A New Green Card Deal

by MAE M. NGAI

[from the July 9, 2007 issue of The Nation]
This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/ngai

The Senate immigration bill faces opposition from conservatives and liberals alike, but critics on both sides are missing a crucial problem with the legislation. The bill fails to address a fundamental flaw in our current immigration system: the arbitrary and unfair manner in which it restricts the number of green cards issued each year.

In addition to placing an annual limit on the number of green cards, the current system imposes a uniform per-country cap. Most countries never come close to reaching their limit, which is 25,620--or 7 percent of all family and employer-sponsored visas. But four countries persistently max out their caps: Mexico, India, the Philippines and China. For these countries the visa backlog for some family categories is twenty or more years--an impossible wait. For employer-sponsored visas the backlog for skilled workers is five or more years.

The cap on annual admissions from these countries is a major cause of illegal immigration and the deficit of skilled immigrant labor. The Senate proposal skirts the problem but cynically addresses its effects by increasing the number of green cards only for those with education and wealth while channeling lower-skilled immigrants into a guest-worker program.

Congress repealed the noxious national-origin quota system, in place since the 1920s, which blatantly discriminated against immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia on grounds that they were racially undesirable. Individual attributes--family relations and job skills--were deemed more important in selecting immigrants than national origin or race. The per-country cap was established to keep the immigration stream diverse, to keep the system from being monopolized by a few countries. The logic appealed to Americans’ sense of fairness, that we should treat each country the same.

But this sense of formal equality obscures the fact that not all countries are the same: Some are larger and some smaller, some are more prosperous than others, some have special historical relationships with the United States that others do not. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in the real world. Why should Belgium and New Zealand, say, have the same number of visas as Mexico and India, if the former are underused and the latter are oversubscribed?

In the early 1960s Michigan’s Democratic Senator Philip Hart proposed an innovative bill that did not treat immigration as a zero-sum game but took into account both America’s needs and the needs of sending countries. Hart’s initial vision allocated 20 percent of all visas to refugees; 32 percent to countries in proportion to their size of population; and 48 percent to countries in proportion to their immigration to the United States during the previous fifteen years. It set a minimum and maximum for all countries and called for an update every five years. It was a complicated formula that eschewed a unilateralist approach in favor of one that balanced human rights, the emigration needs of sending countries, and Americans’ historical and familial ties abroad. The bill had bipartisan support but was bypassed by another bill, supported by the Kennedy Administration. That bill was ultimately signed into law as the Hart-Celler Act by President Johnson in 1965.

Hart’s ideas could be updated to solve the problems caused by the per-country limits in ways that don’t denigrate family ties or create an underclass of temporary guest workers. Since 1980 we’ve had a separate law dealing with refugee admissions. But we could allocate green cards to countries based on the relative size of their population and emigration demand; their ties to American citizens and institutions; and their supply of low- and high-skilled labor that we need. In other words, if we acknowledge that migration is driven by supply and demand and take into account the needs of the United States and other countries, we might have a system that is more realistic and fair.

We might also return to a regionalist approach. Few people know that before 1965 there were no numerical restrictions on immigration from countries of the Western Hemisphere, in keeping with the tradition of Pan-Americanism. When we imposed quotas on Mexico and the rest of the Americas after 1965, we got illegal immigration. Today the free-trade agreements in the Americas (NAFTA and CAFTA) ease the movement of goods and investments--especially those of multinational corporations--but not people. The European Union, by contrast, allows citizens of member states free movement to other member states. If we combined measures to strengthen the economies of our hemispheric neighbors with a more sensible immigration policy, we would go a long way toward solving the illegal immigration problem.

Finally, rather than rehash the agonizing debate over a mass-legalization program every twenty years, we might consider restoring statutes of limitations on prosecuting unauthorized presence. We used to have such a policy (one to five years) before Congress eliminated it in the 1920s. The underlying logic was much the same as the arguments for legalization today: Immigrants who work hard and sink roots in their communities effectively become part of our society and should not have to remain in the shadows forever.

We would be wise to rethink the unilateralist premises of US immigration policy. It makes much more sense for our policies to reflect how migration is driven by supply and demand in a world in which population and wealth are distributed unevenly. History shows that policies designed to categorically exclude--from the Chinese exclusion acts of the nineteenth century to the imposition of unrealistically low quotas on Mexico in the twentieth--are doomed to failure.

Immigration Legislation -- comments by Lou Dobbs

Dobbs: Give it a rest, Mr. President
By Lou Dobbs • CNN
Editor’s note: Lou Dobbs’ commentary appears weekly on CNN.com.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush is building his legacy, adding another unfortunate line of hollow bravado to his rhetorical repertoire. To “Mission accomplished,” “Bring it on,” “Wanted: Dead or alive,” and of course, “I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” he has added “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” referring to his own ill-considered push for so-called comprehensive immigration reform legislation.
Bush emerged from a midday meeting with Republican senators on Capitol Hill to declare, “We’ve got to convince the American people this bill is the best way to enforce our border.”
No, Mr. President, someone you trust and respect must convince you that kind of tortured reasoning should never be exposed before cameras and microphones. Isn’t there anyone in this administration with the guts to say, “Give it a rest, Mr. President”?
Sen. Jeff Sessions came close when he said, “He needs to back off.” This president desperately needs to be reminded that he is the president of all Americans and not just of corporate interests and socio-ethnocentric special interest groups.
In what other country would citizens be treated to the spectacle of the president and the Senate focusing on the desires of 12 million to 20 million people who had crossed the nation’s borders illegally, committed document fraud, and in many cases identity theft, overstayed their visas and demanded, not asked, full forgiveness for their trespasses?
Illegal aliens and their advocates, both liberal and conservative, possess such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they demand not only legal status, but also that the government leave the borders wide open so that other illegals could follow as well, while offering not so much as an “I’m sorry” or a “Thank you.”
This bill would be disastrous public policy and devastate millions of American workers and their families, taxpayers and any semblance of national security. Yet even in defeat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, one of the reform bill’s chief architects, declared: “Doing nothing is totally unacceptable.” Like the senator, Bush says the status quo is unacceptable.
The president and the senator are wrong. It is the sham legislation they support that is totally unacceptable. But if Bush and Kennedy sincerely desire resolution to our illegal immigration and border security crises, I’d like to try to help. But a word of caution, if I may, to our elected officials: Resolution of these crises will require honesty, directness and an absolute commitment to the national interest and the common good of our citizens. Here are what I consider to be the essential guiding principles for any substantive reform:
First, fully secure our borders and ports. Without that security, there can be no control of immigration and, therefore, no meaningful reform of immigration law.
Second, enforce existing immigration laws, and that includes the prosecution of the employers of illegal aliens. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, put it, illegal employers are the magnet that draws illegal aliens across our border. Enforcing the law against illegal employers and illegal aliens at large in the country will mean bolstering, in all respects, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Third, the government should fund, equip and hire the people necessary to man the Citizenship and Immigration Services. To do so will ensure that the agency is capable of fully executing and administering lawful immigration into the United States and eliminating the shameful backlog of millions of people who are seeking legal entry into this country.
Those three steps are necessary to the security of the nation and the effective administration and enforcement of existing immigration laws. Those steps should be considered non-negotiable conditions precedent to any change or reform of existing immigration law.
At the same time, the president and Congress should order exhaustive studies of the economic, social and fiscal effects of the leading proposals to change immigration law, and foremost in their consideration should be the well-being of American workers and their families.
The president and Congress should begin the process of thoughtful reform of our immigration laws. Public hearings should be held throughout the nation. The American people should be heard in every region of the country, and fact-finding should be rigorous and thorough. The process will be time-consuming and demand much of our congressmen and senators, their staffs and relevant executive agencies.
The importance of securing borders and ports and reforming our immigration laws is profound, and that security is fundamental to the future of our nation. That future can be realized only with a complete commitment to a comprehensive legislative process of absolute transparency and open public forums in which our elected officials hear the voices of the people they represent. American citizens deserve no less.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/12/Dobbs.June13/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Marines face U.S. probe in Afghanistan deaths

POSTED: 3:16 p.m. EDT, March 23, 2007

Story Highlights
• Marine unit ordered out of Afghanistan early after U.S. probe begun
• Some Marines are accused of killing and shooting civilians after suicide blast
• Spokesman for Marine unit say members are in the process of leaving country
• Explosives-rigged minivan crashed into a convoy of Marines in March 4 incident

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Marines accused of shooting and killing civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan are under U.S. investigation, and their entire unit has been ordered to leave the country early, officials said Friday.

Army Maj. Gen. Francis H. Kearney III, head of Special Operations Command Central, responsible for special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, ordered the unit of about 120 Marines out of Afghanistan and initiated an investigation into the March 4 incident, said Lt. Col. Lou Leto, spokesman at Kearney’s command headquarters.

A spokesman for the Marine unit, Maj. Cliff Gilmore, said that it is in the process of leaving Afghanistan, but he declined to provide details on the timing and new location, citing a need to preserve security.

In the March 4 incident in Nangahar province, an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into a convoy of Marines that U.S. officials said also came under fire from gunmen.

As many as 10 Afghans were killed and 34 wounded as the convoy made an escape. Injured Afghans said the Americans fired on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away.

U.S. military officials said militant gunmen shot at Marines and may have caused some of the civilian casualties.

Hundreds of Afghan men held an anti-U.S. demonstration afterward, and President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident.

Leto, the spokesman at Special Operations Command Central headquarters, said the Marines, after being ambushed, responded in a way that created “perceptions [that] have really damaged the relationship between the local population and this unit.”

“The relationship you have with the local population while conducting counterinsurgency operations is very important, and because the perceptions damaged that, it probably degraded the [Marine] unit’s ability to fulfill those kinds of missions,” Leto added. “So the general felt it was best to move them out of that area.”

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