Immigrant realities

The Wall Street Journal

The debate over President Bush's new immigration reform has so far been mainly about election-year politics. But what we believe most commends it is that it recognizes the world as it exists.

Like it or not, the U.S. is part of an integrating regional and world economy in which the movement of people across borders is inevitable. Despite nearly 20 years of efforts to "crack down on the borders," the immigrants keep coming -- an estimated eight million without legal U.S. documents today. As long as the per-capita income differential between the U.S. (nearly $32,000) and Mexico ($3,679) continues to be so wide, we can't stop immigrants short of means that will violate our traditions, our conscience, and our national interest.

Do we really want to deputize all of American business to report and arrest illegals? We tried a version of that in the 1986 reform that was promoted by restrictionists, and it proved both a nuisance and a failure. We later beefed up the border guard, but all that did was move illegal crossings deeper into the shadows of organized crime and cause more illegals to stay here for longer periods. We could always next build a Berlin Wall along the 2,000 miles of U.S.-Mexican border, or deploy the 101st Airborne, but we doubt Americans would be morally comfortable with either.

So we are left to deal with the reality of modern immigration, both legal and illegal. "Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics," President Bush rightly said on Wednesday. "Some of the jobs being generated in America's growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling. Yet these jobs represent a tremendous opportunity for workers from abroad." Foreign-born workers represent 14 percent of the U.S. labor force, meaning that huge parts of the retail, restaurant and farm economies would shut down without them.

Bush's guest-worker proposal would create a legal means -- a renewable three-year work visa -- for new immigrants to enter the country and take jobs that Americans don't want. Illegal immigrants already living here would become eligible for guest-worker status after paying a fine. The plan also would allow for circular migration, which means that farm hands could return home to their families after the harvest without worrying about another life-risking trek back to the United States. Immigrant workers would enjoy the protection of our labor laws and be able to quit or switch jobs without fear of deportation.

The proposal also has the advantage of making it easier to track foreigners who enter the country in our post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. Valuable homeland security resources are now being squandered chasing down Honduran gardeners instead of more likely terrorist threats. Giving them legal status would let the law-abiding move out into the open and away from possible exploitation by cynical employers or landlords.

One objection, especially from the political right, is that the Bush proposal rewards people who broke the law. But in fact illegals would be required to pay a fine, as well as to prove employment before they could receive temporary visas. The 1986 "amnesty" to which this is being compared made no such demands.

A more relevant criticism in our view is that the White House proposal lacks an "earned legalization" component. Participation in the guest worker program won't necessarily put someone on track for a green card (for permanent residency), which is the goal of many immigrants. For some illegal aliens already here, this may be reason enough to remain in the shadows, even though the president also said he will ask Congress to increase the overall number of green cards issued each year.

As for the politics, Bush is said to be playing for Hispanic votes, as if attracting voters wasn't part of getting elected. But the initial opposition also suggests that this is a controversy that Bush could easily have dodged. The pessimist conservative wing of his own party is opposed and will give him an especially hard time in the House. Meanwhile, some of the pro-immigration groups on the left resist any efforts to assimilate immigrants more easily into American cultural life. Democrats will also give him no credit for stealing one of their issues.

But that's all the more reason to applaud the President for returning to the generous pro-immigrant tone of his 2000 campaign and taking this on even after Sept. 11, 2001. As he said in one of his better campaign lines, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande."