WASHINGTON – With 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, there’s little disagreement that the system is broken and needs to be fixed.
The fight in Congress is over how.
Most advocate better security at the borders; some would build more fences and put U.S. soldiers behind them.
Others argue for a guest-worker program; opponents contend it would just reward the undocumented immigrants already here.
Low-skill jobs are being filled, and the social ills of Latin America are being eased, goes the debate. No, good jobs are being lost and our social services are being drained, the other side says.
Sorting it all out will be complicated because the debate likely will take place next year, when all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.
“Immigration is going to come up in all sorts of races and in all sorts of ways,” said Jennifer Duffy, a congressional analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “I don’t think it’s an issue that any candidate can ignore. It’s everywhere.”
Indeed, the problem is no longer a major concern just for Texas, California and other states on the Mexican border. The issue popped up at a recent candidates’ forum in Minnesota and was road-tested in the race for governor in Virginia.
Congress has several immigration bills to consider. The House could begin debate before the Christmas recess, the Senate in January.
Much of the divisiveness is within the GOP, whose members are involved with most of the major pieces of legislation under consideration. Some Republicans call strictly for stiffer penalties, and others are looking for practical solutions to the millions of undocumented immigrants already here. President Bush is trying to find his balance between different factions.
Appealing to his more conservative base by talking mostly about enforcement, Bush promised in Tucson, Ariz., last week: “I’m not going to sign an immigration bill that includes amnesty.”
Only briefly at the end did he discuss the temporary worker program that he trumpeted in 2004: “People in this debate must recognize that we will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary worker program.”
Proposals for some kind of temporary or “guest” worker program have bipartisan Senate backing.
Yet, outspoken opponents in the House, such as Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, largely equate the idea to amnesty and surrender.
“No one in the leadership is saying, “Please give us a guest worker program,”‘ said John Keeley at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan research group. “It seems to be a nonstarter.”
The issue is so politically sensitive that some worry that hard-liners might be tarring the party as anti-immigrant, particularly as it tries to make gains among the Latino voting block.
In an e-mail, Tancredo writes of a “struggle to preserve our national identity, against the tide of illegal immigrants flooding the United States.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman told GOP governors last week that while stronger law enforcement was crucial, America was a nation of immigrants and its doors should never be closed.
Two key questions will be what to do about the undocumented immigrants already here and how to control the future flow of those escaping poverty in their home countries.
“The (undocumented) workers are going to where the jobs are,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group. “There are jobs that need to be filled that no one else is filling.”
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a right-leaning think tank, told a Senate committee last summer that those jobs were easily filled 50 years ago because half of all American men were high school dropouts and took them.
Now less than 10 percent drop out.
“We now need foreign workers to do the low-skilled, low-paying jobs these men used to do,” Jacoby testified.
“The native-born American work force is aging; it’s shrinking.”
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One bill has the backing of Republicans such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. It also boasts Democratic backing, from Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
The business community supports the McCain-Kennedy bill because it provides undocumented immigrants a path toward citizenship.
Undocumented workers take low-wage, low-skilled jobs that companies find hard to fill.
“Many jobs in agriculture are seasonal and are jobs that U.S. workers are unwilling to do,” Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a statement backing Bush’s temporary worker proposal.
Melinda Lewis, director of policy for El Centro, a social services agency in Kansas, said that families are often split between two countries and the wait to reunite relatives takes years.
Combined with the limited supply of work visas, the easy availability of false documents and the tendency of employers to look the other way, she said, “There’s a general sense of almost anarchy within our immigration system because it’s so dysfunctional.”
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AP-NY-12-09-05 0614EST
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