Better options needed on immigration reform

When Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced their immigration reform plan, the Obama administration said it will support it. Unfortunately, it recycles the same bad ideas that have led to the defeat of reform efforts over the last five years. In some ways, it is even worse.


Schumer and Graham dramatize the lack of new ideas among Washington power brokers. Real immigration reform requires a real alternative. We need a framework that embodies the goals of immigrants and working people, not the political calculations of a reluctant Congress.

What's wrong with the Schumer-Graham proposal?

-- It ignores trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, which produce profits for U.S. corporations, but increase poverty in Mexico and Central America. Since NAFTA went into effect, income in Mexico dropped, while millions of workers lost jobs and farmers their land. If we do not change U.S. trade policy, millions of displaced people will continue to come, no matter how many walls we build.

-- People working without papers will be fired and even imprisoned under their proposal, and raids will increase. Vulnerability makes it harder for people to defend their rights, organize unions and raise wages. That keeps the price of immigrant labor low. Every worker will have to show a national ID card (an idea too extreme even for the Bush administration). This will not stop people from coming to the United States, but it will produce more immigration raids, firings and a much larger detention system.

-- They treat the flow of people coming north as a labor supply only. They propose new guest-worker programs, where workers would have few rights and no leverage to organize for better conditions.

-- Their legalization scheme imposes barriers for the 12 million people who need legal status. In 1986, even President Ronald Reagan, hardly a liberal, signed a plan in which people gained legal status quickly and easily. Many are now citizens and have made contributions to our country.

Instead, we need reform that unites people and protects everyone's rights and jobs, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike. We need to use our ideals of rights and equality to guide us. It's time to put those ideas into a bill that can bring our country together, not divide it. A human rights immigration bill would:

-- Stop trade agreements that create poverty and forced migration.

-- Give people a quick and easy path to legal status and citizenship.

-- End the visa backlogs.

-- Protect the rights of all workers - against discrimination, or getting fired for demanding rights or for not having papers.

-- Bring civil rights and peace to border communities.

-- Dismantle the immigration prisons, end detention and stop the raids.

-- Allow people to come to the United States with green cards that are not tied to employment. -- Use reasonable legalization fees to finance job programs in communities with high unemployment.

-- End guest-worker programs.

Those who say no alternative is possible might remember the "go slow" advice given to young students going to jail in the South in the early '60s. If they'd heeded it, we'd still be waiting for a Voting Rights Act. Do we believe in equality or not?

That's the choice.



David Bacon is the author of "Illegal People - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants."