Bipartisan Consensus for Immigration Reform - Including for Border Security and Criminal Alien Exclusion
Tom Barry
Yes, there’s good reason for celebrating. Finally, democracy in America seems to be reflecting changing demographics and a common sense about what is good for the country – rather than reflecting the fear, resentment, and rightwing populist backlash that have swept this country.
One product of this healthier democratic reasoning is revived bipartisan support for liberal immigration reform. Over the past seven years or more, all we have seen is conservative immigration reform, which has deepened an enforcement-only regime in immigration matters.
Going into the coming immigration reform debate, it’s worth remembering that over the past couple decades – and especially since 2005 when Congress began considering liberal immigration reform proposals – bipartisan consensus has never dissipated with respect to certain aspects of immigration policy, especially border security and a crackdown on criminal aliens.
Pasted below are two Border Lines opinion pieces that briefly examine the downsides of immigration-related bipartisanship.
Bipartisan Border Security
as Base for Immigration Reform
http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/raise-your-hand-if-you-dont-support.html
There’s renewed bipartisan consensus in favor for some type of immigration reform. Yet this emerging post-election bipartisanship exists in the shadows of an almost enthusiastic bipartisanship in favor of increased border security.
Within Congress, there is no – really absolutely none -- opposition to border security policy and operations, despite persistent waste, lack of due diligence, corruption, immigrant abuse, and inability to set forth a strategy and performance measures.
In Congress, there are differences about border security but these are largely limited to questions about just how many more agents, drones, walls, and surveillance systems are needed.
President Obama set the bottom line of the debate, when speaking about the need for immigration reform. In late November, he told the media: "I think it [immigration reform] should include a continuation of the strong border security measures that we've taken because we have to secure our borders.”
The president will encounter no opposition on that point, although there were be many congressional members in both parties who will be lobbying for even more border security spending than the Obama administration has authorized – in part because border security has proved popular politically and in part because of the infusion of pork-barrel spending in border areas.
The broadening political consensus for immigration reform is hopeful. Bipartisan border security, however, is not a sign that political gridlock is ending but rather a sure sign that the traditional bipartisanship over security spending issues continues to taint politics and fiscal responsibility.
Bipartisanship is the rule not the exception when security issues are involved. That’s a sorry tradition in U.S. politics – a tradition that since 9/11 has expanded beyond national security to include homeland security and border security.
Uncritical Acceptance of Border Security
At first, the post-9/11 fear of foreign terrorists drove the multi-billion dollar campaign to “secure our borders.” The buildup continued even as the fear diminished, and as counterterrorism experts (and common sense) concluded that it was unlikely that foreign terrorists or weapons of mass destruction would enter the country across the southwestern border – the focus of the new border security operations.
Yet Congress and the White House kept increasing the border security budgets – not so much to obstruct terrorists but to “secure our borders” against immigrants, driven by the mounting anti-immigrant backlash during the second Bush administration. More recently, border hawks – and the Obama administration – explain border security operations mainly in terms of the drug war or what’s now called the “combat against transnational crime.”
Since 2005, when Congress began debating comprehensive immigration reform, a key factor in ensuring wide support for the border security buildup was, oddly, the assumption that the imperative to “secure our borders” was a necessary precondition for immigration reform.
The uncritical – and largely enthusiastic – backing for more border security has cost the nation more than $100 billion over the last ten years. It has left a legacy of national shame and monumental waste in the form of useless virtual fence projects, embarrassing walls between north and south, a mounting toll of dead and murdered immigrants, and an escalation drug war throughout the U.S. and Mexican borderlands even as political pressure is mounting throughout the hemisphere to end drug prohibition.
Aside from the near total absence of strategic focus, the border security buildup has been an insult to good governance. Again, the uncritical acceptance of border security has resulted in systemic abuse of the standards of accountability, transparency, and performance evaluations.
Rather than once again giving a free rein to the border security hawks, the coming immigration represents an opportunity to assess the assumptions and achievements of the continuing border security buildup. Without such a critical examination of border security, the proponents of immigration reform / border security become accomplices of the waste, human rights abuses, and drug war escalation that have become emblematic of the Border Patrol.
As part of the new movement for immigration reform, advocates and activists need to stand up and reject the implicit political marriage of immigration reform and the border security buildup. That doesn’t mean open borders but rather a stance in favor of sensible border control and regulation, not virtual militarization.
It would be unfortunate if progress on immigration reform gives border security a free pass, leaving mounting questions about the waste, militarization, misdirection, and lack of accountability in U.S. border policy unaddressed and unresolved.
Bipartisan Crackdown on Criminal Immigrants
http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/joining-hands-across-aisle-to-deport.html
Another source of broad agreement in the immigration reform is the widely shared conviction that noncitizen immigrants (whether here legally or not) should be “removed” from this country if they have criminal records. Even nongovernmental advocates of immigration reform accept the criminal exclusion provisions, or at least haven’t opposed these restrictions.
At first glance, this determination to deny legal residency and to deport criminal immigrants makes good sense. Why, after all, should America open its borders to foreigners who not only threaten public safety but who also burden every level of government with law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration costs?
One should expect that in the coming immigration debate all the main actors – whether they be progressives, liberals, centrists, conservatives, and hawks -- will accept the notion that so-called “criminal aliens” have no place in U.S. society.
Yet if immigration reform is largely about social justice, can this automatic exclusion be defended morally? There are also unaddressed questions about the impact of this exclusion and deportation of criminals on the stability of neighboring nations and the spread of international criminal networks.
For reform advocates, opposition (whether tacit or explicit) against including criminals from immigration-reform benefits may stem less from an ethical conviction than from a political calculation – much as support for border security operations is seen as a precondition for any reform.
Immigrants Are America
That’s a phrase often used by proponents of liberal immigration reform.
As the prospects for reform increase, it will be tempting for advocates to maintain a sharp focus on the strategy and tactics of the reform campaign, yet give short shrift to their own rhetorical and social-justice arguments for legalization of those immigrants who are already part of our communities and economy.
If “Immigrants are America” and if immigrants are “America’s voice,” as the pro-reform slogans have it, then the immigration reform campaign shouldn’t be so narrowly fought – only on strictly immigration issues.
In the past, immigration reform activists have been so focused on their own campaigns and strategies that they have not sought out allies in the prison-reform, criminal-justice reform, and drug-law reform movements.
There are strong and increasingly powerful movements and lobbies to reform drug laws, mass imprisonment practices, and the dysfunctional criminal justice system. Immigration reformers would do well ally themselves with such citizen movements.
For fear of reinforcing the anti-immigrant stereotypes of immigrants as criminals and drug addicts, the immigration reform campaign over the past two decades has largely distanced itself from the movements against mass incarceration, drug prohibition, and the expansion of the federal government’s domination of our criminal justice system.
There are few other sectors of U.S. society that have been so victimized by our nation’s drug laws, imprisonment habit, and harsh criminal justice system.
Since the early 1990s there has been a steadily increasing merger of the criminal justice, drug prohibition, and immigration enforcement systems. Scholars call this conflation of immigration and criminal system the crimmigration of America.
Once caught in the grips of crimmigration, immigrants are doubly punished – first by jail, fines, and prison sentences; and second by automatic removal from the country.
Many otherwise law-abiding immigrants, as do many U.S. citizens, have drug violations on their record. Many immigrants have spent some time in jail or been on probation, the same as millions of U.S. citizens. If we are to accept that America has been a nation of immigrants and that immigrants continue to be an integral part of this nation, then our lawmakers shouldn’t exclude immigrants from the benefits of any immigration reform.
Such a course of action would preempt hundreds of thousands of future deportations that separate families and weaken communities. Dealing directly with the criminal alien shibboleth in the reform debate, rather than assuming that all immigrants with records will be ineligible for reform benefits, would created a more expansive community of immigration reform proponents, including member of the growing anti-drug prohibition movement.
It would also demonstrate in a powerful way that immigrants are not a population apart – that immigrants are America. In the process, the coming immigration reform debate may push aside the restrictive framework that has stifled criticism of border security and crimmigration.
Time to Reassess Border Security and Criminal Alien Bipartisanship
In both cases, stances in favor of border security and ridding the nation of criminal immigrants are regarded as good and necessary politics on the path to immigration reform.
However, there are costs to accepting both these conditions – continued border-security buildup and exclusion of beneficiaries – they will surely be paid down the road.