18 May Immigration Reform Bill: DOA
That’s my hunch. It looks too much like the 1986 deal, coupling an amnesty with enhanced enforcement, the latter of which of course utterly failed. The deal announced yesterday would make pretty much all undocumented aliens arriving in the US before January 1 eligible for legalized status, under an indefinitely renewable “Z” visa program. That amounts to legalization of the 12 million or so noncitizens who are now here out of status. (A summary of the bill — no text available yet — can be found over at Immigration Prof Blog.)
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for legalization, amnesty, whatever you want to call it, and the bill is about the best one could hope for as an immigrant advocate. But unless restrictionists have lost all their political clout in the wake of the (for them) disastrous 2006 elections, they’re not going to let this happen. Check out, for instance, the chorus this morning over at the National Review Online (“a travesty of a mockery of a sham,” says Harvard’s George Borjas, circumspectly). Mainstream restrictionist Mark Krikorian has been all over the airwaves with an emphatic two-thumbs down.
Add to that a weaker-than-lame-duck Administration and the beginning of a presidential election cycle (note McCain’s new reticence on the subject) and it doesn’t make for a promising picture. My bet is that we get nothing in the way of immigration reform out of this session.
(By the way, one provision being trumpeted by the White House would make English the official language of the United States (“The Proposal Declares That English Is The Language Of The United States And Calls On The United States Government To Preserve And Enhance It”). I haven’t come across any response to or even acknowledgment of this elsewhere, and there’s nothing in the bill summary to this effect, which seems to me like a pretty big deal, at least symbolically.)
Over at Imm Prof Blog there is a link to what is possibly a draft of the bill. Section 702 of the bill states: “Sec. 702. Declaration of English. (a) English is the language of the United States. (b) Preserving and Enhancing the Role of the English Language—The Government of the United States shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the language of the United States of America. Nothing herein shall diminish or expand any existing rights under the laws of the United States relative to services or materials provided by the Government of the United States in any language other than English. (c) Definition: For the purposes of this section, law is defined as including provisions of the United States Constitution, the United States Code, controlling judicial decisions, regulations, and Presidential Executive Orders. ” Although it allows some people to become residents through what is likely to be a slow and costly process (I guess some were thinking that this is better than nothing) the bill itself contains many terrible provisions and should die a quick death. Congress would have been better off simply re-authorizing 245 (i), increasing the immigrant and non-immigrant visa caps, and eliminating the… Read more »
It seems that this is basically a (bad) attempt to please everyone. Instead of deporting people, we give them temporary status that might lead to citizenship. So you have amnesty, but you don’t give them rights.