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June 29, 2007
Immigration compromise
Of all the praise and criticism he has received over the past seven years, one thing can be said with certainty about President Bush. He has painted his presidency in big, bold strokes, displaying a remarkable degree of political stubbornness throughout. The president’s pursuit of immigration reform has certainly fit this pattern. Since his time as governor of Texas, Bush had displayed an intense, personal interest in immigration policy. As president, he has continued to pursue immigration reform in the face of serious opposition from many of his political allies.
In recent weeks, a surprise compromise on immigration reform was reached by a bipartisan group of Senators. The sudden re-emergence of the issue in Congress was matched by an outpouring of equally bipartisan opposition that appeared to kill the prospect of immigration reform once and for all. But as he has consistently done in the past, Bush has proven determined to push forward, and against all odds, the immigration compromise lived far longer than many expected it would. Nonetheless, the stakes of the debate have become higher than ever, and despite its latest failure in Congress, the inevitability of immigration reform has grown even stronger.
The issue of immigration is by no means a new one. Last year, a compromise on immigration reform appeared possible in Congress (for more, see Capitol Watch, April 2006). Then, the Republican-controlled Senate and House pursued two very different tracks toward reform. In the Senate, various border security, guest worker, and naturalization provisions were considered and ultimately packaged together to form the basis of an ungainly, bipartisan compromise. In the House, however, a relatively hard-line Republican proposal that cut off any path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants and emphasized increased border security prevailed. Crucially, the president supported the compromise position of the Senate, against the views of many in his own party. But before either proposal could reach the other chamber of Congress for consideration, the tenuous compromise in the Senate broke down. No one, however, could really claim to have been surprised by the failure. In an election year, such a tenuous, controversial compromise had no real chance of success.
Although the Democratic victories in the mid-term elections last year constituted a rebuke of many of the president’s policies, it had the ironic side effect of creating a legislative coalition more amenable to immigration reform. In May, after months of secret negotiations, this coalition announced its new immigration compromise. The plan would have created a new “Z visa” that would have offered most of the 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States a path toward legalization and eventual citizenship, provided they pay a series of fines, undergo background checks, and pass other hurdles. The plan also would have created a guest worker program, allowing up to 600,000 people into the country each year to receive two-year work “Y visas.” A new points system would have been established that emphasized skills, education, and English-language proficiency among potential immigrants over extended family ties in the United States. The plan also would have increased the number of Border Patrol agents and provided funds for enhanced border security, along with strengthening penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants. The negotiating team behind this compromise included Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kyl (R-AZ), and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), and it was supported by the Bush administration. In emphasizing the urgency of immigration reform, Kennedy noted, “Now, it is time for action. 2007 is the year we must fix our broken system.”
Any compromise is bound to upset as many people as it pleases, but in the case of the immigration reform package, the volume of opposition appeared to overwhelm its sponsors. Many conservative Republicans decried the compromise as providing “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, despite the lengthy, expensive, and convoluted path toward legalization that the compromise offered. This base of opposition consisted of many cultural conservatives who decried the demographic shift and security concerns brought upon by illegal immigration. It was largely the same groups of people that supported the hard-line House immigration proposal in 2006. This time around, however, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, so the conservative opposition had less of an institutional base from which to fight. Accordingly, it relied strongly on grassroots strength and constituent pressure, fueled in no small part by vitriolic commentators that railed against “invasion” by illegal immigrants.
Many on the political left felt that the proposal’s guest worker program would create a separate class of workers in the United States that would be estranged from political society and be vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Many also disliked the emphasis placed on employable skills over family ties, arguing that extended family connections frequently form the bedrock of immigrant communities in the United States. Summing up many of these concerns, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) noted that “the proposed bill could devalue the importance of family reunification, replace the current group of undocumented immigrants with a new undocumented population consisting of guest workers who will overstay their visas, and potentially drive down wages of American workers.”
Senators were responsive to their constituents’ opposition, and when the bill first came up for debate, they offered a plethora of amendments. Amendments that passed would have reduced the size of the “Y visa” guest worker program and ended the program altogether after five years, declared English as the national language of the United States, and created inadmissibility and deportability grounds so that various categories of criminals could not qualify for the legalization program, among other things. Failed amendments included those that would have further reduced the emphasis on family connections for new immigrants, those that would have increased the emphasis on family ties, and those that would have done away with the entire point system after five years.
With any compromise as delicate and prominent as the immigration reform plan, however, amendments are not always offered in good faith. Knowing the support for the compromise rested on such tenuous footing, opponents of the bill pushed this relentless stream of amendments knowing that they likely would scuttle the entire package. Tempers rose accordingly, and accounts of shouting matches between senators quickly seeped into the press. McCain and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) apparently got into a shouting match about their respective qualifications on the issue of immigration, and Graham and Obama engaged in a sharp debate on the Senate floor in which Graham underscored the political risks he has undertaken by supporting the compromise. A proposed Obama amendment, Graham said, would undercut “everybody over here who's walked the plank and told our base, ‘You're wrong.’”
Opposition to the immigration plan initially succeeded in stalling the bill when a 45-50 procedural vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster. The president, however, remained as relentless as ever. Having been out of the country during the key days of debate on the immigration compromise, he made a rare trip to Capitol Hill upon his return to lobby Senate Republicans in favor of the bill, suggesting that “the status quo is unacceptable.” His efforts proved successful, and after a 64-35 vote in the Senate to revive the legislation, the bill was considered anew. To help win this reprieve, Bush endorsed a plan to provide an additional $4.4 billion to bolster border surveillance and workplace enforcement provisions. Most crucially, however, Senate leaders agreed to whittle down the plethora of amendments initially offered to a package of just 26. After their consideration, the Senate would then have been able to hold a definitive up-or-down vote on the complete bill itself
That was the plan, anyway. In the end, the immigration compromise fell victim to the threat of a Senate filibuster, with a 46-53 vote. The tally was remarkably similar to that of the initial vote that scuttled the bill, and its composition was equally bipartisan. In all likelihood, the bill’s persistent failure in the Senate will mean that comprehensive immigration reform will have to wait until after the 2008 elections. But compromises, by their inherent nature, can be as popular as they are unpopular. It is hard to imagine any other issue that would have found both President Bush and a majority of Congressional Democrats on the same side. From a political perspective, the president was more desperate than the Democrats—he very much wanted to secure a positive legacy, while Democrats might be reluctant to grant him the satisfaction of doing so. But from a policy perspective, the two unlikely allies shared their most important priorities on this issue. This alliance of convenience certainly faced an up-hill battle to win passage of its comprehensive immigration reform, but in the long run, immigration is an issue that Congress must inevitably address. In that sense, the prospects for reform live on.
Foreign Policy Association, 28 June 2007
Posted by Daniel Widome at 07:05 AM to U. S. Politics | TrackBack (0)
