Let's talk future flows

The most common explanation that comes from the right for the current failure of the immigration system is of course lack of enforcement. They claim the problem would be easily solved if only we spent more time, money, and effort locking up or deporting unauthorized immigrants, or patrolling thousands of miles of border to keep them out. They couple this with an argument against providing a normalization of status for 12 million undocumented immigrants based the failure of the 1986 IRCA amnesty.

They have taken these two ideas and tied them into nice package to form the foundation of their narrative in opposition to immigration reform. A narrative that essentially says; "You can't reform immigration unless the borders are totally secure...and you can't have an 'amnesty' because we tried that before and it only opened the floodgates to more 'illegal' immigration by rewarding lawbreakers."

This simple narrative has allowed them dominate debate and set the parameters of how CIR has been crafted in all past attempts, with a heavy reliance on enforcement and border security, restrictive guest worker programs, and in return, some limited normalization of status for some the undocumented population.

We see it's influence even in the framing used by Democrats when addressing the issue. Such as President Obama's statement in the SOTU:

"And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system -- to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation."

The problem for reformers is that, although based on faulty logic and misinformation, the narrative is compelling, easily understood, and unfortunately accepted by not only large swaths of the American public, but by those on both sides of the aisle in Washington.

It doesn't matter that border security and enforcement measures have grown exponentially since the mid nineties with no resulting decline in unauthorized entry, and that enforcement expenditures today are at their highest level in history. Or that deportations and detentions are at record levels. Or that it was not until the recent economic meltdown that we saw any decline in unauthorized migration.

It also doesn't matter that the true reason for the failure of IRCA was that it made absolutely no provisions or plans on how to address "future flow" ... it had no systems or mechanism in place to determine, regulate, or control, the future level of immigration going forward.

The determination of the number of the immigrants that are legally allowed to enter the country each year was left to politicians (and their lobbyist friends) who set quotas, and to low-level bureaucrats who administer them. Once enacted, these quotas were rarely revisited or adjusted in the last 24 years to reflect economic realities or other needs.

The result of this lack of foresight, and unwillingness to address the issue of regulating future flow, led to a defacto "free market" for immigrant labor with flows determined by market forces and greed.

It has left millions of needed workers, who should have had a legal path to entry if the system was in fact responsive to economic needs, in a state of limbo whereby they are easily exploited and marginalized.

But at the present time the opposition narrative still trumps the truth ... it makes for better sound bites and is easily digested without the need for too much thought or analysis.

But, if we are to enact truly meaningful and lasting reform we must find a way to offer up solutions and narratives that can be just as easily packaged and resonate not only with the left and in pro-migrant circles...but also with the middle.

We must offer up an alternate solution that is not only humane and practical, but also "common sense."

The key to both fixing to our broken system, and creating a narrative by which to win support for reform, lies in formulating an effective and practical plan for addressing future flow. One that truly addresses both domestic labor needs and the global forces that drive migration. One that is responsive to real world situations and events with enough flexibility to be adjusted to changing circumstances.

Such a plan would allow us to not only insure that our reform measures would in fact have long lasting positive effects, but also supply us with an alternative narrative base on sound principles, and built on foundation of factual realities, that could counter the opposition's enforcement only positions.

We must be able to offer up a plan to the American people that says we have a practical solution that will guarantee that our immigration system will be responsive to our economic and social needs. It will supply needed workers when economic conditions warrant, it will keep families together, it will supply ample opportunity for innovation and education to keep us competitive in a global economy, and provide refuge to those most in need.

But most of all it will flexible and fluid, able to respond to shifting needs and circumstances. It will not be based on the wants or needs of special interests or those wishing to exploit the system, but rather on what is in the best interest of the American people and those looking to make a better life.

We must be able to assure the American people that a functioning and responsive immigration system will end the cycle of unregulated and uncontrolled migration.

It will end the inequities and injustice inherent in "market driven," Laissez-faire, systems that look only to make profits at the expense of people. That controlling the flow of immigration based on rational needs is far more effective than trying to control it through tough enforcement of the rules of an already dysfunctional system.

Currently, labor and big business are in the process of hashing out a compromise on just how they would like to see future flows handled:

.... The AFL-CIO's Ramirez indicated that she and other labor leaders are trying to reach a compromise with business representatives on a complicated section of the bill that would set guidelines to regulate the use of migrant workers on either a temporary or permanent basis. Labor organizations have supported a plan for a new Presidential commission to help establish criteria and calculate labor needs. Business groups have said that they would not accept a commission that could be politicized and not suitably responsive to "market forces." This issue may seem esoteric, but as legislative efforts to enact immigration reform move haltingly along, the ability of labor and business to agree on the fundamentals of migrant worker programs could make the difference between a viable bill and yet another failed effort to fix the broken system. ...

Labor's Ramirez suggested that the commission proposal would not be a deal breaker. "In terms of creating a system--let's put the word 'commission' aside--that contemplates economic need and makes decisions on visas based on demonstrated need, that's attractive to us both [business and labor]. So I think there is lots of agreement on how to move forward." Ramirez said that labor would want to insist that migrant workers involved in "future flows" be assured worker protections and rights. Labor is also pushing to make sure that recruiters who bring in foreign workers are better regulated. But she made it clear that the commission idea was more of a subject for negotiation than a key demand. "It's about crafting a system," she said, "not calling it a 'commission.'"

Jeffrey Kaye-HuffingtonPost

We can only hope that as labor and business leaders meet behind close doors to decide the fate of millions and the future of our immigration system and economic security, they can go beyond their usual partisanship and parochial concerns, and instead carefully craft a system that takes into account what will ultimately be best for those most effected....and what is best for all our futures.

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Schumer reaches out to Lou Dobbs on immigration. This is insanity.

While everyone in Washington has been banging heads over health care reform, the economy and jobs, quietly behind the scenes Democrats have been working on attacking another hot button issue...immigration reform. And while rumors of whether reform has any chance of seeing the light of day abound, coalitions are being built, political alliances formed, and legislative agendas explored.

Leading the push in the Senate, where the powers that be have decided the battle should begin, is Chuck Schumer. In recent months he's called together leaders from all the stakeholders in the debate to get a lay of the land. Labor, business, immigrant rights activists, representatives of faith organizations ... all have weighed in and expressed their wants and concerns.

Schumer's also been looking for a couple of "republican champions" to help him nurse the bill through the Senate. With McCain abdicating his previous leadership role, due in no small part to his wish to save his political hide in what could be a very tenacious battle for re-election, all eyes have turned to McCain fan-boy, Lindsey Graham.

Obviously, Schumer's looking to put together a big tent.

But apparently that "big tent" just got a little bigger ...ridiculously bigger

According to The Hill, Schumer has been reaching out to none other than the recently disgraced CNN blowhard, Lou Dobbs, to see if he might be a possible spokesman for reform.

Senate Democrats have reached out to former CNN anchor and prominent illegal-immigration opponent Lou Dobbs in an effort to build broad bipartisan support for immigration reform.

Winning the support of Dobbs, who became a prominent critic of illegal immigration and proposals to grant amnesty to illegal workers, could provide a significant boost to reform efforts.

... Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is spearheading the Democrats’ effort to put together a comprehensive reform bill, met with Dobbs on Wednesday.

“We’re meeting with all different kinds of groups, trying to get everybody together to come out for one bill,” Schumer said.

The rationale behind this seemingly impossible occurrence:

Schumer noted that Dobbs, who left CNN in November, is 'changing his views on immigration

Let me get this straight. Dobbs has had some sort of road to Damascus moment and is no longer the poster boy for every racist, anti-immigrant knuckle dragger in American...and is now a credible spokesman FOR immigration reform?

All those years of brown-bashing, cozying up to the likes of minutemen, Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox, or being a virtual megaphone for the Tanton-run hate groups like FAIR and CIS ... all of that was some sort of dream sequence that never really happened?

Sorry, but I've got all the you-tubes and transcripts to prove otherwise.

I know that principles in Washington are fluid and move with the ebb and flow of political expediency.... and that memories tend to be no longer than the last election cycle.

But Chuck...you have got to be kidding

Who in the world do you think is ever going to even buy this one.

Certainly not those who favor reform, who know Dobbs for what he is and hold him in as much regard as they do Joe Arpaio. Who do you think actually started those campaigns, and signed those petitions, and protested outside of CNN until they finally fired the cabro viejo?

Or what about his "base"?

Do you actually believe that his hardcore following, who for years cheered on his brown-bashing, with claims of leprosy ridden immigrants, Reconquista, and conspiracy theories about The North American Union, are now going to have a change of heart and follow Dobbs' lead. I realize that you believe he's had an epiphany like St Paul ...but are we to believe is he now Moses as well? Do you expect him to lead his flock out of the wilderness?

While the President lectures the nation on the need to live up to our principles.... behind closed doors in Washington, people like Schumer make deals, literally with the devil. But the lives he bargains with and the souls he condemns are not his own...but rather those of the millions who suffer the greatest burden of this governments inability to function on any level that goes beyond controlling raw political and economic power.

So go ahead Chuck. Make your deals. Craft your compromises. Get in bed with anyone, no matter how vile.. But don't count on cheering throngs screaming "sí se puede" next time around. Because instead I think your going to hear..."oh no you can't"

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Any idea on how much longer that check might be in the mail?

Every day my inbox and Twitter account overflows with messages from DC types, pro-reform movers and shakers, and recently, netroots muckamucks, letting me know that immigration reform is gaining political momentum and a new legislative cycle is just around the corner.

Invitations to listen to conference calls and panel discussions flow in at a steady stream. Links to press releases, policy pieces, political polls and analysis, pile up one after the next.

Each proclaiming that this DC organization, or that politician, has some monumental news about the impending Immigration Reform legislation, or information on some critical action item that will directly effect its outcome.

If I was a gullible soul, naïve or unaccustomed to standards by which DC types or new media mavens operate, I'd probably buy into all this smoke and mirror cheerleading ... it seems on its face to make perfect sense.

I mean, com'on, it's not like everyone didn't work their asses off to change the power structure in Washington so we could have the Change We Can Believe In™.

It’s not like Señor Sí Se Puede didn't promise time and time again, prior to his election, that he wouldn't forget the millions of new voters who signed on to the Yes We Can™ juggernaut and honor his pledge to take up reform in his first year in office.

Over the last few days these messages started to reach a frenzied peak.

Those in the know had positive word that Obama would make an important statement about immigration reform in his SOTU and revitalize the movement. He would clearly call on congress to finally move on legislation and allow him to keep his promise.

So with baited breath I awaited the President's remarks last night to hear his clarion call to Congress finally take up immigration reform.

And finally there it was …. What we have all been waiting so long to hear him say….

" And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system -– to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation."

With 7446 words …over an hours worth of brilliant Obama oratory …. And all he managed to squeeze in was a single sentence of the same old boilerplate, regurgitated stump-speech talking points, we've been hearing for over three years now.

Thanks Barry ….

Guess the check is still in the mail on that one.

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We've got to do better than this

Just some food for thought before Obama's SOTU, and hopefully a renewed push for CIR starting in the Senate by Shummer and Graham

While it's a good sign to see Progressives, Labor, Faith-based organizations and so many more signing on to CIR. There's seems to be a disconnect between the current messaging and framing and what I think might be needed to finally gain the kind of support CIR will really need to get through the legislative process in one piece (as opposed to what's happened w/ health care)..and more importantly, accepted by the vast majority of Americans.

In order to enact really meaningful and practical reform, it is not the far-right, teabaggers, or groups like FAIR or Allipac that will determine the fate of reform this time around ...but rather "the middle."

And while it's great that polling claims there is pretty strong support for some kind of reform, I think all must admit that both the framing of the poll questions and specifics of what exactly that reform will look like are presently the only determining factors that set apart the polling numbers presented by pro-reform orgs, from those of the anti-immigration advocates.

The Immigration Policy Center posted a very good diary up at Daily Kos today....But if you read through the comments you'll notice that there is a lot of sentiment opposed to reform.

And it's not the usual "what part of illegal, don't you understand" bullshit we've become accustomed to, but rather some serious questioning of the economic issues around CIR.

And while many of the comments are based on misconceptions or anecdotal evidence, they go to show just how much work there remains in framing this issue out for the middle.

While it's all well and good to talk about the concepts of Peri's "complementary workers' and "imperfect substitutes" in the workforce to explain why foreign workers don't really take US jobs during times of high unemployment, ... or how the tax benefits of normalizing the status of undocumented workers far outweighs the liabilities....or how bringing the undocumented into the legitimate workforce raises the standards of all workers......These are all concepts based in academia, the theoretical, or conceptual. They are not visceral. ...some in fact are counter intuitive. And to simply restate them and repeat them does not seem to be a strategy that will have long term benefit.

To tell those commentors that they simply don't grasp labor-economic, or their views are simplistic, is not the way the middle is going to be won. You can't talk down to them. To quote polls that claim people support reform or studies that prove that their economic ideas (or preconceptions) are wrong only further alienates them and makes them dig in.

To win the middle the framing needs to become more clear.

We must be able to counter arguments like these (from the IPC diary at DKos) with more than just statistics and alternative studies. We must have a better narrative. Not only for why reform is the morally right thing to do...but why it's in the best interests of all those living in this country.

If they are legalized most will be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits which will count against any taxes they do pay

(as to)your point about "interchangeability."

But that's no longer true.

People with multiple college degrees are willing to take jobs cleaning houses and picking produce because that's all they can find. They will take jobs for which they are overqualified because otherwise they would continue to be unemployed.

It might be "unrealistic," but it's happening.

Your point might hold up in normal times, or what was considered normal in the past, but there are too many people casting about for ANY job for it to be valid now.

People in lower paying jobs qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit which can reduce your income tax liability to zero and on top of that give you up to around 4000 in free money (if you have children). The EITC free money counts against SS tax paid in my book. If we legalize illegal immigrants they will be eligible for the EITC.

People on the left argue for a social welfare state in part because poor people need services, right? That basically means that the poorest among us are going to be given more in services (health care, school funds, rent supplements) then they pay in taxes, right? I think we would all agree that most people that come here from Mexico are low income and unskilled (lots don't even have a high school education), right? Put all of this together and basically it means that once they are naturalized as citizens the vast majority will become net beneficiaries of funds from the treasury. So basically on average any taxes paid will be less then funds provided to them in government services. Mass immigration of unskilled people and a modern social welfare state are simply not compatible; it will make us poorer per capita not richer.

These are the kind of sentiments that kill will CIR, not the racist rants the far-right, or the idiocy of the tea baggers. It will be the economic angst of the middle that puts the nail in the coffin this time.

Unless those in the pro-reform movement start to read the writing on the wall more clearly, and start to figure out how to frame this issue out beyond spouting public opinion polls, demographic and voting statistics or economic studies, it will be a long uphill battle to win reform. And I fear that the compromises necessary to win that reform may make the victory a sour pill to swallow at the end of the day.

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Krikorian: Problem with Haiti- slavery ended too soon

Over the past ten days much has been written about Haiti's troubled past, the ramifications and causes of it's crushing poverty and political instability, and the historical role many nations have played in perpetuating it's suffering.

Of course coupled with these lessons in colonial, and post-colonial geo-political history have been the expected wingnut assertions like those of Pat Robinson about Haiti's "pack with the devil"

But now, thanks to Mark Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right "think tank" opposed to immigration, we get this little tidbit of neo-colonial/white-man's burden analysis of why Haiti remains the poorest nation in the hemisphere:

From NRO:

Why isn't Haiti like Jamaica or Barbados? Those places certainly have their problems, but they're not dystopian like Haiti.....

My guess is that Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough. The ancestors of today's Haitians, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, experienced the dislocation of de-tribalization, which disrupted the natural ties of family and clan and ethnicity. They also suffered the brutality of sugar-plantation slavery, which was so deadly that the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born, because their predecessors hadn't lived long enough to reproduce.

But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn't stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

According to Krikorian, if only the pesky Haitians had abandoned their fight for freedom (as the only successful slave revolt and revolution in history) and remained under the whip for another 40 years like their counterparts in other former slave colonies, they would have had time to absorb the greater wisdom and culture of their oppressors, and their nation wouldn't be the basket case of the western hemisphere it is today.

No mention made of the harsh reparations the ex-slaves were forced to pay their former masters (equal to $21 billion in today’s dollars) that took from 1825 to 1947 pay and crippled Haiti's economy for more than a century. No acknowledgement that a successful slave revolt and revolution of colonial peoples of color in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century was more frightening to the ruling powers of the time than any Taliban or Al Qaeda could ever be today, and all efforts were made to isolate the tiny nation in order prevent the spread of revolt and revolution to the rest of the occupied world. No insight into the years of foreign interference, domination, and manipulation of the Haitian political system by European and US government and corporate interests.

Nope... The Hatians, like their black brothers and sisters in certain areas of deep dark Africa, just never managed to absorb the wisdom and knowledge of their white colonial benefactors according to Krikorian.

But, thankfully, Mr. Krikorian offers up a solution to this lack of proper schooling of the poor, ignorant Haitian people in the white mans ways.... return them back to paternalistic colonial control until such time as they can make it on their own.

So what can we do about it? As much as we'd like to go back to ignoring the place, we can't, if for no other reason than a continually dysfunctional Haiti means boat people in Miami.....

But if Haiti's problem is a stunted, dysfunctional culture caused by an interrupted process of colonial development, then it follows that a solution would be to resume colonialism...

...but, as we've found in Iraq, Americans just don't do colonies very well. In fact, the time of conventional colonization is past — it's not just that the Haitians value their independence, nominal though it might be; it's that there's no developed nation who'd want to bother.

Instead, Haiti needs to become a like U.N. Trust Territory, essentially putting it into receivership. Unlike past examples, Haiti wouldn't be administered by a single nation but rather collectively, perhaps by the OAS, since the U.N. is almost as feckless as Haiti itself. This is the de facto situation now, with the complete absence of national government, but by formalizing it, the needed "intrusive paternalism" might be more likely.

As ridiculous as Krikorian's assertions are, his mere spouting off of this kind of archaic, white-mans-burden drivel, raises one very serious question:

Why is this nut, and the organization he runs, still viewed as in any way credible on any issue.

Why is he called before Congress to testify as an expert witness on anything. Why are his groups "studies" and statements taken at all seriously by anyone in both the media or government.

How much longer will it be, and how many times must we listen to his lies, racism, and distortions before he and the rest of the puppets in the Tanton network of anti-immigration front groups are finally discredited and relegated to the dustbin of history, just like his paternalistic, colonial view of the world.

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