Home-baked solutions to illegal immigration
Home-baked solutions to illegal immigration
By Patti Waldmeir
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 13 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 13 2007 03:00
Sometimes it seems like government by paralysis is written into the US constitution. Every time we Americans confront a problem that really needs resolving - like our vast underclass of 12m illegal immigrants, or the almost 50m Americans who have no health insurance, or the risks of global warming - our democracy seems to fracture in the face of it.
Instead of the tyranny of the majority, which our constitution was written to combat, we increasingly seem to suffer a tyranny of immobility. Last week, for example - in spite of almost universal agreement that America's immigration system is grievously hurting companies, the country and the American dream - the US Congress again failed to strike the political compromise needed to repair its deficiencies.
It is enough to make a true democrat despair: ordinary Americans, from both parties, are fed up with the inertia.
Increasingly, they are stepping in where Congress fears to tread, coming up with their own home-baked solutions to the nation's problems. From a Dallas suburb to a dying coal town in Pennsylvania, local officials have come up with their own versions of immigration reform: scores have passed laws or ordinances cracking down on illegal immigration, by penalising landlords that rent to illegals or employers that hire them. Gridlock in Washington will only encourage this Balkanisation.
America's states and localities often function as indispensable "laboratories of democracy" - as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis labelled them more than a century ago. But in the case of immigration reform, the towns and states that have passed these measures are functioning more like laboratories of intolerance, cloaking class, ethnic and chauvinist hatred in the language of justice. And a lot of their zeal is driven by fury at the federal government's failure to protect them from a new generation of immigrants - not the hard- working, frugal and ambitious masses of the early 20th century, but an undereducated underclass of mostly Hispanic immigrants, viewed as bringing crime, drugs and poverty wherever they go.
So now places such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania - an old coalmining town built partly by east European immigrants - are turning America against its own history as a nation of immigrants. Almost a year ago, Hazleton passed its Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which was soon cloned by scores of other cities and towns that blame their problems on aliens.
The law imposes stiff fines on landlords and employers who hire or rent to "illegals" - but the definition of "illegal" is so broad and vague that immigrant rights groups say it could easily trap those who have a legal right to a flat or a job. Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert who opposes the Hazleton measure, says it is simply unworkable: small town landlords and bosses cannot be expected to become instant experts on the intricacies of federal immigration law.
A Mexican woman who enters the country without documents, then marries a Mexican man and has US-born children might have a perfect right to stay in America - but lack the papers to prove it, says Mr Yale-Loehr. Landlords and employers may simply have no idea who is legal and who is not - and faced with the costs of getting it wrong, they may err on the side of discrimination, says the American Civil Liberties Union.
Hazleton's law, and others like it, could be struck down as unconstitutional on the grounds that immigration is the job of the federal government, so state and local laws are pre-empted. A judge in Farmers Branch, Texas - the first town to put an anti- immigrant ordinance to a popular vote - temporarily froze the town's law on those grounds.
"We would never allow states or cities to declare war," says Mr Yale-Loehr - so why let them write immigration laws, he asks?
Washington is frantic with last-ditch efforts to salvage a national solution. If they fail - as seems likely - employers and landlords face the impossible task of complying with federal and local laws that often conflict. After a few years of this democratic chaos at the grassroots, we will be right back where we started: looking for a national solution to a national problem, in spite of our fractured politics.
By Patti Waldmeir
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 13 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 13 2007 03:00
Sometimes it seems like government by paralysis is written into the US constitution. Every time we Americans confront a problem that really needs resolving - like our vast underclass of 12m illegal immigrants, or the almost 50m Americans who have no health insurance, or the risks of global warming - our democracy seems to fracture in the face of it.
Instead of the tyranny of the majority, which our constitution was written to combat, we increasingly seem to suffer a tyranny of immobility. Last week, for example - in spite of almost universal agreement that America's immigration system is grievously hurting companies, the country and the American dream - the US Congress again failed to strike the political compromise needed to repair its deficiencies.
It is enough to make a true democrat despair: ordinary Americans, from both parties, are fed up with the inertia.
Increasingly, they are stepping in where Congress fears to tread, coming up with their own home-baked solutions to the nation's problems. From a Dallas suburb to a dying coal town in Pennsylvania, local officials have come up with their own versions of immigration reform: scores have passed laws or ordinances cracking down on illegal immigration, by penalising landlords that rent to illegals or employers that hire them. Gridlock in Washington will only encourage this Balkanisation.
America's states and localities often function as indispensable "laboratories of democracy" - as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis labelled them more than a century ago. But in the case of immigration reform, the towns and states that have passed these measures are functioning more like laboratories of intolerance, cloaking class, ethnic and chauvinist hatred in the language of justice. And a lot of their zeal is driven by fury at the federal government's failure to protect them from a new generation of immigrants - not the hard- working, frugal and ambitious masses of the early 20th century, but an undereducated underclass of mostly Hispanic immigrants, viewed as bringing crime, drugs and poverty wherever they go.
So now places such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania - an old coalmining town built partly by east European immigrants - are turning America against its own history as a nation of immigrants. Almost a year ago, Hazleton passed its Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which was soon cloned by scores of other cities and towns that blame their problems on aliens.
The law imposes stiff fines on landlords and employers who hire or rent to "illegals" - but the definition of "illegal" is so broad and vague that immigrant rights groups say it could easily trap those who have a legal right to a flat or a job. Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert who opposes the Hazleton measure, says it is simply unworkable: small town landlords and bosses cannot be expected to become instant experts on the intricacies of federal immigration law.
A Mexican woman who enters the country without documents, then marries a Mexican man and has US-born children might have a perfect right to stay in America - but lack the papers to prove it, says Mr Yale-Loehr. Landlords and employers may simply have no idea who is legal and who is not - and faced with the costs of getting it wrong, they may err on the side of discrimination, says the American Civil Liberties Union.
Hazleton's law, and others like it, could be struck down as unconstitutional on the grounds that immigration is the job of the federal government, so state and local laws are pre-empted. A judge in Farmers Branch, Texas - the first town to put an anti- immigrant ordinance to a popular vote - temporarily froze the town's law on those grounds.
"We would never allow states or cities to declare war," says Mr Yale-Loehr - so why let them write immigration laws, he asks?
Washington is frantic with last-ditch efforts to salvage a national solution. If they fail - as seems likely - employers and landlords face the impossible task of complying with federal and local laws that often conflict. After a few years of this democratic chaos at the grassroots, we will be right back where we started: looking for a national solution to a national problem, in spite of our fractured politics.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 9:39 AM
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