Towards a More Open immigration Policy

A nation which for most of its history has welcomed all comers and which attributes its drive and creativity to the myriad cultures making up its national mosaic now seems to be increasingly drawn to a lifeboat ethic. Yet, there are many reasons why the drift and substance of U.S. immigration policy should be toward openness rather than toward creating a more closed society. Here are a few:

1. Immigration is a positive rather than a negative phenomenon. Father Allan Figueroa Deck, S. J., a member of the Orange County (Calif.) Task Force on Illegal Aliens, points that immigration is the byproduct of our age’s internationalization and the gradual disappearance of divisions among people who previously had little to do with each other. He states that even in an age of scarcity, immigration is good. It arises out of the mutual needs of both rich and poor nations. The developing nations have difficulty generating enough jobs and the industrial nations generate bottom-level jobs critical to the functioning of society, which cannot be filled with citizens. Thus Western Europe has its “guest workers” from Spain, Italy and other Mediterranean areas. Oil-rich Venezuela has its Colombian illegals. Japan has its Koreans and even Australia and New Zealand have their foreign laborers.
   
   The late Pope Paul VI in his Instruction on the Pastoral Care of Migrants observed that immigration today results from the enormous changes in the sociopolitical order and the processes of industrialization and urbanization occurring worldwide. These changes, the Pope wrote, are leading to a growth in awareness of the fundamental unity of the human race and for the need for the gradual disappearance of territorial borders.

2. Despite the recent bad publicity, immigrants are an asset to the nation. Much has been said about how undocumented workers in particular depress wages, take jobs away from Americans, become a burden on social services and fail to pay their share of taxes. However, a number of important studies (by Wayne Cornelius of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, North and Houston for the U.S. Labor Department, Villalpando for San Diego County and the Task Force on Illegal Aliens for Orange County) refute these claims. These studies suggest that the immigrant, particularly the illegal alien, is a boon for the nation. Father Deck wrote: “Undocumented workers are the most efficient and productive members of American society. They are the mainstay of the services which hotels and restaurants provide. Undocumented workers are the mainstay of the garment industry in the West Coast and it is their work and only their work, which makes that industry competitive with that of Taiwan or Korea and many other places. And it is the undocumented workers who make possible the continued existence of countless small businesses throughout the Southwest.”

3. Current immigration-control programs seem destined to fail because they attack symptoms rather than causes, are premised on faulty or inadequate data or have unrealistic expectations. The undocumented workers are pushed northward by an economic crisis in Mexico, (and other Latin nations) and pulled by the habit, felt need or vice of the economic system in the U.S. demanding low-pay labor-a situation which has changed little from the days of slavery to the present use of illegals. Yet, immigration policy zeroes in on alien only-by trying to apprehend him along a 2,000-mile border, which everyone agrees cannot be closed without a prohibitively expensive Berlin-wall type of barrier, or, as the Carter legislative program proposes, deny him employment by assessing civil or criminal penalties against employers. Yet, even if the sanctions against employers could be enforced-an unrealistic expectation given the 100,000 backlog of equal employment opportunity cases and the failure of other agencies to enforce wage and hour laws -such a measure does not solve the basic problem of how marginal industries, hotels and restaurants cannot get by without cheap labor.
   
   Making the border crossing more difficult by doubling the Border Patrol from 2,000 to 4,000 men, as the Carter program proposes, could backfire in a very significant way. A three-year 3tudy of Mexican communities by MIT Professor Wayne Cornelius disclosed that the majority of Mexican workers who come to the U.S. return to Mexico the same year. Making the crossing more difficult may cause them to opt for permanent residency rather than returning after a few months as they have done for generations living out a cultural pattern institutionalized through the Bracero program, an arrangement between the U.S. and Mexican governments which ran from 1942 through 1964 and in its peak year brought 445,000 Mexican workers to the U.S.

4. Current immigration programs and proposed legislation will perpetuate an underclass of workers without an opportunity for upward mobility. The Carter legislation, which would grant conditional amnesty to about 700,000 illegal aliens who entered before 1970 and non-deportable status for five years to several million who came between 1970 and 1977, is meant to prevent such an underclass. But critics say there is no surer way to doom non-deportables to such a class than by decreeing that they cannot bring their families and have to pay taxes without being eligible for social benefits: Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children, supplemental security income and perhaps even unemployment insurance or workman’s compensation.
   
   Labor economist Martin Brown writes that the existence of disadvantaged groups-blacks, women, other minorities and now illegal aliens-has made it possible for the U.S. economy to maintain a substantial “low wage sector” exempt from minimum wage regulations, unemployment and workman’s compensation coverage, industrial safety regulations and even labor relations legislation. Racism justifies the low wages and bad working conditions and bars such workers from unions.
   
   But even the lowliest worker eventually finds a way out of such a trap or starts demanding a better deal, thereby becoming an undesirable employee. That is why the illegal alien, who is more vulnerable to exploitation than the citizen worker, finds it so easy to find employment. A priest in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn which is receiving a steady influx of Mexican immigrants says that within 10 to 15 days the new arrivals have jobs-this in a city with a large number of unemployed minority workers. Legalizing the undocumented would improve the situation for citizen workers.

5. Finally, a more open immigration policy is demanded by our moral principles and by our commitment to human rights throughout the world. As a nation we cannot escape the moral imperative to aid the weak, be they individuals or nations. This is especially true in relation to Mexico, a country from whom the U.S. seized half its territory at the point of a gun in the mid-19^th century-including California and its gold, Texas and its oil and Arizona and its rich copper deposits, to say nothing about the riches in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. A strong moral argument can be made that the United States has a special responsibility to help Mexico because of such territorial seizure and other economic exploitation.