Give Me Your Tired...

of arguing over immigration. Like me. I guess it's better than arguing about poor Terry Schiavo, may she rest in peace. Or late-term abortions, or gay marriage. Immigration is actually a substantive issue with implications for the lives of ordinary Americans. Given that we are a nation of immigrants, we probably need to talk about it every so often.

But it would be useful not to schedule that recurring debate in a presidential election bi-year (yes, let's admit it, the election campaign season now lasts two years.) Then we could actually talk about reality, rather than set up a field of straw men and take turns knocking them down.

Conservatives claim to worry about terrorists sneaking in from Tijuana and Vancouver, while liberals think anybody who wants to set any kind of limits on immigration is an anti-Latino racist.

Full disclosure: I'm a Latina, sort of. Both my parents were born in Cuba. Spanish was the language they told their secrets in. I'm more or less bilingual and bicultural. One of the great trials of my life is my current inability to find canned cascos de guayaba in any grocery store, even the ones in Latino neighborhoods. (I mention that here in hope that some reader can help me out with a well-placed comment.)

Does that give me any kind of license to talk about immigration? Dunno. Most of my ruminations on the issue arise out of (a) recurring arguments with Mr. Dissociated, an Anglo with four immigrant grandparents, and (b) a long-standing family feud with INS (now ICE), which screwed around with my mother's citizenship and has thereby become my least favorite federal bureaucracy, ahead of even Selective Service. I used to practice a bit of immigration law--the simple stuff, green card and citizenship applications, re-entry permits and so on. Now none of it is simple, the stakes are very high, and I refer all inquiries about it from my clients to experts who practice nothing else and are very very good and very very expensive.

And, as usual, I like to look at the history of the issue before coming down to current events. The history of immigration law is pretty short. There wasn't much of any immigration law before 1900 or so. People who found their current residence economically or politically uncomfortable just migrated. Wherever they migrated to, the locals might welcome them, or passively accept them, or ignore them, or riot against them, or massacre them. The quality of their reception, and the severity of the situation they had fled from in the first place, would determine whether the migrants would stay, go home, or move on to someplace else. But law had nothing to do with it.

That changed as the United States suddenly realized that its population was becoming ethnically different from the way it had been in the era of its founding. We looked around at ourselves and discovered "we" were no longer the "us" we had been in 1776, or even 1865. That led to the establishment of Ellis Island and other screening ports, where immigrants were checked out for criminal records, moral character, and physical and mental health. There were racial restrictions. You had to be "white," whatever that meant. Not African or Chinese, at any rate. It was a binary system--you either passed inspection and got to stay, or failed and had to leave. Whichever happened, happened fast, at most within weeks, usually within minutes.

When Mr. Dissociated, and many other who insist they aren't anti-Hispanic or even anti-immigrant, they're only anti-lawbreaking, talk about how their grandparents came here "legally," that's what they mean. Those grandparents were "white," more or less healthy, and unencumbered with criminal records. Bully for them.

It was World War I that changed all that, all over the world. Two generations later, INS was interrogating my mother about how many of her "formative years" she had spent in the States. This was still something of an improvement on what happened to my paternal grandmother, born and brought up in Marietta, Georgia, a generation earlier, who lost her US citizenship automatically for marrying a Brit. In between, anarchist Emma Goldman's husband was deprived of his naturalization after his death, so that she could lose her citizenship and be deported to Russia.

The legal system with which current would-be immigrants are expected to comply is cumbersome, complex, and arbitrarily and often abusively administered. It is underfunded and understaffed. Its personnel are badly undertrained in "people skills." Things that should take weeks take years. To add insult to injury, the process has now been made outrageously expensive by piling four- or five-figure processing fees on top of the costs of the high-powered legal representation that is now almost essential for most immigrants, and the usually-required trip back to the Old Country.

And, worse still, immigration is the one area of our national legal system in which the influence of high-ranking people is openly available and routinely applied for the benefit of those who know the right people. That is, if all of your attempts to immigrate legally into the US have failed, but you know the right people, you can get naturalized by a special bill passed in Congress by your influential buddies, all open and above board, without so much as a "wink-wink nudge-nudge."

But for the ordinary working immigrant trying to make a decent life in the US, compliance with the law is always difficult, usually expensive, and often impossible.

Nonetheless, many conservative opponents of illegal immigration insist that illegal immigrants, specifically because they are violating the law, belong in the same circle of Hell as Al Capone. Which is fairly remarkable, since most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, aren't all that crazy about legality, except where they can use it as a lock on the moral high ground against people they don't like anyway.

I found that out most recently when a dear friend of mine was killed by a truck that crashed into his van at an illegally high rate of speed, after running a red light, and with gravely defective brakes. Once it had been established that the trucker was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, even the good sympathetic people we knew all said, "Speeding isn't a crime. Running a red light isn't a crime. Everybody does that. It was just an accident." So far, the State's Attorney of DuPage County, Illinois, seems to agree with them.

Is it fair to conclude that most of the opponents of illegal immigration are really opposed to immigration in general regardless of legality, or even to the presence of ethnic Hispanics on our soil, regardless of their legality? Dunno. It's hard to tell, sometimes. When the same people declaim against illegal immigration and allowing anybody to speak Spanish in public, that does make one wonder. When they deplore illegal immigration, or immigration in general, because immigrants will take the bad jobs that "Americans won't do" and thereby drive down wages and working conditions for native-born and legal-immigrant workers, and because they will take good jobs that Americans deserve, and because they will take no jobs, and sponge off the American taxpayer instead, it's hard not to suspect some kind of prejudice at work. The poor immigrant can't win.

And, on the other hand, the orthodox liberal position seems to be that anyone who comes to the US to improve his economic prospects has the right to do so, regardless of legality. Regardless of the effect on wages and working conditions? Dunno. The mostly-Hispanic United Farm Workers union used to oppose illegal immigration. Now, understandably, they are more worried about the general prejudice against illegal immigration/ immigration/Hispanic visibility. The newer labor unions (SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the American Federation of Teachers, for instance) seem to be heading in the same direction. The older, bread-and-butter unions have always opposed illegal immigration and been somewhat dubious even about legal immigration. But their influence is waning.

So much for the bad arguments on the subject. Are there any good ones? If, as seems obvious to almost everybody, the current system is broken and fixing it will cost a lot of time and money, should it just be shelved in the meantime? Or should the whole idea of immigration regulation be thrown back into the dustbin of recent history? After all, the nations of the world got along without it pretty well for several thousand years.

Broaching this argument, even tentatively, has gotten me some very strange bedfellows. Julian Simon, the conservative economist, for instance, who once wrote me a very flattering letter about an earlier article I wrote on the subject of immigration. He and his "let the market do everything" pals oppose regulating immigration because it prevents willing workers and willing employers from finding each other, and keeps wages "artificially" high for American workers.

Or at least they used to. Now, "small government" conservatives like Simon seem to be parting ways with "big gun" conservatives. Republican orthodoxy has trouble deciding whether it's more important to keep wages low, give American workers somebody to hate, or keep potential terrorists out. They haven't thought this through

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, Democratic orthodoxy isn't sure whether the rights of Hispanics not to be hassled are more important than maintaining the standard of living of American workers. They haven't thought this through either.

One of my favorite speculative fiction novels has a character who comes from a planet where "you have not thought this through" is a deadly insult.

We should be so lucky.