By David L. Wilson, MR Online
February 7, 2018
We’ve seen and heard a lot about immigration in the past few
weeks, and a good deal of it has been out-and-out nonsense. Many journalists and
politicians simply don’t understand U.S. immigration policy, some consciously
lie about it, and a few, like Donald Trump, manage not to understand and at the
same time consciously lie.
1. We have a big problem called “chain immigration.” People who say this are actually talking about the family-based visa system established by the 1965 immigration reform. The term “chain migration” refers to an age-old process of people settling in a new country and then sending for friends and relatives. Many or most European Americans got here through this kind of migration. So why do conservatives call family-based immigration “chain migration”? Simple: they claim to support family values, so they don’t want us to notice that they’re opposing a program that favors family reunification.
2. Family-based immigration means “a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.” Most people don’t live long enough to create anything like the migration “chain” we find in President Trump’s rants and rightwing TV ads. It’s true that a naturalized U.S. citizen can sponsor green cards for a spouse, for parents, and for minor children, but the process involves many bureaucratic hurdles and delays. To sponsor other close relatives, such as siblings and adult children, the citizen confronts a labyrinth of quotas and restrictions, with delays stretching into decades for people of certain nationalities. Green card holders face even stricter limitations and greater hurdles.
In January Trump claimed that terrorism suspect Sayfullo Saipov brought in “22 people through the chain.” PolitiFact calculates that the 29-year-old Saipov, a green card holder since 2010, could only have done this by somehow “fathering more than 20 kids before he left Uzbekistan.”
3. We also have a good visa program called “merit-based
immigration.” Currently the U.S.
government makes immigration visas available for some people with special
skills or employment opportunities; these visas are capped at 140,000 a
year, including the applicants’ spouses and minor children. Conservatives
generally like this program, but after years of charging that immigrants are
“taking our jobs,” they’re naturally uncomfortable with the program’s usual
name, “employment-based immigration.” So in the past decade they’ve been trying
to rebrand it as “merit-based immigration.”
4. This program brings us people who “will contribute
to our society and who will love and respect our country.” Republicans are trying to reorient
the employment-based visa program towards admitting immigrants with advanced
degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This
probably does contribute to our society, but the Republicans’ real
interest is the new workers’ ability to benefit
U.S. corporations. Recruiting these immigrants gives U.S. companies a
technological edge; creates a “brain drain” for the immigrants’ home countries,
often U.S. economic rivals like China and South Korea; and compensates for the shortage
of qualified U.S.-born workers caused by the failures of our own
underfunded education system.
5. Current immigration laws have “deadly
loopholes” which allow “criminals to break into our country.” This is a reference to the William
Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which
George W. Bush signed into law in 2008. The act was intended to protect
unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S. border; instead of turning the
children back, Border Patrol agents are required to hand them over to Health
and Human Services while their asylum claims are considered. Most of these
minors are Central Americans fleeing violence in their own countries—violence
largely created by the U.S.
demand for drugs and U.S.
support for rightwing regimes.
There really is a
loophole, though—for the Border Patrol. The law excludes “contiguous
countries,” giving the agents freedom to ship Mexican kids back across the
border to face whatever the drug cartels may
have in store for them.
6. The only important immigration issue now is the legal
status of immigrants known as “Dreamers.” The
main media and political focus has been on the nearly 700,000 younger immigrants
currently losing work authorizations and the protection from deportation they
had under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),
but more
than 300,000 other immigrants, including Salvadorans and Haitians, are
losing protections they had under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
And of course there are another 10 million out-of-status immigrants who never
had any protections to lose; at least two-thirds
of them have lived here for a decade or more.
7. But of course we can’t give all these people legal
status. For much of the twentieth
century—through 1986—Congress periodically provided an avenue to
legalization for unauthorized immigrants with long-term residence. A 1938
report for the Roosevelt administration explained the reasoning: “It is not in
the best interests of the United States that there should be a considerable
number of aliens here who have resided in this country for many years and who
are otherwise eligible for naturalization and anxious to become citizens, but
who are prevented from doing so” because of a lack of status.
Why can’t we apply that
logic now? Or was amnesty all right in 1938 because back then the undocumented
immigrants were mostly white?
8. Still, we need to be realistic and compromise
on immigration. The White
House talking points from January 25 laid out a hardline restrictionist
agenda as the government’s bargaining position. Why shouldn’t immigrants and
their supporters negotiate from an equally firm position? For example, polls
show as much as 86
percent of the U.S. population supporting legal status for the Dreamers.
Why in the world should we have to compromise on that? (The rest of Trump’s
immigration agenda is also generally unpopular.)
9. At least we could compromise on Trump’s
wall. There’s a widespread sense that it
will do no harm to humor Trump by giving him $25 billion for increased border
security. But even the existing border security is far from harmless. It disrupts
border communities and causes
environmental damage, and its main result has been driving migrants into
inhospitable and dangerous terrain. More
than 7,209 people have died trying to cross the Mexico-U.S. border in the
last twenty years; for comparison, official
estimates for deaths at the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989 are in the low
hundreds.
What we actually need is
a rollback of the border security regime, along with an investigation of
corruption in the awarding of border security contracts. For example, how did
we end up paying Boeing $1 billion
for a barely functional 53-mile “virtual fence”?
10. We can count on Democrats to do the right thing for
the Dreamers. The first version of the DREAM Act
was introduced in 2001, before some of the current Dreamers were born. In 2009
and 2010 the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House. For two years
the party leadership refused to put the bill up for a vote; when they finally allowed
a roll call, in December 2010, the votes of five
Democratic senators killed the legislation. Some Democratic politicians
sincerely support immigrant rights; others are just trying to get reelected. We
can only count on them when we’ve instilled a fear in their hearts that they
may be looking for a new job after November.
11. Still, it’s up to the people in Washington; all we can
do is make phone calls. Any progress that’s
ever been made in this country has been driven by popular movements. Advances
in immigrant rights will only come about when millions of people are backing
immigrant activists in their struggles. We need to accompany
them to immigration hearings; turn
out for protests to defend their rights; report
and—if we can do it without endangering others—record
abuses by immigration agents; and consider risking
arrest to prevent these abuses. We also need to do something seemingly less
radical but no less difficult: educate ourselves on
the realities of immigration policy and get this knowledge out to others, in
personal conversations, through social media, at community meetings, at forums,
screenings, and teach-ins—in any milieu where we can be heard.
“Knowledge is power,”
according to an old adage. Rightwingers understand this; sometimes they even
use the phrase as a motto.
That’s why they’re working so hard to keep us in ignorance.
