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The Other Side of the Law Despite all U.S. efforts to curb it, immigration is rising Louis Freedberg, Ramon G. McLeod, Chronicle Staff Writers |
Tuesday, October 13, 1998
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Washington -- For more than a decade, Congress has aggressively sought to control immigration to the United States using methods never attempted before, including tough border controls, employer sanctions, cutbacks in benefits to immigrants and a treaty promoting economic development in Mexico. The results were far from what lawmakers expected. Precisely in the period when Congress was most determined to contain it, immigration continued to rise, and there are now more immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- in the United States than ever before. During the 1990s, when the overall U.S. population rose by only 8 percent, the foreign-born population increased by 30 percent. Nowhere is the ineffectiveness of U.S. immigration policy more evident than in the efforts to deter migration from Mexico, by far the biggest source of recent immigration to the United States. More than 7 million Mexican natives -- the equivalent of 8 percent of the entire Mexican population -- are now estimated to be living in the United States. Since 1990, California alone has absorbed the migration of 1 million Mexicans -- 80 percent of them entering illegally, according to a study by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. ``U.S. immigration policy with respect to Mexico has been spectacularly unsuccessful,'' wrote Douglas Massey, an immigration expert at the University of Pennsylvania in a seminal article published in the American Prospect earlier this year. ``It is hard to imagine a more inept, self-contradictory and self-destructive policy.'' There is now an emerging consensus among scholars, analysts and advocates across the political spectrum that attempts to limit immigration have produced consequences never contemplated by lawmakers in Washington or Sacramento. Controlling the complex movements of people -- migrations that have shaped the United States throughout its history -- has proven to be an unwieldy task filled with paradoxes and contradictions. Even Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner acknowledges that some immigration reforms have backfired. ``There is no question that the law of unintended consequences is alive and well as far as immigration is concerned, and it will continue to be in effect for quite some time,'' she said in an interview. Immigration experts point to a range of unanticipated outcomes: -- Tightening controls at one point on the border has compelled large numbers of migrants to cross at other points, often in life-threatening terrain. ``We expected geography to be our ally,'' said Meissner. Instead, over the past year, at least 90 would-be migrants have died in California after crossing the border, many during the record summer heat wave. ``We did not envision that people would try as tenaciously as they have to cross in these very difficult areas,'' Meissner said. -- As crossing the border becomes increasingly costly and risky, more illegal immigrants are staying longer in the United States once they arrive, swelling the illegal immigrant population. -- A landmark 1986 law that gave green cards to 1.2 million undocumented farmworkers failed to create the stable farm labor force that was intended. The newly legalized workers soon left the farms in search of better jobs, opening the door to a new wave of illegal immigrants. -- A provision in the 1986 law that imposed sanctions on employers who hired undocumented workers had practically no effect on keeping illegal immigrants out of the labor market. Because employers were not required to verify identification documents, thousands of illegal migrants obtained work by presenting counterfeits. -- A major purpose of the 1996 legislation that cut public benefits to immigrants was to encourage them to leave the United States or to not come in the first place. But most are staying and managing, barely, without public assistance, contributing to the emergence of an immigrant underclass in rural and urban communities. -- Reducing the benefits -- or just threatening to do so -- has scared record numbers of legal immigrants into becoming citizens. As a result, more immigrants may be eligible to receive government assistance than before. They are also eligible to bring in additional family members, setting in motion a chain of migration that will increase immigration for years to come. -- The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, which was supposed to reduce incentives to migrate from Mexico, has increased unemployment by displacing small farmers, business owners and other workers there. Mexican economic ``liberalization'' policies also slowed job growth and helped widen the wage gap between Mexico and the United States. In the end, pressures on Mexicans to migrate north have increased rather than decreased. ``U.S. attempts to suppress migration flows will not succeed, indeed they will make matters worse,'' wrote Massey. ``In the end, the United States will have the worst of all possible worlds: continued migration accompanied by stagnant wages, declining labor standards and a growing population of impoverished, unhealthy and poorly educated Mexican Americans.'' Most reforms over the past decade have been directed at controlling illegal immigration. Lawmakers have been more divided on what to do about legal immigration. Two years ago, Congress defeated a strong move led by former Senator Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., with the support of Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to reduce the number of legal immigrants admitted to the country. But at the same time, Congress did vote to deny legal immigrants $24 billion in benefits such as food stamps and Supplemental Security Income. It also raised income requirements for new immigrants wishing to enter the country, hoping it would discourage many from coming. Congress' seemingly contradictory approach reflects another reality: Lawmakers have often lurched from one immigration ``reform'' to another, failing to take into account the long-term consequences and the connections between their actions and earlier legislation. In addition, laws are invariably passed long after they are first conceived -- and when the conditions they are intended to address no longer exist. Once passed, the laws have been only partially enforced. Another major flaw in the reform effort is that the United States has failed to coordinate its policies with social and economic reforms in Mexico. Those policies have more often than not increased emigration, undercutting U.S. attempts to do the opposite. ``We have not engaged Mexico in a conversation that could lead to a common approach to the issue of illegal immigration,'' said Demetrios Papademetriou, director of international migration programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And because migratory networks are so firmly entrenched, some experts now believe that illegal immigration will continue at current levels for some time. ``We're sucking people into the California economy,'' said Michael Fix, an immigration scholar at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. ``The networks are in place, and we won't be able to stop this illegal flow even if we declared an immigration moratorium tomorrow.'' -- -- -- The immigration flow from Mexico to California has its roots in the bracero program, which allowed 5 million farmworkers to legally enter the United States between 1945 and 1964 for temporary work. Now maligned as a program that encouraged the exploitation of poor immigrants, the program -- loosely translated, bracero means ``temporary farmworker'' in Spanish -- succeeded in firmly establishing the migratory networks that exist today. By the time the bracero program ended, according to Kitty Calavita, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, ``a relationship of symbiosis between Mexican immigrants and U.S. employers had become entrenched.'' After the program ended, many of the same workers simply re-entered the United States illegally. Apprehensions at the border rose from 71,000 in 1960 to 345,000 by the end of the decade, to well over 1 million each year in the 1980s. Pressure mounted on Congress to stop the influx, leading to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), perhaps the most important immigration legislation of the century and now widely viewed as one of the government's biggest failures. For the first time, the bill imposed fines on employers who hired undocumented workers. As a grand compromise between advocates of a more liberal approach to immigration and those who wanted to restrict it, Congress agreed to provide amnesty to illegal immigrants who either had entered the United States before 1982 or had worked in the fields for a total of 30 days between 1985 and 1986. The first unexpected outcome was that far more migrants received amnesty than Congress expected, largely through the use of fraudulent documents. Under the farmworker program, 1.2 million people received amnesty -- nearly 1 million more than expected. Another 1.6 million received amnesty under the non-farmworker provisions. The net result was that 2.8 million former illegal immigrants were given the right to permanently settle in the United States. That gave them the right to bring their relatives -- who in turn would become eligible for permanent resident status and citizenship. By expanding the pool of migrants legally eligible to bring in their families, the 1986 legislation succeeded in driving legal immigration to unexpectedly high levels. At the same time, the provision that established fines for employers who hired illegal workers turned out to be completely ineffective. Job applicants could produce any one of 29 documents to show they were entitled to work, but employers were not obligated to verify whether the documents were valid. That, in turn, led to a sophisticated industry producing counterfeit documents. ``What we have is an explosion of fraudulent documents, with employers winking at the employment of illegal immigrants and then claiming that the documents look real,'' said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. Another reason employer sanctions were ineffective is that the INS did little to enforce them, in part because of lack of resources. The agency has only 291 investigators, and Congress has repeatedly refused to allocate funds to hire more, according to Meissner. ``The long-term impact of IRCA, which originated in and was fueled by restrictionist fervor, is likely to be a continued increase in immigration, both documented and undocumented,'' concluded sociologist Calavita. -- -- -- The surge of newly legalized immigrants resulting from the 1986 legislation coincided with a deep recession in California and the nation. That convergence helped provoke one of the most extreme reactions to illegal immigrants during this century, culminating in voter approval of Proposition 187 in November 1994. ``The people of California declare that they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state,'' read the first sentence of the initiative. The proposition called for terminating a wide range of services to illegal immigrants. Two years later, Congress took an even stiffer approach in its welfare reform law, signed by President Clinton in August 1996: The measure eliminated benefits to legal immigrants as well. However, there is so far no evidence that cutting benefits has significantly deterred migrants from coming to the United States. Neither has it convinced many others to return home. Because of court challenges, Proposition 187 never went into effect. Congress, meanwhile, ended up backtracking and restoring many of the benefits to legal immigrants. And neither state nor federal legislation affected the biggest benefit of all: the ability to work in the United States. -- -- -- While Congress vacillated on the benefits issue, the mere threat of losing public assistance had another unexpected consequence: Millions of legal immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for decades without becoming citizens rushed to be naturalized, often in a desperate attempt to avoid the cutoff dates. The increase in naturalization has been particularly dramatic among Mexicans, who traditionally have been reluctant to become citizens. In 1987, for example, only 22,000 Mexicans chose to become citizens. By 1996, that number had jumped to 217,000, with most of the increases coming in the past three years. The rush to citizenship has interrupted long-standing migration patterns between the United States and Mexico. For much of this century, Mexicans in California maintained ties to their hometowns. They sent money there to support families, returned there whenever possible and in many cases ended up retiring there. Now, says sociologist Massey, ``our policy undermines that motivation by encouraging their long-term settlement in the United States.'' -- -- -- As Congress moved to cut off benefits to immigrants, it also moved to beef up controls on the U.S. border to a level never before seen in U.S. history. To that end, Congress doubled its allocation to the INS from $1.5 billion in 1993 to $3.1 billion -- at a time when the budgets of most federal agencies were being slashed. Over the next few years, new border fences went up in San Diego, Arizona and Texas. The number of Border Patrol agents was doubled, and lights, sensors, night scopes and other high-tech aids transformed part of the border into a much more formidable barrier. The effect in San Diego, historically the nation's busiest border crossing, has been dramatic. The number of apprehensions there has declined from 473,000 in 1992 to 259,000 in 1998 -- suggesting that far fewer people are trying to get across. The San Diego section of the border, claims INS commissioner Meissner, has effectively been controlled.'' But at the same time, apprehensions have soared elsewhere. This year, for the first time, the Border Patrol will apprehend more migrants in its Arizona sector than in the San Diego sector. Across the entire border, the INS in 1998 expects to apprehend 1.5 million migrants, the highest total in a decade. Although interpreting apprehension figures is notoriously difficult, the inescapable conclusion is that large numbers of migrants are simply moving from one section of the border to another. Meissner readily admits that a strategy focusing just on border controls will never be entirely effective and that illegal immigration will never be eliminated. Border enforcement, she argues, must be coupled with more effective apprehension of illegal immigrants once they make it past the border. But Congress shows no signs of increasing funds for what the INS calls ``interior enforcement.'' ``Enforcement inside the country is the weak link right now,'' Meissner said. Others say that U.S. immigration policy is on the right track: it simply needs time to work. Representative Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, said that recently approved reforms will be effective as they are fully implemented over the next several years. He noted that the 1996 immigration law calls for doubling the number of agents on the border to 5,000 in the next three to four years. ``We will always have people trying to come into the country illegally, but we hope that by doubling the Border Patrol agents we will cut illegal immigration in half,'' he said. And he argued that while Congress has restored some benefits to immigrants now in the United States, those who arrived after the enactment of the 1996 welfare reform law will not be eligible for assistance. Over time, he said, the restrictions should discourage migration. ``At a very minimum, when you look into the future you will have fewer people coming to America for the wrong reason . . . those who see America as a free retirement system,'' he said. But the Carnegie Endowment's Papademetriou says that the deep flaws in U.S. immigration policies defy such simple solutions. The latest effort to deter immigration,
he said, will ``no doubt inconvenience a lot of prospective
immigrants, but by and large you will find that immigration
will continue at the same levels as it did over the past 10
years, both illegal and legal, for the foreseeable future.''
ABOUT THE SERIES-- TODAY: During the period when Congress was most determined to contain immigration, it continued to rise to record levels. -- TOMORROW: The law of unintended consequences is clearly visible in the Central Valley, where immigration policies are helping to swell a new rural and urban underclass. -- THURSDAY: Deep-rooted cross-border family ties have overwhelmed the government's attempts to control the flow of people south to north. -- FRIDAY: Immigration
experts say reforms will continue to be ineffective unless they
address the most potent lure for illegal immigrants: jobs.
CHART: (1) |
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