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Comprehensive Immigration Reform—Dead, Dismembered, or Alive?

Posted February 17, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

When Al Franken won his Senate seat last year, many of us in the immigrant rights movement believed that comprehensive immigration reform was finally within our grasp. Latinos had played a crucial role in Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress, as well as in the historic election of Barack Obama. Key congressional leadership positions were in the hands of reform supporters and President Obama promised to be an outstanding spokesman for the earned legalization we advocated.

Polls also clearly lined up in favor of immigration change, with majorities of Americans saying they wanted immigrants to come out of the shadows, pay their taxes, learn English, and earn their legal papers.

Today, the window for passing comprehensive immigration reform is closing. Latino leaders are angry at the administration for failing to spend political capital on reform, and many undocumented immigrants have lost hope that earned legalization is still possible.

The consensus among immigrant rights advocates is that 2010 is the year to make a final effort to pass reform. The reform agenda is under attack at the grassroots level by immigrant activists who believe that comprehensive reform should be abandoned, the reform proposal disaggregated, and that supposedly easier bills to pass like AgJobs or the DREAM Act should be pushed at the expense of more sweeping reforms. Other critics think that the efforts to pass any bills this year should be postponed for a time when the economic and political climate is more congenial to the consideration of immigrants.

In this essay, I hope to address the problems holding up reform, look at the remaining chances for passage of major legislation, and try to answer those who believe the effort to pass a comprehensive bill should be abandoned.

Before I address the current legislative state of play, let me begin by looking back to the last failure of immigration reform in 2007.

First, I want to throw a little cold water on advocates who feel that the extremely flawed 2007 reform proposal failed because it was too conservative. The notion I still hear, most recently just a week ago, is that the 2007 bill never attracted the support of progressives because of its lukewarm approach to legalization.

The 2007 reform bill fell eighteen votes short of the 60 votes it needed to pass in the Senate. It didn’t even get close to becoming a law. But, the bill was supported by virtually every strong supporter of immigrant rights in the upper house of Congress. Just about everyone who would have voted for a more liberal bill did vote for the so-called “Grand Compromise” measure. So, it was not the conservative nature of the bill that led to its failure.

Shortly after the 2007 defeat, I correlated the way senators voted on the so-called “Grand Compromise” with the percentage of foreign-born people living in their states. I broke the states up into three groups, based on proportion of foreign born. There are 15 states (30 senators) with more than 10% of their population foreign-born. These are the High Immigration States. There are 15 more states (30 senators) that have between 5% and 9.9% foreign-born and are Middle Immigration States. The largest group, 20 states with a whopping 40 Senators, had less than 5% foreign-born and was the Low Immigration States group.

In High Immigration States, Senators voted 87% to 13% for the “Grand Compromise.” In Middle Immigration States, support dropped to 37% in favor of the compromise and 63% against. In Low Immigration States support for the compromise collapsed with only 23% voting in favor of it.

While it is true that partisanship played a role in the vote, the percentage of immigrants in a state clearly played a greater role. So, for example, Democrats in High Immigration States voted 22 to 0 in favor of the “Grand Compromise”, and Republicans in those same states split 50% to 50%. In contrast, in Low Immigration States only 31% of the sixteen Democrats voted for the compromise, which was much closer to the way Republicans from those states voted than it was to how High Immigration State Democrats voted.

I think that we can all see that home-state demography was a better indicator of how a senator would vote than party affiliation. While the legalization of undocumented immigrants may be a pressing national issue, it is not at all an on-the-ground issue in at least 20 states. And where it is not an issue, it does not garner support.

This means that any reform legislation will rank low for at least 40 senators on the list of issues that they are willing to lose their seats over. Thinking that senators from places like Maine or Wyoming might be willing to risk primary challenges from the Tea Party Nation over a proposal they might agree with—but which has little impact on their state—seems to misunderstand the nature of politics.

As the economy has deteriorated and anger at government, particularly among the now-vulnerable white middle class, has grown, moderate Republicans who would have normally taken a lead in pushing the reform agenda—John McCain most notably—have been silent. McCain, who faces challenges by two candidates tied to the anti-immigrant wing of the Arizona Republican Party, is in a disturbingly precarious position for a former Republican standard bearer. McCain is a warning to other Republican incumbents that their political careers may be unhinged by the populist Right.

This has made the job of our own Senator Chuck Schumer extremely difficult. He has the task of drafting reform legislation, and, by all accounts, has labored hard to come up with a bill that satisfies the need for better border controls along with a humane legalization program. But, following the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, the half-dozen Republicans who have traditionally supported reform have become skittish. They see the vile anti-immigrant attacks from within his own party on South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who is working with Schumer on the bill, and wonder if they could withstand the tea party onslaught.

As passage becomes more difficult, the bill will be re-written to pick up the last few votes necessary for passage. This will alienate some in the immigrant rights movement, who will wonder if passing a flawed bill is worth the effort. Many, who are already becoming disenchanted with the legislative process are wondering if we should just start over again after the November elections.

No, we should not.

The Democrats are likely to lose seats in both houses in November and passage of reform will then require even more concessions to the Republicans. Meaning that the chances of final passage are even smaller and the compromises more drastic next year. If comprehensive immigration reform fails to pass this year, it may be postponed until 2013. Or it may be dead.

There are also calls for abandoning the comprehensive immigration reform effort and instead trying to pass sections of the bill piecemeal. Frankly, in 1999, when comprehensive reform was first proposed as the entire agenda for the immigrant rights movement, I believed that piecemeal was the way to go. I did not believe that passage of a comprehensive package was possible. In addition, my experience as an advocate told me that a piecemeal approach could accomplish much without the serious negative trade-offs that comprehensive reform would demand.

But my position was not the majority position, and the broad movement adopted comprehensive immigration reform and emblazoned it on its banner. Over the next decade, the treasure and efforts of the immigrant rights community around the United States were devoted to crafting and passing far-reaching legislation that would address the United States’ immigration needs for decades.

While that effort has not yet succeeded, it is too soon to declare it failed.

It may also already be too late to break up the comprehensive immigration reform bill and pass smaller pieces of legislation like the DREAM Act and AgJobs separately. Many supporters of reform will melt away if the comprehensive bill is abandoned—they signed on for the whole package. And piecemeal legislation will be met with the same arguments against legalizing a portion of the undocumented that have been voiced against legislation that would enable larger earned legalization. In addition, to secure passage of the DREAM Act and AgJobs, so many concessions will have to be made that little may be left to trade if we try to revive legalization.

Analysts in Washington say that there is still a slim chance for reform this year. With other prospects looking even dimmer than pressing on with our current strategy, it would seem that the immigrant rights movement’s last best hope is to press the Democrats hard with the threat that a failure to push reform will lead to Latino electoral defections and simultaneously embarrass the president into assuming the role of Reformer-in-Chief that we once thought fit him naturally.

We also need to be realistic about what a reform bill will look like if one is introduced by Senator Schumer in the next 50 days. It will not be perfect, and attacks on it for its flaws will likely condemn immigration reform to the legislative graveyard. Any reform bill will need to satisfy the two to six Republicans we need for passage. Pulling out the elements of any compromise Schumer arranges will doom the bill.

For those of us outside the Beltway, we need to keep the pressure on. This year there have already been more than 160 pro-reform events. More than 300,000 people have communicated with Congress and the President in support of reform. Churches, city councils, unions, and community groups have passed hundreds of resolutions in support of reform. Here on Long Island, the Workplace Project has collected more than 5,000 pro-immigrant postcards, Long Island Immigrant Alliance’s call-in day to Schumer’s office got wide support, and Long Island Wins’ e-mail campaigns have generated more than 2,500 communications with our elected officials.

These efforts have won over more than half of the Senate to reform already. Since the time horizon for winning reform is limited to the next several months, we must continue to push hard in the knowledge that while victory may be difficult even with the greatest effort, defeat will be certain if we give up.

Tags : immigration reform, legislation, politics, undocumented