July 21, 2008 11:00 AM
In the last intallment of this twenty-part series on Immigration Reform, I looked at the analysis of Frank Sharry, one of the leaders of the national reform effort, on why the McCain Kennedy bill was defeated last year. In his much-talked-about artcile on the subject, Sharry offers a prescription for victory for the pro-immigrant movement. This prescription is gaining wide currency, but many doubt that it will work.
Before going into the emerging critique of his approach, let's look at what Sharry says needs to be done. He asks his readers what it will take to win and offers a three-part strategy:
1. A voter mobilization effort that punishes anti-immigrant politicians
2. A policy approach that excites progressive constituencies.
3. A communications effort that redefines the debate and a grassroots effort that neutralizes the loud but not large anti-immigrant forces.
Sharry the sketches out how this strategy would play itself out:
What might this look like? First and foremost, the movement needs an unprecedented citizenship promotion and voter mobilization drive. The good news is that national and local organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials (NALEO), the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Democracia USA, and Center for Community Change, along with coalitions in Los Angeles, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, as well as others, are coming together to make this happen. If they succeed, come November you may hear pundits talking about “el voto castigo” in which Latino immigrants as well as other immigrant voters came out in record numbers to punish anti-immigrant candidates, most of whom have an “R” next to their name.
Second, we need to rethink our policy approach. Of course, some things must not change. Legalizing the currently undocumented and reducing family backlogs has to be part of any immigration reform proposal aimed at modernizing our immigration system intelligently. But the old comprehensive immigration reform strategy embraced a significant increase in temporary worker visas for the “future flow” of needed workers. This element of comprehensive reform divided progressives. Especially as we enter and weather an economic downturn, a new strategy needs to consider a more limited set of “future flow” worker visas that extend permanent status rather than temporary status to new workers, with perhaps limited but reformed temporary worker programs (with more robust labor protections incorporated) targeted at agriculture and other seasonal industries.
In addition, our understanding of what constitutes the workplace enforcement component of immigration reform needs to expand beyond the drive to create a workable worker verification system. We need to include enhanced labor protections and aggressive enforcement of labor standards for all low-wage workers. For example, we need to consider expanding the Occupational Safety and Health Act, fighting wage theft by strengthening enforcement of minimum wage and overtime laws, stopping the misclassification of workers as independent contractors, improving access to job offers by all low-income workers by requiring employers to make information available to all potential applicants, protecting against discrimination in the workplace by strengthening civil rights laws and enforcement, enabling workers to join a union if they choose to, protecting workers who are displaced when their jobs are shipped overseas by improving Trade Adjustment Assistance, helping workers and their communities plan for and adjust to plant closings and mass layoffs, and modernizing the nation's unemployment insurance program.
Of course, all of these changes in strategy will have little effect as long as the anti-immigrants have their way in the media. Sharry says:
[W]e are going to need a more aggressive and assertive communications and grassroots strategy to define and drive the debate going forward. Remarkably, the right-wing xenophobes have too often presented themselves as mainstream defenders of the American way of life. In fact, they are nothing of the sort. They use high-sounding arguments to hide their low-road disdain for immigrants from Latin America. Their ugly policy goal is to drive immigrant families -- most of them Latino, some legal, some not -- out of the country. They call it “attrition through enforcement” and claim that by enforcing the laws on the books, immigrants will “humanely” self-deport. But there is nothing humane about a deliberate strategy of repression aimed at driving 12 million undocumented immigrants and their millions of U.S. citizen children and loved ones out of the country. Let's call it what it is: nothing less than a nonviolent form of ethnic cleansing.
In addition to making it clear that opponents of broad reform are extremists that have hijacked the debate, we have to make sure we win the argument that our approach to reform -- workers with rights, families that are enfranchised with all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and visa limits as well as labor laws sensibly enforced -- is better for workers, taxpayers and the rule of law.
Stiffening language, but will it do the trick? I'll take that up next week.