Getting No Bill at All Is Better Than Senate Bill
New America Media, Commentary/Analysis, David Bacon Posted: May 25, 2006
Editor's Note: Many grassroots immigrant rights groups outside Washington, D.C., say that failure to pass any immigration reform is better than any possible combination of the current House and Senate immigration bills. David Bacon is an associate editor at New America Media and author of "The Children of NAFTA" (University of California Press, 2004). He sits on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Committee of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.
SAN FRANCISCO--When the U.S. Senate passed its version of "comprehensive immigration reform" on Thursday, senators from both sides of the aisle claimed that despite the enormous controversy the bill has generated, passing a bill with flaws was better than passing no bill at all. Outside of the beltway and its coterie of lobbyists, however, a groundswell of community groups now argue that Congress would do better to pass no bill than to enact a bill which reconciles the proposal just passed by the Senate, and that passed last December in the House of Representatives.
In a statement condemning the latest Hagel-Martinez compromise, S 2611, the proposal that just passed on Thursday, immigrant rights advocates convened by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights argued Wednesday that "the rush to reach a bipartisan accord on immigration legislation has led to a compromise that would create deep divisions within the immigrant community and leave millions of undocumented immigrants in the shadows."
"The current Senate bill," said Sheila Chung, of the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, "does not reflect the immigration reform called for by millions of immigrant communities marching the streets."
The United States is currently home to over 12 million people without immigration documents, which makes them and their families subject to deportation and vulnerable to exploitation at work. Nevertheless, the groups point to the following provisions of the Senate bill, which will make immigrants much worse off than they are even at present:
--Under the Senate's legalization plan, those with less than two years in the United States (about a million people) would be immediately subject to deportation. Those with two to five years must leave the country, and may apply to re-enter through some currently unknown process. The ability of border stations to handle the applications of the 3 to 4 million people involved is doubtful, given the current years-long backlog in normal visa applications.
--Like HR 4437 passed by the House in December, the Senate bill would ramp up the enforcement of current employer sanctions to make it a crime for undocumented people to hold a job. Employers often use this law to retaliate against workers who try to enforce labor standards or join unions. The Social Security Administration would become immigration police, forcing all workers to carry a new national ID card, and would require employers to fire anyone who's documents they question. The current Basic Pilot program, which moves in this direction, has shown the SSA database to be rife with errors.
--The Senate bill establishes and expands guest worker programs, allowing employers to recruit workers outside the country on temporary visas. These new contract workers would be vulnerable to employer pressure, since their visa status would be dependant on their employment. Further, as the AFL-CIO's Ana Avendaño points out, "this turns jobs that are now held by permanent employees with rights and benefits into jobs filled by temporary, contract employees. It basically takes the jobs of millions of people out of the protections of the New Deal won by workers decades ago." The labor federation points out that if currently undocumented workers and new immigrants were given permanent residence status instead of temporary visas, they would be able to exercise their rights as workers and community residents.
--The Senate bill "vastly increases detention and deportation practices and further militarizes the border," according to the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Halliburton Corporation has already been given a U.S. contract for construction of immigrant detention facilities near the border with Mexico, and proposals have been made for reopening closed military bases to house deportees and detainees. The bill makes document fraud an aggravated felony and grounds for deportation, resulting in the criminalization of the millions of immigrants who have had to provide false Social Security cards to employers in order to get hired.
Stan Mark, AALDEF director, warned before passage of S 2611 that "the upsurge in the mass movement will redefine this debate well into the elections if Congress passes their so-called 'compromise' of comprehensive immigration reform." He calls instead for eliminating current laws penalizing lack of legal status, especially employer sanctions. "The political climate of the debate," AALDEF says, "has converted this immigration bill into a Trojan horse into which lawmakers have crammed anti-immigrant and undemocratic policies."
The NNIRR declaration, a set of principles enumerated by AALDEF, and similar programs put forward by groups outside of Washington all emphasize the need for positive, pro-immigrant alternatives. They include immediate legal status for the undocumented, easier family reunification and elimination of the backlog in processing visa applications, no guest worker programs, ending the indefinite detention of immigrants, restoring due process to immigration proceedings and an end to the militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico.
Since the Senate has approved a bill far removed from these principles, and the House has enacted an enforcement-only bill that is even more hostile to immigrants, immigrant rights advocates believe killing all current proposals is their only option.
That might, in fact, be the outcome of efforts to reconcile the House and Senate bills, since the most conservative House Republicans oppose any legal status for the undocumented. "It is possible that a reconciliation between HR 4437 and S 2611 will not happen in the conference committee," speculates Evelyn Sanchez of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. "Should this happen, we will have time to continue pushing for real and fair comprehensive immigration reform. If HR 4437 and S 2611 are successfully reconciled, and the president signs the bill into law, then we have the task of overturning that law."
Despite the grim scenario, advocates are unwilling to give up. "It's been done before," she says.
Photo by David Bacon
Page
1 of 1
|
User Comments
Michael Marizco on Jun 06, 2006 at 14:07:10 said:
I read this commentary twice now just to be sure.
So David Bacon thinks keeping the current state of affairs is better than the offered solutions, does he?
Then I invite him to come spend some time where the "current situation" prevails - the Arizona border with Sonora.
Here, he'll see what twelve-plus years of the current border policy has left us, including:
Ecologically devastated public lands at places like the San Pedro riparian area, Organ Pipe Cactus National or the Cabeza Prieta wildlife refuge.
More than 160 people died this year alone and summer hasn't even started yet. This comes about because the "current situation" is driving illegal migration into the wild desert of Arizona.
It means a two-three day walk through 110 degree temperatures. Migrants sometimes hang themselves from trees, or just lay down and die, unable to continue because they run out of water.
The "current situation" has led to increased sexual assualts on female immigrants crossing through Arizona. We have an average of two rapes per week now - those that are reported to U.S. or Mexican officials.
The "current situation" leads to dozens of burglaries in the homes of Arizona ranchers while Mexican residents are over-run with more than 3,000 people a day running the gauntlet for the border.
I understand; neither the Senate and House bills fall entirely on the side of immigrants but the story of what those people went through to enter the United States falls heavily on the border here.
If Mr. Bacon wants to offer real ideas, please do so; I'd love to hear them. But keeping the status quo is kind of like not voting to protest an election; seems like a sure-fire failure.
I'd invite Mr. Bacon to leave the ivory towers of theory and come down to the border where the "current situation" might educate him a little.
Michael Marizco
www.BorderReporter.com
Mark Heller on May 26, 2006 at 06:12:57 said:
I've been representing low-income immigration clients as an attorney since 1978. The bill passed by the Senate will help several million people but will damage more (and some of those helped by the current bill will eventually run into problems from the same bill as they proceed through the legalization process). Also, if a conference committee works out the differences between the Senate and House bills it's likely that the final law would be much worse than the current Senate version.
David Denholm on May 26, 2006 at 01:36:05 said:
I've got another reason that the Senate immigration bill would be harmful to the interests of immigrants.
The provisions of the bill applying the Davis-Bacon Act and other prevailing wage laws to immigrant workers would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to get jobs.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Davis-Bacon Act is a prevailing wage law under which the Department of Labor determines the wages to be paid on federally financed construction projects. The wages are notoriously set to accommodate union interests. The problem is the process and motivation. Davis-Bacon wage rates are determined by replies to a voluntary survey. Union contractors have an extremely high level of motivation to respond to the survey. Nonunion contractors have a low, and sometimes negative, level of motivation. As a result, even though according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of construction workers are union members the Department of Labor all too frequently determines that union scale is the prevailing wage.
It doesn't have to be this way. The Department of Labor also keeps track of prevailing wages for immigrant labor certifications. Those "prevailing wages" are often quite different from the Davis-Bacon determinations.
For example, the DOL's Davis-Bacon prevailing wage determination for a carpenter in San Francisco is $32.25 plus $14.945 in fringe benefits. The DOL's Employment and Training Administration's prevailing wage determination lists wages for four skill levels of carpenters ranging from $13.42 to $29.69. That's not an isolated example. In Des Moines, Iowa the Davis-Bacon wage for a cement mason is $28.50 plus $12.28 in fringes while the other prevailing wage ranges from $10.03 to $17.97. In San Diego, California the Davis-Bacon wage for an electrician is $36.51 plus 3.75% of that and $10.03 in fringes while the other prevailing wage ranges from $13.74 to $24.35.
So, imagine yourself as a newly documented immigrant worker seeking employment as a carpenter in San Francisco. If your potential employer isn't a union contractor, and about 80 percent of them are not, to offer you a job he will have to pay $32.25 as opposed to the somewhere between $13.42 and $29.69 he is paying his other employees. Your chances of getting a job are nada.
David Denholm on May 25, 2006 at 20:43:20 said:
There's a story that the Irish invented the bagpipe to keep wolves away from their flocks and then as a practical joke told the Scots it was a musical instrument.
Immigrants seeking work might feel the same way about the provision in the immigration reform bill in the Senate, S. 2611, mandating prevailing wages for newly documented (H-2C) immigrant workers. It wouldn't be quite fair to say they tried to hide it but in defining the "prevailing wage" required by the bill rather than refer to the better well known Davis-Bacon Act, the bill merely refers to subchapter IV of Chapter 31 of Title 40, United States Code without mentioning that is the Davis-Bacon Act. This little attempted subterfuge is made noticeable because it goes on to say in the same sentence "or the Service Contract Act of 1965 (41 U.S.C. 351 et seq.)..." Perhaps the very words "Davis-Bacon Act" are developing a bit of an foul odor.
Just in case you didn't get the joke, the unions are so gung ho for immigration reform they have a provision in the bill making it unlikely that the immigrants will find work.
That reminds me of an editorial cartoon from the 60's when the Nixon Administration instituted the "Philadelphia Plan" to force the construction unions to integrate. The picture was of a very large white construction workers strangling a rather small black construction worker with a hammer lock around his neck. The caption read, "I love him like a brother."
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Davis-Bacon Act is a prevailing wage law under which the Department of Labor dictates the wages to be paid on federally financed construction projects. The wages are notoriously set to accommodate union interests. The problem is the process and motivation. Davis-Bacon wage rates are determined by replies to a voluntary survey. Union contractors have an extremely high level of motivation to respond to the survey. Nonunion contractors have a low, and sometimes negative, level of motivation. As a result, even though according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of construction workers are union members the Department of Labor all too frequently determines that union scale is the prevailing wage.
It doesn't have to be this way. The Department of Labor also keeps track of prevailing wages for immigrant labor certifications. Those "prevailing wages" are often quite different from the Davis-Bacon determinations.
For example, the DOL's Davis-Bacon prevailing wage determination for a plumber in Springfield, Massachusetts is $32.54 plus $16.73 in fringe benefits. The DOL's Employment and Training Administration's prevailing wage determination lists wages for four skill levels of plumbers ranging from $15.41 to $24.81. In other words, the Davis-Bacon wage is 30 percent higher than what is more likely to be the true prevailing wage for the most highly skilled plumber. That's not an isolated example. In Portland, Oregon the Davis-Bacon wage for a carpenter is $28.41 plus $11.16 in fringes while the other prevailing wage ranges from $11.80 to $24.06. In San Diego, California the Davis-Bacon wage for an electrician is $36.51 plus 3.75% of that and $10.03 in fringes while the other prevailing wage ranges from $13.74 to $24.35.
So, imagine yourself as an immigrant seeking work as a carpenter in Portland. If your potential employer isn't a union contractor, and more than 90 percent of them are not, to offer you a job he will have to pay $28.41 as opposed to the somewhere between $11.80 and $24.06 he is paying his other employees. Your chances of getting a job are nada.
Is that a practical joke or just "tough love" union style?
john mcmahon on May 25, 2006 at 18:22:57 said:
The bill makes document fraud an aggravated felony and grounds for deportation, resulting in the criminalization of the millions of immigrants who have had to provide false Social Security cards to employers in order to get hired. So according to you and your group,if you are here illegially its OK to steal others SSN, others addresses, others property. Why dont we just make it ok to just steal and rob anyone at any time, that sounds fair playing by your rules.. I do not see your point.
Juana on May 25, 2006 at 14:10:32 said:
it\' too easy for white leftists to dismiss something that might benefit desperate people.
-->Why don\'t you stick to writing about whites.
J