The term “immigration reform” means radically opposite things to Democrats and Republicans, and since this issue involves so many basic human rights, I wanted to provide my own thoughts and open up this Diary to suggestions from others who’ve been tackling this issue. I addressed some of these issues in my companion diary about jerkwad bloviator-in-chief Grover Norquist's recent turn in the NYT as an immigration "reformer", and I'll be treading some similar ground here while getting into this set of issues more comprehensively. In fact, the strident shilling of regressives like Norquist, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake and other reactionary douchebags for their own ideas of immigration reform, should prompt us in turn to be very specific about what a truly progressive immigration bill, in contrast, would contain as a necessity of passage. This is something that we have to communicate repeatedly and intensively with our own Congresspeople and Senators, and hold their feet to the fire about.
For US progressives, immigration reform means a host of things designed to ensure the full dignity, rights, and fair wages for immigrants: providing a concrete and well-supported path to citizenship to millions of immigrants who have been brutally exploited by corrupt corporations, ensuring that families can re-unify and stay intact (including same-sex couples), expediting the dysfunctionally slow naturalization process, accelerating the process of immigrant voter registration and voting rights, enabling immigrants to gain full citizenship rights and assistance when they need it, and above all treating immigrants with the respect that has been the backbone of America’s historic strength.
To US conservatives (Marco Rubio and Grover Norquist perhaps the most visible GOP mouthpieces for this), immigration “reform” means a bonanza of cheap, powerless, easily exploited immigrant labor for corrupt predatory capitalists to abuse, with a retarded (if any) path to citizenship (e.g. the prolonged delays and fines envisioned in the Gang of 8's proposal), at the whim and mercy of greedy employers, with immigrants unable to stand up for their rights or seek assistance when needed, and used as a wedge to depress wages, jobs, and opportunity for immigrants and native-born Americans alike.
The Republican model, at its core, is the outrageously abused H-1B visa, which is for all practical purposes a backdoor to allow coolie or even slave labor at the expense of everyone but the greediest, scummiest members of the 1%. Assisted by rampant fraud and shoddy enforcement, the H-1B in effect allows for employers to arbitrarily control the visa status of low-wage tech workers imported for a temporary period, work the imported labor to the bone for 100+ hours a week, deny them basic benefits and worker protections, then discard them back to their home countries once they’re mentally and physically broken, replacing them with new imported serfs when the term’s up. Jobs disappear and wages are pushed brutally downward for both the exploited H-1B workers and American sci-tech STEM workers alike. Republicans salivate at the opportunity to not only increase the H1B visa cap, but also to use its corruption and degradation of both native-born and immigrant workers as a model for general immigration “reform”.
Congressional Democrats and Obama would never acquiesce to such a grotesque GOP bill, right? Well, hopefully. The flipside of having immigration reform as a major policy aim for the Dems is that it creates expectations in the media, and as the Republicans perpetrate their usual hostage-taking and thinly-disguised war against unions and the interests of working Americans, the superficial press treatment may inevitably ratchet up the pressure on Democrats to pass “some immigration bill, any bill” in hopes of saving public face, and equally hoping the public doesn’t delve too much into the details. This is what happened with the public option in the ACA, after all, and it’s in the process of occurring with the chained CPI for Social Security.
The problem with immigration reform, though, is that there’s no such thing as an incremental, “half-a-loaf” strategy for it. We already have a basic immigration framework in place (from 1990), so the immigration issue today involves nothing less than basic human rights. There’s no “compromise” on basic immigrant rights and worker protections any more than there’s a “compromise” (aka capitulation) on whether the US should allow slavery. Thus a bad, watered-down, “half-a-loaf” immigration bill would be far, far worse than no immigration bill at all. It would act as a deadly Trojan Horse, undercutting worker protections for decades while precluding real, progressive immigration reform at a later date, when we likely won’t have to deal with so much GOP mucking-up as their corrupt party goes the way of the Whigs.
So we have to stay extra vigilant on this to keep our legislators honest, and to be forceful in our actions—calls and mail/email to their offices, letters to the editor, videos and social media, public media-grabbing protests where necessary—to make sure that any considered immigration bill truly involves progressive reform. And for this, there really do have to be red lines, a checklist of basic provisions and rights in the bill that cannot, under any circumstances, be compromised away. If it comes to this, it may be far better to encourage immigrant protections and a path to citizenship by executive actions on President Obama's part, to simply relieve the backlog of unprocessed applications. This would help, among other things, for undocumented immigrants who've contributed so much with their brutally exploited labor, to be sponsored by grown children and other family members as citizens. This approach would be far [preferable to a pretend immigration reform bill drawn up by corporate lobbyists and the Chambers of Commerce. Failure to take a truly progressive path on immigration reform would, in 2014, result in an even worse disaster than 2010. A few of these progressive fundamentals below the fiery doily.
1. The core of the bill must be a clear, unequivocal, and enforceable path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have been horrifically abused by corrupt corporate interests. Republicans would prefer a “guest worker”, bracero or some other vaguely euphemistically-named scheme to allow for more cheap exploitable labor, while disallowing eventual citizenship or making it all but impossible in practice to obtain. Aspects of the recent Gang of Eight proposal, including extending the already crippling delays in place, are unacceptable, as these would in practice turn the immigrants into an exploitable cheap labor class, unable to vote or assert their rights against the corrupt firms abusing them.
2. Family reunification must remain the backbone of the immigrant system in general, and that includes same-sex couples. Republicans once again, will tout various alternatives or argue for replacing the family reunification scheme with some point-based or “skills” preference, which is little more than GOP wingnut-speak for various methods to separate families and deprive immigrants of basic rights, using them instead as defenseless cheap labor.
3. Immigration status cannot be contingent on employment status- one of the corporate giveaways that Marco Rubio and other Republicans in the Gang of Eight apparently want most. This would basically replicate the worst features of the H-1B program, giving employers carte blanche to abuse and humiliate their immigrant employees by threatening them with arbitrary job termination and subsequent deportation of them and their families. Immigrant workers would be too intimidated to speak up against abuses, arbitrarily low wages, 100+ hour weeks and such.
4. Immigrants must be paid fair, comparable wages and receive full benefits for their work, as befitting a modern industrialized country. No exceptions. To do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of both American workers and immigrants alike, acquiescing to the GOP’s cheap-labor (“as close to serfdom as possible”) lobby.
5. The path to citizenship can’t be larded with a gazillion stupid, arbitrary demands that make no sense in the context of the issue. The fine (which could be set to anything, potentially many thousands of dollars) is especially offensive, since gaining citizenship is outrageously expensive as it is, and the undocumented migrants have already been grossly abused and robbed of the fruits of their labor by corrupt, stingy employers. They’re hard-pressed financially, and a large fine would exacerbate their woes and merely serve to provide an ill-gotten revenue source for governments too cowardly to tax the real freeloaders (aka 1%ers milking the system and sending their proceeds offshore, like Mitt Romney and the health insurer and financial sector in general). It would also push hard-pressed immigrants into debt and make them vulnerable to further exploitation by Payday lenders and our corrupt financial sector. If anything, the underpaying, exploitative employers of illegal immigrants must be the ones bearing the fines.
The language test likewise doesn't belong in the bill- how can hard-working, exhausted immigrants already pushed to the brink, be expected to find spare time to prep for this sort of thing? How would it even work in states like New Mexico, where Spanish has been the main official and working language since the Mexican-American War in 1848? Spanish isn’t a foreign language in the USA, we’re the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking country and we’ve been a multilingual land from the start. Heck, languages like Algonquin and Navajo, as well as Spanish, were established in United States territory well before English was, the first biblical scriptures were published in native American languages and Spanish! Immigrants aren’t stupid, they’ll learn the languages they need wherever they’re working, and for a big diverse country like our own. The language requirement does nothing more than provide another opportunity for corrupt obstructionists to block and delay immigrants from gaining their basic human rights.
6. The H1-B visa program must not in any way be expanded. A few Dems have been duped into supporting this corrupt serf labor scam based on high-sounding platitudes from rich corporate donors, always a danger in this wonderful post-Citizens United era of ours. (Including of all people, Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota who’s been a reliable progressive otherwise, tricked into co-sponsoring the H-1B cap increase with two oily wingnut showboaters, Orrin Hatch and Marco Rubio, not to mention Grover Norquist in his recent NYT piece. She’s reasonable and will reconsider this mistake if we help make her aware of it.) If anything, the H-1B program should be formally abolished, and replaced with a more humane program that puts the visa into the hands of the immigrant worker, not the employer, while allowing immigrants to stand up for themselves against abusive companies and executives, obtain citizenship and earn wages that are consistent with industry standards. Heavy penalties should instead by applied to companies that outsource American jobs while paying virtually no tax to the country that's allowed them to gain so much wealth.
7. There must, absolutely, be more funding and expediting of the naturalizing process. The backlog for gaining citizenship is an outrage and affront to decency as well as our country’s traditions, and here too we see ulterior motives at work. After all, the longer immigrants are kept in limbo by Republicans, the more corrupt employers can exploit their labor and intimidate their workers while pushing down wages, without the immigrants being able to vote or assert their rights. There have been some suggestions about doubling the numbers of legal immigrants each year, but this should be considered only if there are concrete steps to accelerate and expedite the naturalization process.
8. There must not be any consideration of the sorts of violent, ultra-punitive border control measures that Marco Rubio and other Republicans seem to fantasize about in their various gusts of hot air about immigration reform. .
9. There must be attendant consideration given to low-cost worker retraining and a true, effective jobs bill for both Us-born workers and immigrants in this still awful economy. The true unemployment (U6 and measures that look at discouraged workers) is not far away from Depression levels, so simply tossing workers to the wolves won't work. There has to be public involvement (yes, the evil hand of government to Norquist and his fellow corporate bootlickers) to smooth this process.
Ideally the Dems will be able to twist enough arms to bring about truly progressive comprehensive immigration reform. But the GOP controls the House and is throwing a temper tantrum a day in the Senate, so it’s conceivable that they may try to water down the immigration bill into an ugly corporate giveaway and vicious exploitation of immigrants as cheap labor, depriving them of the ability to protect themselves. If so, then we can’t give in and allow a bad bill to be even considered. We need to keep constant vigil and pressure on our elected representatives, to make it clear that there’s no tolerance for capitulation on any of these provisions, and if the GOP wants to obstruct, so be it- as their power wanes, we’ll be back. In the meantime, Obama can use his executive powers to bring about necessary interim changes for the better (as he did with the Dream Act).
This is just a brief list, and unfortunately I'll be working a night shift and then some so won't be able to follow up on my own. Just wanted to spark some discussion about these and other key elements that you all might have in mind to ensure the progressive quality of this legislation.