Thoughtful analysis of immigration in hemispheric context

from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA--linked below). I'd call them a progressive outfit...


Mods: These first few one-sentence paragraphs are actually introductory bullet points. I have included four paragraphs of actual text and a link at the bottom.

The Immigration Bomb Explodes


Analysis prepared by COHA Research Fellow Michael Lettieri
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

President Bush travels to Cancún for U.S.-Canada-Mexico meeting as Harper awaits to accommodate Washington and Fox struggles to salvage the remnants of his presidency.

When he meets tomorrow with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts, Bush has the opportunity to help repair battered ties with Mexico as well as Canada that were damaged by the State Department’s policies of hemispheric neglect.

Mexican president Vicente Fox can perhaps finally advance the immigration issue, which has been mainly moribund since the September 11 attacks, as the topic has finally migrated from the margins to center stage in Washington.

Immigration is a bilateral issue very much involving Mexico, and must be addressed as such, with comprehensive strategies that treat not just the symptoms (illegal workers in the U.S.) but the illness as well (Latin America’s lack of inclusive economic growth).

The current U.S. immigration measure that now is going to the Senate floor for debate offers a more constructive building block than previous proposals, but a highly polemic debate lies ahead.

Fox, whose failures to achieve immigration reform have been the defining mark on his presidency, must take concrete steps to promote more effective immigration related policies in his own country.


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Rarely have U.S.-Mexican relations received the sort of public scrutiny that the currently raging immigration debate is now attracting. But the problem, fostered by years of diplomatic indolence and half-measures, now demands an approach that boldly confronts associated problems on both sides of the border, if a sustainable path forward is to be found. Although Thursday’s summit among Canadian Prime Minister Harper, and Presidents Bush and Fox in Cancún, will likely be dominated by talk of immigration plans, these are unlikely to produce a major agreement, let alone a breakthrough.

A Long Stewing Issue
The immigration issue has been propelled to the forefront of public debate in recent weeks. A harsh House bill that included the incendiary proposal to construct a nearly 700-mile long border wall helped incite a wave of protests, which culminated in a 500,000-strong march in Los Angeles on March 26. Further raising the issue’s profile has been the unchecked wave of drug and gang violence in Northern Mexico, which has prompted concerns pertaining to spillover and the thought that the wall might come to be defended as serving the dual purpose of blocking both migrants and drugs. With the topic of immigration now becoming the key election season issue in many U.S. border areas as well as further inland, the debate has often veered from measured approaches towards reckless policies.

Overall, the current debate largely lacks the required degree of depth or relevance. Illegal immigration to this country is not a new phenomenon, yet it has never been addressed with consistent and comprehensive policies. Successive administrations have pursued policies that sought to interdict migrants at the border, but permitted almost non-existent enforcement of hiring practices throughout the rest of the country. And even the front lines were thinly manned: last March Bush proposed hiring only a tenth of the 2000 new border patrol agents he had originally sought in a 2004 intelligence bill. This was not unintentional, as the steady stream of cheap labor proved beneficial for employers and consumers alike, and such easy alternate solutions proved irresistible for White House staffers. Labor unions appreciated the new recruits, and accepted that while there was no shortage of labor in the country, there was an insatiable market for cheap, disposable labor. A push-pull equation was at work here, where illusion was substituted for the facts on the ground which told the story that if you made it over the border – and nearly all those who survived to persist in their efforts eventually did – there was virtually no likelihood that you would be apprehended, because this was the way the Chamber of Commerce and its membership wanted it to be.

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The New Impulse

If illegal immigration had been a dirty secret in the past, it is now at the center of the U.S. political debate, and forces arrayed along the entire ideological spectrum have laid out proposals on the subject. Hard-right groups, such as the freelance border patrolling “Minutemen” (a band even President Bush referred to as “vigilantes”) and their legislative equivalents, Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), have failed to put forth anything approximating a rational proposal. Yet holding the middle ground has been a difficult task. The bill produced by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and backed by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ), is a constructive attempt at balance that has been hailed throughout Latin America as a positive step. But there is a rough legislative path ahead for such attempts at moderation. Even Senator Arlen Spector (R-PA), who voted in favor of the Judiciary Committee bill that eventually was approved by his committee, acknowledge that a fierce debate remains to be faced. The bill, which offers illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S. an inviting path to citizenship, has been blasted by right wing activists – including the Washington Times – as offering “amnesty.” Yet the bill’s proponents steer away from the dreaded “A” word, insisting that their version is something else. Tancredo has already vowed that the Senate Judiciary Committee’s measure would never pass the House.



Full article...


http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/06.21_Immigration_Cancun_Fox.html
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The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers." For more information, please see our web page at http://www.coha.org/ or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.

Here's something that's actually thoughtful and informative, and it's sinking link a stone.

:kick:

That could get in the way of strongly held opinion.