Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986

Snappy title, huh?

I am going to finish the discussion of immigration reform for a couple of reasons. First, I am stubborn. Second, while for the time being this discussion appears to be a yawner, the information here will be useful for a full and complete enjoyment of the comic political theater next year when immigration reform is taken up.

We are skipping by the problems involved with temporary seasonal agricultural workers and border enforcement because those problems are straightforward if the real problem is addressed. What is to be done with the untold numbers of Mexicans who are now in the United States with their families on a permanent basis and who went there without proper documentation, that is, illegally? This brings up the hot issue of “amnesty.” Because it is hot, our President prefers to use the phrase “getting right with the law.”

Many people who lean the same way politically as I used to lean when I was political propose a mechanism whereby undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for a certain number of years can apply to legalize their status and get on the road to citizenship. Readers who lean the other way simply want them deported.

Any discussion of this, in my view, must begin with a look at the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 passed under President Ronald Reagan. With regard to the issue we are looking at, this law provided an amnesty—purportedly one time only—for immigrants in the United States illegally since before 1982 as long as they undertook certain steps such as, among other things, registering for the draft and learning English. Some two million took advantage of this amnesty program. Illegal immigration dropped for a time and then took off again for the following reason.

The Act was also designed to shut down the job market for illegal immigrants in order to stem the flow in the future. For the first time sanctions were imposed on employers in the United States who hired illegal immigrants. Also, employers were required to verify the immigration status of their new hires by requiring documentation of that status from the prospective employees and filling out a Form I-9 for each new employee reflecting that this had been done.

Here was the rub though. A great many employers in the United States need and want to hire cheap, unskilled labor and really do not care about the immigration status of the people who supply that cheap, unskilled labor. The upshot was that the lobbying effort on behalf of employers successfully watered down the provisions of the Act designed to shut down employment of illegal aliens in the United States.

For example, the requirement that the employer verify the authenticity of documents presented by prospective employees concerning their immigration status were removed from the Act before passage. The practical result of this was that a prospective employee could waive a forged document that he had purchased for ten bucks in front of the employer and be hired without fear on the employer's part.

Another important glitch ultimately built into the Act was that an employer was not required to verify the status of workers for a subcontractor hired by that employer. A subcontractor's employees are not the contractor's employees. Employers could safely hire a fly-by-night subcontractor with a phalanx of undocumented workers on the subcontractor's payroll.

Thanks to the lobbying effort on behalf of the employers that removed the teeth from these and other new requirements of the employers, the job market for illegal immigrants was not shut down. The fix was in.

To be fair, let us give space to the employers' main argument. They argued that they should not be made proxy enforcers of the nation's immigration laws. That is the government's job. There it is. That was their main argument.

This illustrates for me why employers in the United States bear every bit as much responsibility for the illegal immigration problem—perhaps more responsibility—than the illegal immigrants themselves. If there is no job market for illegal aliens up north, they will not go north. If there is a job market for illegal aliens up north, then they will go north. No fence is going to stop them. I cannot say that I blame them. There seems to be a mental block on the part of the vast majority of citizen-consumers of the United States that prevents them from recognizing that fact. Citizen-consumers up north are simply inclined to scream about these immigrants, "They broke the law! They broke the law!"

I do not hate President George W. Bush anymore. Here is how I regard President George W. Bush now that I have mellowed out in Mexico for awhile. President George W. Bush was no more stubbornly ignorant than the citizen-consumers of the United States who elected him. President George W. Bush had the same low level of decision-making skills as the citizen-consumers of the United States who elected him. In other words, President George W. Bush was a walking, talking example of Plato's fears of democracy set out in The Republic. President George W. Bush is not to be detested simply because he did not rise above the level of the electorate who put him in office. Those citizen-consumers won and got exactly what they had asked for.

Having said that, President George W. Bush did attempt to implement immigration reform again in 2006 and was blocked from doing so by his own party. Edwin Meese, the Attorney General for President Reagan at the time of passage of The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, wrote a relatively thoughtful opinion piece that appeared in 2006 in the New York Times looking back at the 1986 Act and its failures in the context of the George W. Bush initiative. (Jesus, I never thought that I would cite that guy with any approval. The passage of years does wondrous things.)

For a nice analysis of the 1986 Act by Daniel Gonzalez of The Arizona Republic, albeit riddled with typos, along with a brief interview at the end of Senator Alan Simpson, its Republican sponsor, see this site. Also, there is an informative article here regarding the impact of the Act from the Latino point of view.

My point is that a good start on the project of immigration reform next year would be to undertake a dispassionate look at the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and its failures. However, that will not happen. It will not happen because there is no such thing as “dispassionate” when it comes to this subject. Republican former Senator Alan Simpson said it. This issue arouses "emotion, fear, guilt, and racism." This issue is not a discrete problem that the United States of American can approach rationally with a view toward solving it. Emotion, fear, guilt, and racism are precisely why the show is going to be so entertaining next year.

The Mountain Route

Whether the illegal border crossings are down or not, here are some things that I know personally.

One of the great con men whom I have ever met, Fortino, has hit hard times. Currently, tourists are terrified of driving across the border. As a consequence, there are not enough gringo SUV's and automobiles for Fortino to wash and wax at curbside. He is trying to raise the money to finance a coyote and head to Texas for awhile to earn some money. He is sure he can find work there. In his opinion I am just the man deserving of the honor of financing that trip. Of course, he will repay me immediately upon his return.

I am not going to finance Fortino's coyote. I will, however, probably have to purchase some shoes for his children. Do not worry. I have been around for awhile. I will not give Fortino the money for that. I will go with him to the shoe store.

I met Laura through La Mexicana. Laura is La Mexicana's long time housekeeper, and that relationship is very close, as those relationships are in Mexico. Laura is about 25 years old, a little too old to be my granddaughter but not by much. Laura's father has been up north to work and back several times. He goes there when he goes via the mountain route into Arizona. National Guard troops will be waiting on the other side to under orders to stop him.

The mountain route. We are talking some rugged, remote stuff here, folks. Once you step off the road in Mexico and head into the mountains to make a crossing, it will be days before you ever see another road again. It is essential that you know what you are doing and prepare properly. Many Mexicans try it without appreciating what they are getting into and without proper preparations. The morgues of Arizona are filling up with the bones of Mexicans found in the desert on the other side, particularly now that the heat combined with a drought is hammering that area.

I have also become acquainted with Laura's boyfriend, Salvador. Salvador is a carpenter and all around handyman. I would prefer the word “artisan” to the word “handyman,” but “artisan” seems a bit pretentious to me. I will explain.

Let us say that you have hired Salvador to mount a screen door on your back door, as La Mexicana did recently. Salvador does not go to Dom Pedro's Ferreteria, the local hardware chain, to buy a screen door. Salvador fabricates the screen door himself. This is necessary because not one door in Mexico measures the same as any other door.

Only the screening itself comes from the hardware store. He fabricates the frame, the latch, and the spring from found materials. (Come to think of it, I guess he did purchase the hinges and the screws from the hardware store, too) The spring, for example, is made from a small discarded bungee cord. The frame is made from the hard, cane-like stems of plants that grow along the road to the reservoir. The result is not just a screen door. It is a warm, unique artifact of simple beauty. It works well as a screen door, too.

I was in the same room with Salvador during this job, which took a day. He never took a break, not a lunch break, not a coffee break, not any kind of break until the job was done at the end of that day. Laura was there, too, doing what she does. It is a delight for me, an old man, to listen to Laura and Salvador chirp at each other in Spanish.

Nonetheless, their future depends upon Salvador working in the construction industry, not working on screen doors. He owns his own tools, as many construction workers do, and the construction industry is his trade. He cannot find work here right now. I suspect that La Mexicana is inventing some of these little carpentry projects at her house for him to do. Salvador, too, has been up north to work construction. I fear that he is getting ready to leave Laura and go again, waiting only for some word that work is there. In fact, I know that this is the case.

Salvador is a serious, talented young man who adores a young woman and who wants only to work in order to marry her and to make a family with her. He is not going to let anything stand in his way. He is going to do what he has to do. There is no construction work for him here right now. He, too, will take the mountain route into Arizona when he goes. National Guard troops and the Border Patrol will be waiting on the other side under orders to stop him.

There will be no pictures of Laura, Laura's father, or Salvador here for several reasons. [I lied here. See next entry.] Therefore, they will have to remain abstractions for you. Let me only say that if you were to meet Salvador and Laura and did not soon come to love them as I do now, I would have to question your basic humanity. They are a young couple who project a certain rectitude and gravity—this is a proper courtship--and at the same time radiate the joy they derive from each other. And they work their butts off. Both of them.

I write about this in order to explain my personal bias that, try as I might, I cannot overcome when writing about illegal immigration, undocumented workers, amnesty, “getting right with the law”. . . .phrases, only phrases that are so ill-understood and mean so little to so many up north. And here I am. . . I did not ask for this. I was singularly uninterested myself. I came here for my own selfish purposes not caring whether I actually became acquainted with one single damned Mexican person or not. And what happens? Purely by accident I come to know and love two young Mexicans caught up in all this.

It was a dark day for the solipsist when that happened.

Villains

At the end of the 26 July entry, I was contemplating the identity of the villains in Julie Preston's New York Times piece. The "bizarre situation" I referred to was this.

As a temporary result of the government audits of Gebbers Farms employee records, that company was required to fire a large percentage of its workers. At this point Gebbers Farms found itself without sufficient pickers and other workers. Nearby in that Mexican community, there were numbers of families whose bread-winners were out of a job with little prospects of finding another job now that their immigration status was exposed by this firing. There they are, workers willing and able to pick fruit sitting idle a few miles from Gebbers Farms, which desperately needed workers to pick fruit.

The issue is always whether undocumented workers are taking jobs that citizens of the United States might fill. In this case, apparently not. In other cases that does happen in spite of the arguments of people whom I respect that it never does. No question about that in my mind. This is one of the great variables that is so difficult to figure out.

At bottom, it is apparent to me that it is in the public interest to have labor available to pick fruits and harvest vegetables. If that labor is not available from citizens, it ought to come from somewhere. The obvious somewhere is Mexican workers willing to do the work. Actually, I do not think anyone except the stubbornly blockheaded argue with that proposition. It is simply very difficult to figure out a policy that fairly and efficiently implements this simple proposition.

You will note that the legal way out of this dilemma for Gebbers Farms would be to file paperwork with the government demonstrating that it cannot hire citizens of the United States. They will not take the jobs. Then it can obtain dispensation to hire legally registered foreign workers. Can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that must be? And meanwhile the fruit rots in the trees.

This particular scenario is a clean, classic one, and a nice context within which to start discussion of all this.

One of the big complications sets in when we shift our focus from seasonal work to non-seasonal work. The best example to consider next is the packing plant industry, an industry wherein the necessary labor is non-seasonal. The packing plant industry has traditionally had difficulty filling its labor needs with citizens of the United States. It has traditionally turned to immigrant labor.

The primary difference, it seems to me, is that in seasonal work it is practical for a bread-winner to come north, work for a time, and then return home to his or her family. In the non-seasonal area, the worker is naturally inclined to bring the family with him.

In any event the distinction between these two types of industries is one of the reasons that we split the so-called H-2 temporary worker program in two in 1986 and began administering an H-2A program involving agricultural workers and an H-2B program involving non-agricultural workers.

Next time I want to talk about the big issue, what in justice should be done regarding the millions of undocumented Mexican workers and their families who are here now and have been here for years. We must recognize on the one hand that, yes, they broke the law of this country in their crossing. However, they bear less than half the responsibility for this mess. Fucking this all up has truly been a group effort by all involved.

More about that next time.

By the way, there are no villains in that Julie Preston story that I can see.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Now that I have done my level best to make myself look extraordinarily brilliant, even going so far as to shamelessly drop the name Edward Gibbon (I am only in Volume I; the Romans are still only declining at this point), I feel compelled to come clean about something else. The more I read about the illegal immigration crisis and the undocumented worker problem, the more I come to appreciate the importance of things that I do not know—and very important things that nobody knows.

Best example I can give you. As I read, I kept noticing that writers on the subject were hedging on how many undocumented workers are in the United States right now. It is always something like, “There are an estimated 10 million undocumented workers in the United States,” or “There are 12 million+ illegal immigrants living in the United States.” Notice that plus sign.

So I asked myself, “Well, goddamnit, exactly how many undocumented workers are living in the United States?" That piece of information seemed to me to be a pretty fundamental starting place for an intelligent discussion of the subject.

The epiphany came in the form of my imagining the voice of that great comedian, Sam Kinison—may God rest his troubled soul—screaming in my ear:

You say you want to know how many undocumented workers are now living in the United States, huh? NOBODY KNOWS, YOU MORON, because they are UNDOCUMENTED!

That simple fact pollutes nearly every statistic that writers on the subject try to bring to bear.

Let us consider our friend Mr. Finnegan's statistic in the New Yorker article. He says that last year there were only five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions at the border, the lowest figure in thirty-five years, down by 60 percent since 2000. Then he tacitly extrapolates—or more properly speaking, whoever provided the statistics to him extrapolates—that successful illegal border crossings are down by the same percentage. The assumption is that there is a direct relationship between the number of people apprehended and the number of people who made it.

Now I will grant you, that may be true. In fact, it probably is true. But it is not necessarily true. Who is to say whether that statistic does not represent greater efficiency on the part of the coyotes in successfully delivering the people who hire them to the United States without getting caught?

By the way, I have learned this interesting thing. If you hold your tongue with your fingers and say the word "statistics" ten times rapidly, you will hear a secret message.



But darn it! Now I am distracted thinking about Sam Kinison, the screamer. I was actually sitting in front of the television when he first appeared on David Letterman's show. Thirty-eight years old, still quite pretty, and undoubtedly drunk . . . . . . me, not Sam Kinison. At that time there was a horrific famine in Ethopia, and the world was answering the call with humanitarian aid. Sam Kinison delivered this heartless little oration on the subject:

You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don't send them another bite. Send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW HERE!"

"Come here. You see this? This is sand. You know what it's gonna be 100 years from now? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! We have deserts in America. We just don't live in them, assholes!"

Of course huge numbers of citizen-consumers in the United States now do live in deserts, but that is beside the point here.

The fact is that the Ethiopians did not take Sam Kinison's advice, perhaps because they were too weakened by malnutrition. They continued to sit in the sand, men, women, and children covered with flies, and died. Millions of poor Mexicans, on the other hand, are on the move. They have packed the U-Hauls® figuratively speaking.

We are in the midst of a great movement of people, at the very least comparable in magnitude to the movement of black citizens of the United States from the South to the northern cities. I am coming to think that the idea of maintaining the United States with a fence, attempting to reconstitute it as some huge, pristine gated community with only people living inside the walls who look alike, think alike, and talk alike, is a pitifully, indeed laughably, inadequate response to this. It is already far too late for that even if it ever could have been done in the first place.

Walls—the Berlin Wall, Hadrian's Wall, the Chinese Wall, the wall north of Rome, the Maginot Line, the Iron Curtain, the wall around the Alamo, the wall around Veracruz—walls are made to be breached or flanked. The wall we are talking about has been breached and flanked.

Clearly, we must take the pressure off the wall somehow. But am I ever having difficulty coming up with some intelligent idea as to how to do that!

A Great Movement of People

Before we get on with our next short reading on the "illegal immigration crisis"--or if you prefer, "undocumented worker problem"--I want to come clean with you. I am not even within a United Airlines intercontinental flight of a “solution.” I had to come clean with you because that fact will become apparent in this entry and those to follow. So why am I doing this? And what is the real reason that I think you ought to do yourself a favor and get interested, too?

It is apparent now that “immigration reform,” if it is taken up at all, will be taken up next year after these forthcoming midterm elections. If and when it is taken up, you and I are going to be treated to great political theater. I would even go so far as to say that if the pieces continue to fall into place, it could be one of the greater pieces of political theater in our lifetimes in terms of sheer entertainment value. Not on a level with the Watergate Crisis, but pretty doggoned good.

I know that attitude will offend some because of the seriousness of the issues as they relate to the very identity of the United States of America, the human suffering involved, the rage of so many on both sides. I offer no defense of the propriety of my attitude. Or let us put it this way. If I were to offer a defense, it would require a horrendous word count and involve sharing far more information about me than you could possibly stomach.

I have been studying this issue, that I promise you. Y'all are busy working at your jobs, trying to feed your babies, struggling in a miserable economy, and only God knows what else. Me, I have not a problem in the world. I have time. I can spend hours foraging for information and am delighted to do it. I not only have the time to read contemporary writing on the subject, I can read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and histories of Mexico and “The Mexican War,” known down here as “The U.S. Invasion,” for whatever light works like that might shed on the situation. . .and they do shed light.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have been able to chat with Mexicans who have been back and forth over that border about the when's, why's, and how's. They take one look at me with my hair down to my shoulders and immediately conclude that I could not be anything other than some curious gringo goof. That is how far into my bones this thing has gotten.

The issues we face with regard to legal immigration, illegal immigration, undocumented workers, guest worker programs, amnesty, or “getting right with the law” are fascinating. There are one or more facets to this that would be fascinating to any thinking person of any background if they put both feet in it, I am convinced. One of the primary reasons it is so enthralling to me personally is this. This is one of those rare issues on which one can in good faith argue different positions. This is a question so close that there is no point spread. It is a “you-call-it.” I looooooove those!

Not that it is going to be argued in good faith in the political arena. Far from it. Therein lies the potential for some profoundly entertaining stuff for you. But only if you go to the show actually knowing--actually knowing--a bit about the subject. Only then will you be able to spot all of the rapacious, the posers, the charlatans, the demagogues, the idiots, the clowns, and, yes, the racists who will inevitably step onto the stage of this theater. There will be people fitting one or more of those descriptions on all sides of this issue.

A quick word about that loaded term “racist.” Be cautious there. Some of the most articulate proponents of the “anti-immigration” position—a shorthand term we shall have to use—are black citizens of the United States. They have a significant stake in this game. In other words, this issue requires a legitimate discussion of race. And of course there will also be ill-concealed, illegitimate racism at work. More about that later.

While many national and ethnic groups are involved in the immigration debate, there is no doubt that Mexico is ground zero because of the border. Those groups that purport to speak for Mexican immigrants are in grave danger of shooting themselves in the foot with some of their own rhetoric, a good deal of which I have sampled.

On the other side of the coin, consider this. It was not that long ago that this appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial:

If Washington still wants to do something about immigration, we propose a five-word Constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.

That editorial appeared about 15 years ago. For good reason today, management's interest in cheap, submissive labor is veiled a bit more from public view, but it is still there in spades, I assure you. American labor unions, insofar as they are still players, have no choice but to bitterly fight anything that facilitates immigration.

Any resolution of this issue will not involve simply counting conservative and liberal noses. On this issue, ladies and gentlemen, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are not predictive. But that is really moot, because there will be no political resolution of this issue.




Enough. I apologize for getting carried away. A blog entry of a snitch over 1000 words requires an apology. I just do not want you to be unprepared for this grand entertainment if it comes.

With that let us move on to getting a firmer grip on our handle on the current situation with Julie Preston's fine short piece in The New York Times of July 9, Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in “Silent Raids.” Do not be alarmed. It is only a bit over 1,100 words.

The main point here is that the Obama Administration is enforcing the law, and it is enforcing it in a new, more effective way. However, you will also see that our quandary as to what to do about the millions of undocumented workers already in the United States, many of whom have been there for years, results in a bizarre situation.

Try to pick out the villains in the scenario set out in this piece, and we will consider that tomorrow.

Lastly, I want to assure you that we will get to the thoughtful anti-immigration position.

U.S. Troops to Arrive At U.S.- Mexico Border

U.S. Troops to Arrive At U.S. - Mexico Border August 1 - NYTimes.com

Well, okay. Here we go. Are these National Guard troops going to be issued live ammunition? If so, I am nervous. Based on my observations of events of the second half of the Twentieth Century as they unfolded, I can only say that using troops in what is essentially a law enforcement capacity more often than not leads to disaster. Far more often than not. But I could be wrong. Perhaps this all will go swimmingly.