None of the current immigration reform proposals currently being discussed, including the “compromise” announced today will work. They will not stop the flow of undocumented immigrants and they will not secure our borders. They certainly will not stop terrorists if they wish to enter the U.S.
Why? Because none of them get at the root causes driving immigration to this country and all of them conflate security with immigration in ways that are just plain false.
To take Mexico as the most relevant example, mass migration from Mexico to the U.S. has increased dramatically since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NFTA) was enacted. Real manufacturing wages have decreased in many regions of Mexico, while entire swaths of what were once family farms where once indigenous people worked and made their lives have been wiped out by large agribusiness interests. Here is more from the New York Times.
More from New American Media:
“U.S. farm subsidies have rendered obsolete Mexican farming, and millions of farmers have lost their livelihoods. In Oaxaca and Michoacan states, two of Mexico's poorest -- agriculturally dependent with large numbers of indigenous peoples, with literacy rates trailing the national average -- entire towns and villages have been abandoned by the able-bodied in search of work. The protests in Oaxaca state this past summer, ostensibly to oust an unpopular governor who runs the state as if it where his personal fiefdom, have made it impossible for anyone to govern.”
In addition, as U.S. and other multinational companies took advantage of NAFTA to establish manufacturing and such in Mexico, they were unencumbered by the labor and pollution standards they might face in other countries. As a result, labor conditions in Mexico have suffered and entire regions are so polluted as to be nearly unlivable.
That’s why none of the proposals currently being considered will stop immigration from Mexico. When people are literally STARVING, living in polluted squalor and seeing no hope for themselves or their families, they will find a way out. When they can risk coming to the U.S. without documentation and still make more in a day than they could often make in a week or even a month in Mexico, they will keep coming. It is called survival.
Unless we revise trade policy and work with Mexico to improve labor and living conditions (unlikely under the current administration), we can revise our immigration laws all we want but it simply will not work.
Add to that, when current U.S. immigration law can often separate them from at least some of their family members for 10 to 20 years or more, they will find a way to bring those family members here anyway. The compromise announced today will not change this. In fact, by focusing more on labor skills and less on family relations for granting immigration visas, it will likely make the situation worse eventually.
Neither will any of the proposals being put forward secure our borders or stop those who wish to harm the U.S. from entering the country, Our borders are simply to large geographically and too privately owned for this to work. It is just not affordable and likely not even possible to militarize the entire border. What about those that come over water? Could a potential terrorist not still get a student visa or apply to be one of the new temporary workers?
The problem with the approaches now being taken is that they conflate immigrants who want to live and work in the U.S. and mean us no harm with guarding against those who would try to inflict harm. The Mexican farmers are really not planning to blow up anything, I assure you -- at least not yet. If we keep treating people the way we currently are, maybe.
What is needed is a system that makes it easy to identify those who are here for legitimate reasons. If there are not million of people living in the shadows because they have to, it becomes much easier to identify those that are still trying to hide in the shadows.