They also often live in low-income, heavily policed communities in which the likelihood of arrest for all sorts of activities that many people in the United States regularly engage in is greatly heightened. This is not least because the very “illegal” status of unauthorized immigrants often compels them to violate the law-by using false documents to secure employment, for example, or to participate in the “underground” or illicit economy to survive. However, given the ever-expansive category of crime and its highly elastic nature, the qualifications uttered by Schumer are certainly cause for great worry. What percentage of people would be denied is unclear. Credit: ategory of crime, Schumer and Graham are undoubtedly casting aside large numbers of unauthorized migrants who might otherwise be eligible to walk down that “path to citizenship.” (Like Obama’s record-setting deportation regime, this delimitation of eligibility also sets the stage for ever-more divided families.) By invoking the highly elastic c Schumer and Graham. So instead of a general amnesty-or whatever one might want to call it-for those living in the United States without legal status, what is on offer is far more limited. But the refusal to embrace something Ronald Reagan championed not too long ago (in, among other venues, a presidential debate with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale in 1984-see below) is perhaps the most painful manifestation of how much the political spectrum has moved in a direction of immigration restriction. There are many troublesome aspects of the Schumer-Graham plan in terms of what it embodies and suggests. And fourth, a path to citizenship that’s fair, which says you have to learn English, you have to go to the back of the line, you’ve got to have a job, and you can’t commit crimes. Third, on legal immigration, let in the people we need, whether they be engineers from our universities, foreign or people to pick the crops. that will stop illegal immigration in its tracks. And once they hire someone illegally, throw the book at them. Second, make sure that there is a non-forgeable document so that employers can tell who was legal and who was illegal. Thus, as Schumer explained, his and Graham’s “detailed blueprint” has these components:įirst of all, close the border, make sure that’s shut. While “comprehensive immigration reform” means many things to many people, in Washington circles the range of what it signifies is pretty narrow: 1) more “security” and policing-along the country’s perimeter and within 2) an expansion of employment-related (temporary) immigration and 3) a long path to regularization of status and, eventually, citizenship for many, but far from all, of the millions of unauthorized migrants living in the United States. On the talk show “Meet the Press,” Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer (Democrat-New York) toldhost David Gregory that he and Senator Lindsay Graham (Republican-South Carolina) were resurrecting talks broken off two years earlier to finalize a reform plan that will win bipartisan support. I recalled the conversation with my friend on the Sunday following Obama’s re-election when it became clear that the corpse of comprehensive immigration reform had risen from the dead. An estimated three million individual eventually benefitted from this program. IRCA made eligible for permanent residency (and eventual citizenship) unauthorized migrants who had lived in the United States continuously since at least January 1, 1982, as well as those who had labored as agricultural workers for at least 90 days in a one-year period beginning on May 1, 1985. Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act ( IRCA) in November 1986. Indeed, Reagan (and the Congress) did just as my friend stated. As I struggled to formulate a response, she volunteered the name of a former president she much admired: Ronald Reagan.Īs I gasped to myself at the name of the person responsible for sowing so much terror in Central America in the 1980s-among other myriad crimes and injustices that he perpetrated-she explained why: “He gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants.” She raised the topic of the then-upcoming presidential election and asked me who I thought had been a good president of the United States. Not long ago, I was talking with a friend and neighbor who happens to be an unauthorized immigrant.
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