I’m sure just about all of you have heard about the controversial Arizona law formally known as SB1070 by now. The law, signed over a month ago, essentially requires Arizona police to question anyone about their immigration status if they have “reasonable suspicion” that someone stopped or arrested is an illegal immigrant, according to the LA Times. Naturally, the signing of that bill has set off a national debate around the very issue both parties wanted to avoid in this election year, and as the debate has played out, many politicians in Washington and around the country are realizing the very thing they were afraid of: that we need to tackle immigration reform now, rather than push it down the road as just about every politician wanted.
If the controversy had ended with SB1070, that would have been one thing, but since this is a fiery national debate topic you know what’s coming. Apparently, a girl in the second grade called out the First Lady on immigration, and according to the Huffington Post, she hit the mark. Showing more leniency toward illegal immigrants than the previous administration was one of the ideas that President Obama ran on as part of his whole “change” platform. Well, we got that change: there are more deportations now than under the Bush Administration, and the article indicates that the rate of deportation is going up. While it looks bad on the face of it, the truth of this figure is in the details. In fact, while the overall number goes up, and the knee-jerk commentators on talk radio love to point at the number, the real gem in this is that the proportion of those detained and deported with criminal records is going up relative to the group of ordinary, law-abiding illegal immigrants.
A little girl at one of the First Lady’s many events around the country could be forgiven for bringing politics into focus in such a setting as a community event hosted by Michelle Obama and the Mexican First Lady, the fact is that according to the reports of the encounter, she articulates her point in a much more poignant manner than many adult commentators. While it is easy to make her into the poster child for immigration reform, it says a lot about the state of the political landscape in America when the words of a second-grader are more effective and true than the most well-reasoned, impassioned argument by a politician or other commentator. Though the thought of someone that young being thrust into the national spotlight and being used as a symbol of the immigration debate sickens me, the fact of the matter is that immigration is an issue that hits home for individuals, families, and their broader communities who could possibly feel a bit intimidated by all of the vitriol spewing on both sides of the debate.
Further, this child has actually performed a vital service for the country. We can talk about the need to reform the nation’s immigration policies in the abstract as much as we like, but in truth, the little girl who politely told Mrs. Obama about her mother’s immigration-related fears added a dose of reality that the average person sitting in their living room watching the evening news could relate to. In that moment, the immigration debate went from discussions of our shared history as immigrants and talk of civil rights and liberties to fears that a little girl could one day be snatched up by ICE agents and taken with her mother away from just about everything she knows and thrown into one of the nation’s shady detention and deportation facilities for months while the Department of Homeland Security works through the deportation process. If nothing else, the girl’s words have put a human face on the immigration debate and have allowed all of us to hopefully take the chance to step back and question why we let the system punish those who just want to do what we all did in our family’s past, whether it was years or generations ago.
So What Can We Do?
Again in the abstract, the questions of whether we need to fix our nation’s immigration policies and when we need to have essentially been settled by this event. Immigration needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now. But more specifically, what are we going to do to fix it? Today, President Obama announced that he is going to send 1,200 National Guard troops to secure the border. As the New York Times reports, however, this proposal is already being attacked as not enough by the governors of the states affected. You know what, they’re right, but instead of throwing more troops at the border like they are saying, we need to achieve systemic reform in order to truly secure the border. Far too often, as in the War on Drugs and the current immigration debate, too much emphasis is put on enforcement and not enough on fixing the root causes. How about we change that? Go ahead and secure the border by any legal means necessary and deport those here illegally who have gotten a criminal record.
But here’s a (not so) radical idea: give those immigrants who are already here and have proven themselves to be law-abiding members of the community a chance to become citizens. Of course, I am not calling for a blanket amnesty as many liberals do every now and then; they committed a crime by crossing the border without proper documentation or staying past their visa’s expiration, and so on, but call that a misdemeanor and make that on its own not be grounds for immediate deportation proceedings. Neither am I encouraging opening up completely and just letting people in. Fix the convoluted visa system so that those individuals who want to come here can easily figure out what documentation they need and then strengthen enforcement of those visas. If an immigrant is willing to pay taxes and be a productive member of society, why shouldn’t we let them? Make them pay a reasonable fine as part of their path to citizenship, but give them a path to citizenship.
I can hear the standard line about them taking away Americans’ jobs a mile away; don’t start that, just don’t. It is a valid concern, but come on, that argument is stained with racism at its core. After all, let’s say an immigrant arrives from the United Kingdom and he decides that he wants to open a business selling widgets in the same area that I am already selling them. However, he is able to sell them more cheaply than I am because he is willing to live with a smaller profit margin. Because of the lower prices, soon all of my customers instead buy their widgets from the newcomer and soon enough my business is bankrupt and I’m out of a job. Where’s the chorus of complaints that the British immigrant stole my job? There. isn’t. any. It is regarded as a simple cost of doing business.
When we think of illegal immigrants, we generally think of Mexicans and people from other Central and South American countries crossing the border to work in California’s agricultural fields or as landscapers and other low-paying jobs. The case here is somewhat different, but the fundamentals are the same. The farm owners and business owners that hire these immigrants try so hard to minimize their costs of doing business and maximize their profits that the practice borders on illegal. There are minimum wages for a reason people; if you aren’t willing to provide a living wage for your employees, you should be ashamed to call yourself an entrepreneur. Times are certainly tough with the recession and sluggish recovery, but that is no excuse to not try to show some decency toward your employees. With all the subsidies and other special concessions that go to farmers in our country, that industry is a different animal altogether, but let’s show some humanity. Reforming immigration is more than enforcement and deportation; it is about upholding our commitment to civil rights and the freedom to live the American Dream that drew each and every one of our families to this great country in the first place.
The It’s Time for Immigration Reform by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
RSS
Twitter
Tumblr
Facebook
LinkedIn
Digg
