Call Off the Immigrant Hunt
By JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA
Op-Ed Contributors, The New York Times
December 28, 2008
THERE are myriad claims to Barack Obama’s attention, and the list will only grow before Jan. 20. But immigration reform and, more immediately, putting an end to the outgoing administration’s unfortunate and inhuman immigration enforcement policy should be high on the president-elect’s list.
Mr. Obama can learn from his predecessor. President Bush wanted comprehensive immigration reform in 2001, but 9/11 got in the way. He started over in 2004, but did little given the imperatives of re-election. He pushed it gently in 2006 and failed, and then went all out in 2007 but failed again.
Immigration reform is the sort of complex and costly project that, as a rule, presidents accomplish only at the peak of their power — when their term begins. If Mr. Obama decides to postpone immigration reform until later, he runs the risk of no longer possessing the leverage to convince his party’s legislators to brave the furies of the extreme right wing.
But even without comprehensive reform, Mr. Obama can make a huge difference in the lives of millions of undocumented migrants in the United States today. Since late 2006, the Bush administration has been carrying out the “tough love” side of immigration reform without the generous and open-arms side, which would mean legalization for those in the United States today, and a migrant worker program for those it will need tomorrow.
It has pursued a humiliating and hostile policy of persecution and harassment of illegal Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and many others. It changed the rules of the game without any warning or empathy, nor with the traditional understanding the United States has shown, more often than not over the past century, in regard to those who cross its borders without papers.
The Social Security Administration has sent “no match” letters to employers to detect unauthorized workers, while federal agents have conducted innumerable raids on immigrants’ homes and day-labor hiring sites, and even outside schools where migrants’ children are enrolled. The raids are followed by immediate deportation, or, in one case at an Iowa meatpacking plant, by a shameful plea-bargaining agreement. Drawn up by the courts, federal prosecutors and the Department of Homeland Security, the plea agreement forced hundreds of Guatemalans, including 16-year-olds, into a deal they could not understand, with six-month jail sentences.
Mothers and fathers are being forcibly separated from their children — husbands from wives, brothers from sisters, all in the name of a crackdown whose only futile purpose is to terrorize immigrants into leaving, and to deter more from arriving.
Money has been appropriated for the construction of a border wall that has become a symbol throughout Latin America of this hateful stance. Environmental and local objections have been shunted aside, even though everyone knows the wall is not really being built, would not be effective if it were, and contradicts everything the United States stands for.
After his inauguration, Mr. Obama could put an end to all of this by suspending the raids, detentions and deportations. He should return to the approach followed by all of his predecessors until 2006: stop illegal entrants at the border when possible, but refrain from hunting them down once they cross the border.
Mr. Obama should halt construction of the wall until its effectiveness can be determined, and until the United States resolves how many gates it wishes to place in that wall — and how wide they will be.
He cannot, obviously, erase aggressive local ordinances in states like Arizona and Oklahoma. But he can initiate or hasten the federal government’s challenge to their constitutionality.
By taking these actions, Mr. Obama would send three powerful messages. First, he would signal his gratitude to the nearly 70 percent of the Latino electorate who voted for him. Second, he would indicate his desire for improved relations with the nations of Latin America, who joyfully welcomed his election and for whom the Bush administration has made the United States more unpopular than at any time in recent memory.
And he would say to the rest of the world that, on his watch, the United States will not build fences, deport mothers without their children, nor persecute foreigners. He can do all this with just a stroke of his pen.
Jorge G. Castañeda, a professor of politics and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University and the author of “Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants,” was Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28castaneda.html
