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April 28, 2006
Beneficial inaction
As events this year have already demonstrated, Congress has a great capacity to shape U.S. foreign and national security policy. Certain institutional realities, however, limit its abilities in these policy realms. Perhaps foremost among these limitations is Congress' deliberative nature. Whereas the president can make a decision and thereby define the institutional voice of the executive branch, Congress must deal with the views, agendas, and personalities of 535 co-equal members before it can even consider speaking with a single institutional voice. Such difficulties were amply highlighted during the recent debate over immigration policy. Sometimes, however, the difficulties wrought by deliberation are actually by design, and accordingly represent a blessing in disguise.
There is no question that immigration is an urgent issue in the United States. Drawn by family ties, political idealism, and the promise of employment, as many as 12 million unauthorized or “illegal” immigrants currently reside in the United States. The scope of the immigration debate encompasses many fields of public policy, from national security (border control) to economic policy (enforcement of regulations prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants) to cultural affairs (assimilation of immigrants into U.S. society). In terms of sheer economic and societal impact, immigration may be the foreign policy issue felt most directly by many Americans. Yet the current U.S. immigration policy is woefully inadequate. For this reason, immigration reform has been a priority for President Bush since he took office. In the midst of the recent debate, he reminded Congress that it “needs to pass a comprehensive bill that secures the border, improves interior enforcement, and creates a temporary-worker program to strengthen our security and our economy.”
Any immigration reform, however, would have to originate in Congress. Immigration has long been a uniquely divisive issue for politicians, and the proposals considered by legislators in recent weeks spanned the political spectrum and forged unlikely alliances across party lines. In the Senate, a number of proposals were considered that would have offered work visas or guest worker status to illegal immigrants for varying periods of time and that would have made it more difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants. One such proposal, primarily sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), passed the Judiciary Committee by a surprisingly bipartisan 12-6 vote.
In the House, however, a much different proposal had won approval. Sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the House bill would have built a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, made it a felony to be an undocumented worker, and criminalized the act of giving assistance to illegal immigrants. Sensenbrenner noted, “Illegal aliens should not be granted amnesty and a path to citizenship. This would be a slap in the face to all those who have followed the law and have come to America legally.”
The unpredictable politics of immigration policy, plus the widely divergent bills emerging from the House and the Senate, made any deal seem impossible. But just before Congress recessed in the middle of the April, a hopeful glimpse of compromise emerged in the Senate. Under a complex deal reached by Republican and Democratic leadership, the proposal would have required illegal immigrants who had been in the country between two and five years to return to their home country briefly, re-enter the United States as temporary workers, and ultimately become eligible to seek citizenship. Illegal immigrants who had been in the United States for longer than five years would not have needed to return to their home countries, while those who had been in the United States for less than two years would have been required to leave without any assurances of returning. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV), praised the deal: “Even though we all feel good about [the deal], it pales in comparison to the millions and millions of people out there who today feel that they have a chance to participate in the American dream.”
Alas, the earlier predictions of legislative collapse were borne out. At almost literally the last minute, the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate fell apart. Republicans attributed the failure to the Democratic refusal to allow votes on amendments to the immigration bill. Democrats claimed that Republicans would have drastically altered the proposal during the conference process with the House, resulting in a final bill that would have borne little resemblance to the original Senate compromise. Many pundits suggested that an immigration deal had always been a long shot, for neither party would have been willing to grant the other a political victory during an election year. And because the deal collapsed right before a congressional recess, its failure was widely interpreted as more than just a temporary setback. Once halted, the momentum for reform would be hard to restart.
Almost universally, this legislative collapse was greeted with frustration. Indeed, that this session of Congress will likely produce no new immigration legislation represents a disappointment for Bush, for advocates on all sides of the immigration debate, and for immigrants themselves. There is, however, another way to interpret this legislative collapse. In a perfect world, Congress should accurately represent popular will. In the case of immigration, there was plenty of will to go around, on all sides of the debate. Vocal and well-organized demonstrations by immigrants and their supporters across the country took many by surprise, while the immigration debate made minor celebrities of newscasters like CNN's Lou Dobbs who railed against the United States' “broken borders.”
How, then, can this abundance of popular will be reconciled with an apparent collapse of the legislative process? It is important to remember that the U.S. system of government was created by people inherently distrustful of authority—the founders specifically wanted the policymaking process to be difficult, time-consuming, and deliberative. The process was to simultaneously convey popular will and limit its excesses. While many lamented the collapse of the Senate compromise, that deal vastly differed from the Sensenbrenner bill that had cleared the House. Even if the Senate compromise had survived, the likelihood of any legislation passing both chambers of Congress was slim. In other words, the process was difficult, time-consuming, and deliberative—just as it was supposed to be. In this particular case, however, the result was not new legislation but stalemate. After exhausting the policymaking options available at the time, could such legislative inaction actually be a desirable outcome?
Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, suggested something along these lines in the midst of the immigration debate in Congress. Although he acknowledged that much is wrong with U.S. immigration policy—border security could be tightened, and those immigrants in the United States illegally need to somehow be better integrated into U.S. society—Zakaria also noted that things could be much worse: “Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?”
This is an important perspective that risks being overlooked amidst the fallout of the legislative collapse. Although immigration remains an urgent public policy problem, perhaps inaction represents the most sensible course available at this time. If the political stars are not properly aligned, inaction is certainly preferable to bad policy, and it can pave the way for better policy in the future. And in this election year, Senators and Congressmen are acutely aware that their political stars are ripe for realignment.
Foreign Policy Association, 27 April 2006
Posted by Daniel Widome at 10:05 AM to Trans-geographical,
