Sirotablog
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. David writes about political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties.
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June 9, 2008 7:45 PM
Good news bears (guest post)
Seeing as how immigration seems to be the hot topic around here these days, I thought I'd throw a bit more fuel onto the fire. If you follow the issue, then you probably read today's front-page New York Times article on the subject of state efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants. The upshot of the story is pretty familiar: sick of the Feds' failure to solve the problem of illegal immigrants, state and local officials take matters into their own hands with get-tough enforcement measures that disrupt immigrant communities and send them packing back to where they came from.
You know: good riddance and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Sadly, this article is only the most recent example of a national media narrative that reports ad nauseam on anti-immigrant policies but fails to take into account the budding progressive movement to implement more inclusive and economically sensible initiatives.
Of course, in the midst of the current anti-immigrant frenzy, you might think I'm crazy for proposing that there might be any kind of pro-immigrant storyline out there to report. And I would cede that the amount of anti-immigrant legislation being introduced in the states is on the rise. Just as I would cede that an awful lot of that legislation is downright scary in its nativism and economic shortsightedness.
But that's hardly the whole story.
In states across the country, we're seeing the defeat of some of the most pernicious anti-immigrant legislation combined with a rising tide of pro-immigrant bills. From New Americans bills and Welcoming America campaigns, to in-state tuition for the children of undocumented immigrants, to the extension of wage enforcement measures to cover undocumented workers, the states are actually seeing an upsurge in measures to counter the much ballyhooed anti-immigrant backlash.
Call it the backlash against the backlash if you like. Whatever you call it, it's the next wave in the immigration story and the nation's major media outlets aren't picking it up. Although they are capable of penning eloquent pro-immigrant editorials, the Times, and papers like the Times, don't seem to be able to summon the will or the wherewithal to piece together the emerging pro-immigrant policy narrative that's emerging in the states. This failure gives the impression that the anti-immigrant movement is monolithic; its success inevitable.
So where's the real story?
Let's start with some numbers peeking out of the Times article. What's painfully obvious is that the recent crackdown in Santa Rosa county, the main focus of the piece, can't draw much justification from the causes typically cited by anti-immigrant advocates. It's clear from the article that Santa Rosa has had a relatively small and recent influx of immigrant labor that was not resulting in a substantial loss of jobs for native workers.
As the article indicates, the bulk Santa Rosa's immigrant work force came to the county in the wake of Hurricane Ivan in 2004 to help with reconstruction efforts. Currently Latinos (the primary target of the anti-immigrant backlash in the county) make up only 3 percent of the population. And the county's unemployment rate is 2.7 percent, well below state and national averages.
The sudden and desperate calls for anti-immigrant enforcement measures of the kind detailed by the Times, would seem to correlate with a community seized by a sudden fear of difference rather than motivated by a level-headed discussion of the economic impact of immigrant labor or the options available to combat what are unquestionably hard economic times for workers across all cultural lines, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.
Sadly, this knee-jerk reaction to difference seems to be increasingly common in states across the country. The Times article notes:
In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state's 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally.
In fact, if you look at the states that are passing the most virulent anti-immigrant measures, most of them, like Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Idaho, are relatively new to the challenge of integrating immigrant newcomers into their communities.
In states with long histories of integration such as California, New York, and Illinois, you'll actually find some of the nation's most proactively pro-immigrant policies.
Last year, Illinois led the nation in extending health care coverage to all children in the state, regardless of their immigration status. California and New York followed suit shortly thereafter. Illinois also took the brave step of prohibiting employers from enrolling in the infamously error-prone "E-verify" system while states with lower immigrant populations
rushed to adopt the program.In New York, both the Supreme Court and the Attorney General have declared that the state's minimum wage protections must extend to all workers, regardless of their immigration status. California has extended similar protections to its entire workforce since 2002. All three states extend in-state tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants, and all three are leading the charge to beef up naturalization assistance and English language education programs to help immigrants integrate into their communities. In California, a recent naturalization drive helped boost the citizenship rate among Los Angelino immigrants by a whopping 110%.
And there are other success stories. States as far-flung as North Carolina, Arkansas, and Minnesota and have enacted in-state tuition bills. So-called Welcoming America campaigns to embrace new immigrant populations have sprung up in places like Tennessee and Idaho, proving that even newcomers to the current immigrant influx can take pro-active measures to use it as an opportunity for expanding communities rather than dividing them.
Meanwhile, bills with aggressive punitive measures have been shot down in Kansas, Indiana, and Iowa. Even in the wake of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's (other) colossal blunder, lawmakers in Maryland managed to prevent that state's legislature from blocking undocumented immigrants' access to state drivers licenses.
Regardless of where you look, there are plenty of other stories to write about immigration besides the old local-cops-take-up-the-cause-of-nativism saw. Editorialize as they might, if newspapers like the Times continue to fail to report those stories, they're only going to keep perpetuating the same problem that they rightly condemn. Meanwhile, the country's working and middle classes will fail to have the robust discussion of the common economic interests that should be uniting them rather than dividing them around the issue of immigration.
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About David Sirota
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Hostile Takeover. He lives in Denver, Colorado. His daily blog can be found at CREDO Action. He contributes regularly to the Denver Post's Web site, is a senior editor at In These Times magazine and is working on his second book. He has been profiled in Newsweek and the Rocky Mountain News and is widely known for his reporting on political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties. Sirota serves as co-chair of the Progressive States Network, a 501(c)3 organization that supports state legislators and that is a partner of CREDO.
You can subscribe to Sirota's e-mail newsletter by going to davidsirota.com and signing up in the lefthand corner. To find out more about Sirota, download his official biography or see his recent media appearances. You can e-mail him at sirota@credoaction.com.
The views expressed on this blog are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of Working Assets (publisher of CREDO Action) or the institutions Sirota works for.
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Discussion
These raids, like our war on drugs, are utterly futile and counterproductive. The political environment is so heated, though, rational discussion of these issues is nonexistent. I'd like to see both the war on drugs and the war on illegal immigration end ASAP, but I know that it is impossible.
Now for some criticism: you were too accomodating on Lou Dobbs' show. He's an utter fraud. He complains ad nauseam about Mexico and Mexicans, but calls for billions of dollars in taxpayer aid for their war on drugs (which will of course be won any day now). His "populism" is a joke.
Why couldn't you could have challenged him, for example, on health care? If he's such a champion of the people, why doesn't run daily a show on how bad our health care system, with perhaps commentary on how we need single payer now? I would have liked for you to ask him that.
Best,
jack davis
san diego, ca
It is abhorrent and anti-progressive to give in-state tuition to foreign students while requiring out-of-state US citizens to pay higher out-of-state prices.
Further, it is also against federal law. U.S. Code, Title 8, Section 1623 states: "an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State ... for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit."
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/8/chapters/14/subchapters/ii/sections/section_1623.html
States currently violating this federal law are likely to sued at some point in the future for discriminating against US citizens from other states. Those states are likely to lose their court battles.
Chris V:
While your command of the federal statute in question is admirable, your understanding of the case law establishing its interpretation appears to be severely lacking. You claim that states are "likely to get sued at some point in the future" over their in-state tuition programs. What you do not mention or maybe are not aware of is that Kansas and California have both been sued and in both cases have won overwhelmingly. (For an analysis of the 2006 California ruling see here. For an explanation of the details of in-state tution laws, see here).
While you may think the in-state tuition laws that have now been adopted by 10 states all over the country are unfair, you would be in disagreement with the Supreme Courts of two states and the two Federal District Courts that upheld their decisions. These courts found that in-state tuition programs do not violate federal statutes because they extend the same discounted rate to US citizens who reside in other states but grew up in the state in question. The statutes do not therefore extend benefits to undocumented immigrants "on the basis of residence" that are not extended to all US citizens.
Now, you may claim that this is narrow interpretation of the statute that doesn't get to the larger moral justification of these programs. First of all, this claim would have no legal bearing on the case. But more importantly, the basis of the decisions itself gives an important insight into the moral and practical justifications for in-state tution programs and their federal complement, the DREAM Act.
Think about it. If a children are brought into the country through no choice of their own and have grown up in this country and made it their own, do you really want to deny them the opportunity to better their lives and our society through the contribution of their skilled labor? If undocumented children and their parents have been living in a state for most of the children's lives and paying into the state's tax base, don't they have every much of a right to their state's tax-funded higher education system as any other resident of the state? Punishing children for decisions made by their parents, denying them the right to better themselves and their communities, and stripping them of opportunities afforded to their peers is as impractical as it is anti-progressive.
Particularly when such programs can be used as a way to naturalize immigrant children as a reward for their contributions to our country, it seems entirely incoherent for proponents of "legal" immigration to oppose these measures. Here is the perfect opportunity to offer immigrants a way to become "legitimate" members of our society through honest contributions to our way of life and through hard-earned attempts to achieve citizenship, and yet the same people who complain that immigrants don't bother to try to become citizens and don't want to integrate into our communities oppose them.
It certainly does perplex me how someone who claims to be defending progressivism can have such reactionary views on this issue. Do low-income families really need less rather than more opportunities for higher education? Is it really a progressive position to keep more low wage families trapped in poverty and to force them into jobs that are more than likely to depress wages for the native workforce? Are you proud to be sharing your talking points with Fox News?
The last time we heard arguments that access to colleges, jobs, and wage protection should be denied to large classes of people in this country was when the defenders of segregation, many of them supposedly liberal union leaders, made the arguments that blacks weren't entitled to the same wages and benefits as white people. Then, as now, that's hardly a "progressive" position.
"If a children are brought into the country through no choice of their own and have grown up in this country and made it their own, do you really want to deny them the opportunity to better their lives and our society through the contribution of their skilled labor?"
Straw man. No one said to deny foreign students the opportunity of attending college. What I said is that it's abhorrent to charge foreign students less than US citizens.
"If undocumented children and their parents have been living in a state for most of the children's lives and paying into the state's tax base, don't they have every much of a right to their state's tax-funded higher education system as any other resident of the state?"
Again, a straw man argument. I did not say they could not attend college in the state. What I said is that it's abhorrent to charge foreign students less than US citizens.
The fact that their parents brought them illegally into the state at a young age is irrelevant. They are still citizens of a foreign country. They still do not have the same rights as citizens.
"Punishing children for decisions made by their parents, denying them the right to better themselves and their communities, and stripping them of opportunities afforded to their peers is as impractical as it is anti-progressive."
No, what is anti-progressive is giving tuition breaks to foreign students while requiring US citizens to pay higher prices.
What is anti-progressive is pushing illegal-immigrant policies that increase the work force at the expense of wages, benefiting employers at the cost of employees.
What is anti-progressive is pushing illegal-immigrant policies that increase the demand and reduce the services of our hospitals, schools, roads, water, sewage, fire, and police services.
No, your illegal-immigrant policies are quite anti-progressive. They are the same policies backed by Bush, McCain, and big business. Remember, Bush said he'd sign McCain-Kennedy, a bill widely supported by big business.
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