will make it harder for
pro-immigration Democrats to find allies across the aisle.
Rep. Jeff Flake, of Arizona,
the most outspoken immigration advocate among all House Republicans, save
possibly for Chris Cannon of Utah,
was kept off the House Judiciary Committee. House Republicans filled the
ranking minority seat on the Immigration Sub-committee with Steve King of Indiana who, last year, drew headlines when he suggested
that electrified fences should be erected along the border with Mexico on the
theory that they had proved successful in containing livestock. In Arizona, the same state
that saw Hayworth and Graf go down in flames, a state with a large Hispanic
population, some 17% of all voters, 48% of these Hispanic voters backed a
referendum making English the state's official language. At a recent gathering
of evangelical conservatives in Amelia Island, South Carolina, Senator Sam
Brownback (R-KS) had to defend his embrace of guest worker reform against stout
conservative criticism while Congressman Duncan Hunter, the first House
Republican since James Garfield to seek his party's presidential nod, used this
same gathering to portray himself as an unvarnished foe of any attempt to
provide the undocumented with a path towards citizenship. Senator John McCain
has won himself few friends among the same Republican activists that he is
otherwise moving heaven and earth to attract by his high profile ownership of
CIR. So, while some GOP hardliners may no longer be in Congress, and while the
lure of all out nativism as a political talisman has undoubtedly lost much of
its allure, this does not mean that the Republican Party has found religion on
CIR. While the business wing of the
party wants access to more foreign labor, social conservatives worry about
social cohesion and a disintegration of traditional values. Will Main Street or
Wall Street define the GOP posture on immigration? That answer will tell us
volumes.
Surely, if CIR advocates
cannot count on the Republicans, they can rely on the Democrats? Well, maybe. It is true that Senator Reid, like President
Bush, has identified CIR as of his top legislative priorities. Senator Reid
introduced S.9 only 3 days after Congress convened, to reflect the sense of the
Congress that the time for CIR had come. Senator Reid is not alone. Just
recently, a bipartisan coalition lead by
Senator Larry Craig(R-Idaho) [corrected 3/5/07 Ed.], Senator Kennedy, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA),
Rep Chris Cannon (R-Utah) and Rep. Howard Berman (D- CA) reintroduced the
so-called AgJobs Bill, a key component of last year's debate. AgJobs would
provide 1.5 million unauthorized farm workers the opportunity to obtain
eventual green card status if they met certain tests. The Alliance
for Immigration Reform 2007, consisting of business, labor, ethnic, religious,
conservative and pro-immigrant groups, announced plans in late January 2007 to
fight hard for CIR passage. So, we can all kick back and exhale. Right? Well, maybe not just yet.
Many of the newly-minted Democratic lawmakers might not be so in
love with CIR either. This is particularly true with the so-called "Blue Dog"
Democrats in the Upper South and Mid-West, many of whom like Heath Schuler of
Tennessee and Nancy Boyda of Kansas,
who ran to the right of their GOP opponents on immigration, condemning a guest
worker program as "amnesty" and urging even tougher border enforcement
measures. Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana sheriff
who is part of the Democratic freshman class in the House, protested the USCIS
policy of catch and release when his deputies arrested an illegal alien in Vanderburgh County. Another Democratic rookie, Nick
Lampson of suburban Houston,
who replaced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, opposes any guest worker
initiative now as a replay of what Lampson regards as the failed 1986
compromise. Nor was such Democratic
skepticism confined to the House. In the Senate, for example, Claire McCaskill,
a victorious insurgent who convinced the voters of Missouri to throw out first-term Republican
incumbent Jim Talent, ran a campaign that said yes to a border fence, no to
legalization for the undocumented while urging stiffer fines for employers who
hired them. Now that they are in charge,
the Democrats may find themselves every bit as fractured over immigration as
the Republicans were last time around.
Anxious not to endanger her slim majority and wanting above all to
consolidate and expand it after 2008, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid
are going to have to attract the increasingly important Hispanic vote while
still appearing to honor continued public concern over terrorism and internal
security. That will not be easy. If the Democrats want to consolidate their
gains by picking off the low-hanging fruit, immigration may have to wait a
while. House Democrats are unlikely to support any immigration bill that
Republicans can use successfully against them in two years. It may not have
been an accident that any reference to CIR was conspicuously absent from Senator
James Webb (D_VA)'s Democratic response to the President's State of the Union. His
heart-felt invocation of economic populism had a distinctly "Made in America" ring
to it. "It's not without its challenges for sure," Jeanne Butterfield,
executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers' Association, recently
told the Washington Post. "You've got
opposition in both parties. You still have restrictionists in the Republican
Party. You have Democrats who've been reluctant to move on any kind of worker program."
In the last Congress, then Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) refused
to allow any vote on an immigration bill that did not have the support of the
Republican caucus, the so-called "majority of the majority" approach. After the
Senate passed the Kennedy-McCain CIR bill, Hastert could have pushed it through
the House by relying on most Democrats and some Republicans. He chose not to do
so. If Speaker Pelosi adopts this same tactic, then we will know CIR will have
to wait until next time. It is unlikely that she will want to buck the
continued hostility of her labor union allies to any guest worker initiative
that some, but not all, of organized labor views as subversive of American
wages. Much as social conservatives battle corporate interests for supremacy
within the GOP, the old economy unionists in the AFL-CIO compete with the new
economy Service Employees International Union, who represents health care
workers, public employees and hotel/restaurant laborers, for primacy within the
Democratic Party. One big reason why the Democratic Party as a whole is split
on immigration is the fact that their trade union allies, who provide so much
of the money and vital political ground troops, cannot decide whether to
support or oppose CIR. In defiance of the AFL_CIO, from which they seceded, the
SEIU unions recently sent a strong letter urging the prompt and total adoption
of CIR to Senator Edward Kennedy.
This split over immigration within the
house of labor mirrors a much larger and deeper split over the nature of
unionism within American society. Will
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid be more concerned over placating
AFL-CIO opposition to CIR or echoing SEIU support of it? On the Democratic side, that is the drama to
watch.
The general public seems as confused as Congress over what is
going to happen. CBS News conducted a poll in early January 2007 to ask
Americans if they thought that CIR would pass now that the Democrats had
regained control of Congress. The poll revealed that 42% thought it would, 42%
thought it would not, while the rest were not sure! So much depends on issues
that have nothing to do with immigration. If the Democratic Congressional
leadership goes after Bush hammer and tongs over Iraq, if Chairman Conyers
blankets the White House with subpoenas, and the partisan warfare erases the
last lingering semblance of political civility, it is hard to see how much of
anything will happen. Remember that any immigration legislation will require a
supermajority of 60 votes to get by in the Senate. The partisan combatants may decide they have
more important fish to fry. The Democratic Left may elect to oppose Bush on
immigration because it wants to inflict maximum political humiliation and cares
more about that than it does about CIR, particularly if the political realities
circumscribe what can be achieved. This
will most certainly be the case.
The Democratic Left believes that its' time has come and any
compromise with President Bush now over
a compromise immigration bill that does not provide for complete and immediate
green card status for the undocumented is not worth the bother. Better wait,
throw out the rascals in two years and come back later to get what they really
want. This will be a tragic political mistake. It is vital that the Democrats
pass CIR if only to show that they can actually do something, that they can
once again become the party of governance, that pragmatic results trump
ideological purity. To hold out for the whole CIR loaf now, and spurn anything
less, will be the most pyrrhic of victories, proving to all but those Americans
who would vote for them anyway, that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted
with the levers of power. That will not be the worst of it. Such political
recklessness will break faith with the immigrant community as a whole. No
longer will they and their children reward the Democratic Party with their
loyalty and their votes. No longer will they provide the lever that the
Democratic Party can use to flip Florida
and other battleground states from Blue to Red. If the Democratic Left goes all
out for Bush's blood now, knowing that CIR will go down with the President,
then the immigrant community will know in its bones that there is no place for
it on the Democratic bus; indeed, they will have been thrown under the bus. Good government and smart politics dictate a
far different course: Get something now and establish a foundation to claim a
larger and sweeter triumph in 2009. As a
life-long Democrat, I turn round to my party and urge this wisdom upon them for
our sake, our clients' sake and for the sake of our country. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson told his American scholar of long ago, in words that seem no less
relevant today, "come my friends, it is not too late to seek a newer world."
Endnotes
© Copyright 2007 by Gary Endelman. All rights reserved.
About The Author
Gary Endelman practices immigration law at BP America Inc. The opinions expressed in this column are purely personal and do not represent the views or beliefs of BP America Inc. in any way.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of ILW.COM.
Copyright © 1999-2006 American Immigration LLC, ILW.COM
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