Immigration reform or immigration brawl?

The United States, a nation of immigrants, is having a problem with immigrants — or at least with 12 million of them, illegals known in politically correct parlance as “undocumented.”
The public debate over the issue, far from muted at the best of times, has become strident in recent years between liberals and conservatives over whether, as the former contend, these folks should receive amnesty or, as the latter insist, they should be — improbable though the logistics of it all may be — deported en masse because their presence in the country has strained the economy and, presumably, deflected American culture from its preordained Anglo-Saxon course.
Last Thursday, President Obama injected himself into the debate by giving a 15-minute televised speech to the nation in which he advanced a moral argument to convince the public that a more compassionate stance on the question of undocumented immigrants is in the nation’s best interests. He outlined a plan to provide “administrative relief” and work permits to as many as 3.7 million of these souls, who he said “continue to live in the shadows,” but who are parents of children born in the US, thus American citizens. He additionally offered relief to 300,000 young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.
In effect, the president was at once asserting the executive powers of the White House and daring Republican legislators by going over their heads. The speech sparked immediate outrage among tea party lawmakers, who saw it as a poke in the eye, just two weeks after Republicans handed the chief executive a humiliating defeat at the polls in the mid-term elections, winning full control of both the House and the Senate. From here on, it looks like it’s a free-for-all.
To be sure, the debate over immigration, illegal or otherwise, is as old as the United States. George J. Borjas, a Cuban-American professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School and a recognized immigration scholar, writes: “Despite the fact that all of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, American history is characterized by a never-ending debate over when to pull the ladder in.” Each wave of newly arrived immigrants — the Irish in the 1940s, the Chinese in the 1870s, the Italians and Jews at the turn of the century, South and Southeast Asians in the 1970s — has triggered heated, at times bitter, controversy by nativists.
Example: In 1790, the population of the United States stood at a puny 4 million. By 1920, augmented by newly arrived immigrants — mostly Europeans — that population had grown to 106 million. The foreign-born comprised 13 percent of that total. That did not sit well with nativists, who pressured congress to pass the Quota Act of 1921, by virtue of which a cap of 360,000 (down from one million) was put on the admission of newcomers to American shores.
And, yes, the devil with Emma Lazars’s poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, demanding: “Give me your tired, your poor/ your huddled masses/ yearning to breathe free.” In fact, the Quota Act also established a “national origins” preference that favored immigrants from countries in Western Europe over those from southern Europe, Asia and Africa.
It wasn’t till 1965 that the Quota Act, seen against the backdrop of the civil rights movements at the time, was considered racist and at odds with American values, and replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act, which recognized no national origins quota. Effectively, first come, first served.
All of which brings us back to the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently living underground in the country, that conservative Republicans and tea party advocates want to see, at best, denied amnesty, or at worst booted out. That is both inhumane and impractical. The overwhelming majority of these folks — “families, not felons,” as President Obama called them in his speech on Thursday — are productive, law-abiding members of the community and have made invaluable contributions to the economy. As Sheila Jackson Lee, former co-chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus Immigration Task Force, commented on the subject: “Many undocumented immigrants have earned access to legalization by their hard work and demonstrably high moral character.”
Moreover, countless children, born in the US — and thus citizens by virtue of Birthright Citizenship — whose parents are undocumented, have seen these parents torn away from them and deported right before their eyes. And those are the people, among the 3.7 million undocumented that President Obama plans to provide with “administrative relief” and work permits — if the Republican Congress doesn’t block him in the coming months, including taking him to court with the charge of overreaching his executive mandate and “acting like an emperor rather than as a president.”
It’s not going to be very pretty.