Immigration Reform? Wait 'Till Next Year
By Jun Wang
New America Media
Jun 23, 2009
LOS ANGELES, Calif – If
there’s one thing immigration proponents and foes can agree on it’s
this: a legislative overhaul of our immigration system has been pushed
down the president’s priorities list and probably won’t happen this
year.
That was the consensus on
Thursday at a panel titled, “Are We on Our Way to Immigration Reform?”
at the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs California
State University, Los Angeles.
While generally engaged in
a heated argument, the panelists all agreed that the economy and
healthcare are higher up on the country’s priority list than immigration
reform.
According to Ira Mehlman
of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),
immigration is the top issue for only nine percent of Latinos.
“All care more about
putting the economy back on track and putting people back on the job
with affordable healthcare,” Mehlman said.
But the lack of public
focus on immigration reform does not mean that the debate is any less
polarized, or that that each side's passion is any less intense.
Nancy Ramirez, western
regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund (MALDEF), said the lack of clear national leadership has lead to
“chaos” on immigration.
Progressive cities declare
themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration enforcement, while
voters in Arizona pass numerous ballot measures denying undocumented
immigrants access to basic services, and the city of Hazelton, Penn.,
goes so far as to forbid landlords from renting apartments to
undocumented immigrations.
In such an environment,
Ramirez said, employers in conservative cities have learned that they
are better off not hiring people who are “foreign looking or having
foreign sound names.”
Meantime, Gary Toebben of
the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce said that in diverse cities like Los
Angeles with large numbers of undocumented immigrants, a large
underground economy has developed.
FAIR’s Mehlman said the
on-going tension on immigration endures because the issue affects
everyone’s self-interest.
People come from other
countries to the United States to better pursue their self-interest,
Mehlman said. American employers benefit from a larger pool of workers,
and foreign governments benefit from pouring their unemployed citizens
into the United States, from which immigrants send money back to their
home countries.
However, Mehlman believes
this arrangement drains the resources available to those already in the
United States. “Nobody blames people needing healthcare, kids looking
for education, but logistically there’s a limit of the available
resources,” he added.
“A massive amnesty not
only concerns people who are already here,” Mehlman said, because
they’ll bring more family members into the United States in the future.
Another panelist,
University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor Ruth Milkman
countered that the United States has benefited from immigration
enormously. “There is nothing that could be further from the truth to
blame immigration on the decline of living standard,” she said.
But people do blame
immigrants, especially in a recession. MALDEF’s Ramirez said there has
been a considerable increase in hate crime against Latinos.
MALDEF believes common
ground can be found. Ramirez said a recent MALDEF survey showed that
seven out of 10 people in the United States say the country needs to
boost its border security, while simultaneously registering undocumented
immigrants and putting them on a path to citizenship. She said only 20
percent of people interviewed believe the United States should force
undocumented immigrants to leave.
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