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History > 2013 > USA > Immigration (II)
Less Than American
November
24, 2013
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER
Not so long
ago, it seemed the debate over immigration reform was all about borders.
Politicians competed to offer the most draconian solutions — higher fences,
longer fences, electrified fences, armies of guards, fleets of drones, moats and
crocodiles. Never mind that the Border Patrol had already more than doubled in a
decade. Never mind that many of those here illegally never hopped a fence but
simply overstayed a student or tourist visa. The nativist mythology has us under
siege from relentless hordes striding toward Arizona on, in the fevered
imagination of Tea Party Congressman Steve King, “calves the size of cantaloupes
because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” To pacify the
border neurotics, authors of the bill that passed the Senate last summer
included $46.3 billion to militarize our southern flank.
Now, with the bill stranded in the House, it seems the immigration debate is all
about citizenship. To opponents, the idea of offering 11-plus million
undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship — even a 13-year slog like the
one envisioned by the Senate bill — is anathema, so politically toxic that the
measure’s most prominent Republican sponsor, Senator Marco Rubio, pulled back as
if he’d put his hand on a lit stove. To proponents of comprehensive reform, or
at least to activists on the issue, citizenship is the prize, and nonnegotiable.
It’s beginning to look as if advocates of fixing our broken immigration system
will face an unpleasant choice: no bill at all, or a bill that legalizes the
foreigners who are already here but does not offer most of them a chance to
become citizens. On Capitol Hill several lawmakers are quietly drafting
compromises that give the undocumented millions little hope of full membership
in America.
The first thing to note is that this is progress. The Republican mainstream view
has moved in the last year or so, from Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” to
something considerably less callous. Most Republicans in Congress now say they
can live with legalizing the undocumented as long as (a) we don’t call it
amnesty and (b) we don’t reward lawbreakers by bestowing the precious gift of
citizenship.
The second point that needs making — and my Times colleague Julia Preston made
it last week — is that while citizenship is the priority for pro-immigration
activists, to immigrants living here as a fearful underclass the aim is not so
clear cut. For many of them, the priority is to be made legal, to come out of
hiding and live their lives without the threat of deportation, without the risk
of exploitation by unscrupulous employers, without wondering whether your spouse
will make it home at night.
“The entire narrative behind comprehensive immigration reform has elevated the
path to citizenship as this must-have component of an acceptable bill,” said
Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and
Caribbean Communities, a network of immigrant organizations that includes many
foreigners here without visas. “What you hear from the undocumented is: ‘We like
the idea of citizenship, but what really hurts us is that we are vulnerable,
that I can’t easily get a job to feed my family, that I can’t drive a car
without being at risk, that I want to be able to visit relatives back home and
come back safely.”
Just to be clear, I believe (and so does Oscar Chacon) that deliberately
creating a class of disenfranchised residents goes against the American grain.
There are few precedents for consigning whole categories of people to a
sub-citizen limbo, and they are not proud moments in our history. (See the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.) It is clearly
in the public interest to have people become assimilated, taxpaying,
participating stakeholders in our democracy. Most Americans polled, including a
majority of Republicans, agree that those now in the country illegally should be
allowed to eventually apply for citizenship.
If House Speaker John Boehner is willing to brave the fury of his extreme flank
and put the matter to a vote, a path to citizenship stands a decent chance of
passing the House with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans.
You might even think Republicans would want to get immigration settled and off
the table so they could begin wooing Hispanic voters on more favorable ground —
social issues, taxes, education. But among the people most immersed in this
issue, I can’t find many who expect Boehner to suddenly become a statesman and
defy his fanatics. In part, let’s be honest, that’s because the Republican
stance is, “We protect America from Obama.” It is also in part because they fear
newly enfranchised Hispanics will become Democrats — which the Republicans, by
opposing citizenship, make a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it may well be that supporters of immigration reform have to choose between
half a loaf and none at all. Half a loaf might include a prospect of citizenship
for some undocumented immigrants — the so-called Dreamers, who entered the
country as children, and those in the military — but not the majority. If that’s
the option, should Democrats swallow hard and take it?
Yes, and here’s why.
First, even without a prospect of citizenship, legalization would make the
undocumented much safer from the family-wrecking heartbreak of deportation,
which has continued at record numbers under President Obama. It would free them
to press for better education for their children, to approach the police when
they are victims of crime, to challenge abusive employers, to seek medical care
without fear of exposure. Some advocates of citizenship-or-nothing suggest that
the president should simply use his prosecutorial discretion to stop
deportations altogether, as he has done for the Dreamers and undocumented
soldiers. But the public would view that as a grievous abuse of power, and
Congress might very well take away his authority. An executive order is no
substitute for a protection enshrined in the law.
Second, the legislation has other good things going for it. It puts a little
sense into our archaic legal immigration system, and establishes some meaningful
protection against future illegal immigration (like holding employers rigorously
accountable for assuring their workers have legal status, much more important
than fortifying the border.)
Third, this is not the end of the story. We elect a new Congress in 2014, and
another in 2016, and so on, and the electoral clout of Hispanics will continue
to grow. “I’m a firm believer in the notion of incremental change,” Chacon told
me. “The best public policies — look at gay rights — have evolved, they didn’t
happen all at once.”
And fourth, even if many undocumented workers never make it to citizenship, the
injustice will last for just one generation. Their children are citizens by
birth. Young Latinos are reaching voting age at the rate of about 50,000 per
month. I suspect many in that rising generation will remember, and punish, the
politicians who decided their parents should remain less than American.
Less Than American, NYT, 24.11.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/opinion/keller-less-than-american.html
Fixing
Immigration From the Ground Up
October 6,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The
immigration marches and vigils that took place across the country on Saturday,
uniting tens of thousands of people in more than 40 states, were a plaintive
reminder that immigration reform — remember immigration reform? — is among the
many pieces of business that remain unfinished while Congress is in lockdown.
Reform in the shape of a big, ambitious bill handily passed the Senate, 68 to
32, in June, then entered the abyss of the Republican-controlled House. Last
week, House Democrats offered their version of the Senate bill, echoing its
comprehensive formulas and adding strict border enforcement in a bid to attract
Republican support. But that bill, too, is unlikely to go anywhere, given the
House leadership’s refusal to allow a vote on any measure that includes possible
citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants and their preference for
piecemeal measures, dealing largely with enforcement.
As this stalemate continues, those seeking positive action should look to
California, where a Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, a Democratic-controlled
Legislature and a Republican Party conspicuously lacking in Tea Partyers have
made strides in advancing a sensible immigration agenda. If the goal is to
lessen the problems caused when a huge population lives outside the law, while
protecting civil rights and public safety, then California — home to an
estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants — is setting a good example.
On Saturday, in a powerful rebuke to the Obama administration and Congressional
inaction, Mr. Brown signed the Trust Act, a law that will make it harder for
federal agents to detain and deport unauthorized Californians who are
non-criminals or minor offenders and pose no threat. “We’re not using our jails
as a holding vat for the immigration service,” Mr. Brown said. That same day he
signed a bill to allow qualified undocumented immigrants to become licensed as
lawyers.
On Thursday, he signed a bill to allow driver’s licenses for undocumented
immigrants, which advocates welcomed as a means to safer roads and greater
economic opportunity. This followed earlier bills allowing legal permanent
residents to work in polling places for elections and granting new labor rights
to domestic workers, a largely immigrant work force whose members are often
exploited and abused. A measure that awaits his signature would allow legal
permanent residents to serve on juries. Together the bills put California far on
the leading edge of expanding immigrant rights while finding humane, sensible
solutions to a problem Washington refuses to solve.
The states cannot fix the whole system, of course, or legalize anybody. But they
can try to address issues and prod Washington by example.
The question, as always, is whether and when Washington can be prodded to extend
greater rights and possible citizenship to unauthorized immigrants. The shadow
existence of 11 million people is unsustainable and mass deportation is not an
option. The Obama administration has fed this fantasy; President Obama is on the
brink of setting an ugly record — the deportation during his time in office of
two million people, of whom only a fraction are dangerous criminals. More than
100,000 people have been deported since the Senate passed its bill in June.
But his former homeland security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, who has just taken
over as the head of the University of California system, told students last week
that she had urged Governor Brown to sign the Trust Act, the law written to curb
the excesses of the very department she once led. It’s encouraging evidence that
once outside the fog of Washington, the head clears.
Fixing Immigration From the Ground Up, NYT, 6.10.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/opinion/
fixing-immigration-from-the-ground-up.html
California Gives
Expanded
Rights to Noncitizens
September
20, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES
— California is challenging the historic status of American citizenship with
measures to permit noncitizens to sit on juries and monitor polls for elections
in which they cannot vote and to open the practice of law even to those here
illegally. It is the leading edge of a national trend that includes granting
drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in some states and
that suggests legal residency could evolve into an appealing option should
immigration legislation fail to produce a path to citizenship.
With 3.5 million noncitizens who are legal permanent residents in California,
some view the changes as an acknowledgment of who is living here and the need to
require some public service of them. But the new laws raise profound questions
about which rights and responsibilities rightly belong to citizens over
residents.
“What is more basic to our society than being able to judge your fellow
citizens?” asked Jessica A. Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School,
referring to jury service. “We’re absolutely going to the bedrock of things here
and stretching what we used to think of as limits.”
One new state law allows legal permanent residents to monitor polls during
elections, help translate instructions and offer other assistance to voting
citizens. And immigrants who were brought into the country illegally by their
parents will be able to practice law here, something no other states allow.
In many ways, the new measures underscore the lock Democrats have over the State
Capitol, where they hold an overwhelming majority in both houses. Gov. Jerry
Brown, a Democrat, signed the poll worker legislation this month and has
indicated his approval of the other bills. Many of the changes, including
granting drivers’ licenses to unauthorized immigrants, passed with overwhelming
support and the backing of several Republicans.
State legislatures across the country approved a host of new immigrant-friendly
measures this year, a striking change from just three years ago, when many
states appeared poised to follow Arizona’s lead to enact strict laws aimed at
curbing illegal immigration. More than a dozen states now grant illegal
immigrants in-state college tuition, and nine states and the District of
Columbia also allow them to obtain drivers’ licenses.
With an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants living in California — more
than in any other state in the country — some say the state has no choice but to
find additional ways to integrate immigrants.
“It’s a recognition that how people are living and working in their community
might trump their formal legal status,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration
law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is an
argument that in parts of California a jury without a legal permanent resident
is not really a jury of peers. Some view citizenship as the final consecration
of complete integration, but this says, ‘Let’s take who we have and get them to
participate in our civil institutions.’ ”
Early this month, the State Supreme Court suggested during a hearing that
lawmakers could create a law to address the case of Sergio Garcia, who was
brought to the United States illegally as a child. Mr. Garcia had met every
other requirement to become a licensed lawyer. Within days, legislation was
approved to allow immigrants who were brought here illegally as minors to obtain
law licenses, with just three opposing votes.
But the bill to allow noncitizens to sit on juries has proved more
controversial. Several newspaper editorials have urged Mr. Brown to veto it.
Rocky Chávez, a Republican assemblyman from northern San Diego County, said that
allowing noncitizens to serve on a jury would make it harder to uphold American
standards of law.
“What we call domestic violence is appropriate in other countries, so the
question becomes, ‘How do we enforce our own social norms?’ ” Mr. Chávez said.
He added that granting more privileges would weaken immigrants’ desires to
become citizens. “Once we erase all these distinctions, what’s next? What is
going to convince someone it is essential to get citizenship?”
Departing from their role regarding other bills affecting immigrants, advocacy
groups largely stayed out of the debate over the jury duty bill, which was
sponsored by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, a Bay Area Democrat who is chairman of
the Judiciary Committee.
“Being a juror really has nothing to do with being a citizen,” Mr. Wieckowski
said. “You don’t release your prejudices or histories just because you take an
oath of citizenship, and you don’t lose the ability to listen to testimony
impartially just because you haven’t taken that oath either.”
He said that roughly 15 percent of people who received a jury duty summons never
showed up and that the legislation would make it easier to impanel juries. Mr.
Wieckowski said that he expected the governor to sign the bill and that the
changes would quickly become accepted.
“It’s the same thing that happened with gay marriage: people got past their
initial prejudices and realized it was just discrimination,” he said.
Supporters say that expanding the pool of those eligible to serve on juries and
work the polls would serve citizens as well as immigrants. Several counties in
California are required to print ballots and voting instructions in languages
other than English. In Los Angeles County, ballots are available in Spanish,
Mandarin, Arabic, Armenian, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
But advocates say that the printed instructions are often insufficient and that
many people are turned away from the polls because they simply cannot
communicate. Expanding the pool of potential poll workers to include legal
permanent residents will allow more citizens to vote, they say.
Critics say that the Legislature is going too far and that the legislation will
probably face legal challenges.
“It seems they stay up late dreaming up ways they can reward illegal immigration
and create either new benefits or new protections for illegal immigrants,” said
Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform,
which backs stricter federal laws. “The overriding objective of the California
Legislature is to further blur the distinction between citizen and immigrant,
legal and not.”
State legislators and advocates had for years sought a law to allow unauthorized
immigrants to obtain drivers’ licenses. Earlier legislation to create licenses
for them had been vetoed by the previous governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Governor Brown signaled during his 2010 election that he would do the same.
But this year, a Republican co-sponsor signed on to the bill, and Mr. Brown
quietly assured supporters that he would sign it as long as it included a
marking to distinguish such a license from the existing driver’s license.
Assemblyman Luis A. Alejo, a Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, traced his
involvement back to protests against the 1994 state ballot initiative that would
have strictly limited access to public services for immigrants here illegally.
“Twenty years ago, that drove activists like me to get serious about school, and
now we’re able to lead these pro-immigrant rights legislation, which is the
total opposite of what was happening then,” Mr. Alejo said. “What was really
controversial then is the reality now.”
California Gives Expanded Rights to Noncitizens, NYT, 20.9.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/
california-leads-in-expanding-noncitizens-rights.html
Deportees, Then and Now
September
7, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Congress
returns from recess this week with the immigration system still failing and
repairs still undone. President Obama is still promising solutions, but his
administration remains a huge part of the problem.
Last Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, wrote to Janet
Napolitano, the departing secretary of homeland security, imploring the
administration to stop harming her state’s economy with ramped-up immigration
audits that force farmers and growers to fire workers they desperately need.
“Concentrate instead on removing those who would and have harmed our society,”
she wrote, “rather than those who contribute to our vital agricultural economy
and heritage, and the safe and high-quality food supply that benefits all
Americans.”
Mr. Obama speaks of embracing immigrants but has deported nearly two million of
them. He and Ms. Napolitano, who left office last week, always said they were
focused on catching dangerous criminals, but they cast a wide net that has
fallen hard on day laborers, carwash employees, farm workers and others who pose
no threat.
A wiser nation would have long ago reset the dials on this system. But instead
it is set to expel and repel. The economy depends on the labor of millions of
people who want to work legally and aspire to become full Americans. Instead
they become fugitives and deportees. They languish in detention centers. They
die in the Arizona borderlands. They work until they are caught and disposed of.
Anti-immigrant forces call this “attrition,” the slow expulsion of 11 million
people through the steady accumulation of arrests. Mr. Obama says he holds out
hope for reform, and a bill that passed the Senate this summer with strong
bipartisan support would go far toward bringing those 11 million within the law.
But House Republicans refuse to take up the Senate bill, and are proposing or
threatening inaction or their own harmful legislation.
One bill, the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act, which passed the House
Judiciary Committee, would have devastating consequences. It would give state
and local governments the authority to write and enforce their own immigration
laws, unleashing the full chaos of free-form foreign policies across 50 states.
It would give poorly trained local officers more power to go after unauthorized
immigrants, who would be subject to arrest and prosecution the moment the bill
became law, and it would turn civil immigration violations into crimes.
The bill would also erase one bright spot in Mr. Obama’s immigration record: his
program deferring the deportations of thousands of young people, known as
Dreamers, who arrived as children. Other legislation the Republicans are
considering would allow in hundreds of thousands of temporary immigrant workers
but deny them the legal protections, like the right to change jobs, that would
help them resist employer abuse.
•
The day before Ms. Feinstein sent her letter, there was a ceremony at a
graveyard in Fresno, Calif., to dedicate a granite slab bearing the names of 28
farm workers who were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948 when
their plane crashed. News reports at the time named the pilot, co-pilot, flight
attendant and an immigration guard, but not the Mexicans, an omission that led
Woody Guthrie to write a poem, later set to music, called “Plane Wreck at Los
Gatos.”
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ’neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
America has changed a lot in 65 years, but not enough. We are still a country
that eagerly, if not desperately, accepts the labor of immigrants but is slow to
acknowledge their humanity. When singers perform Guthrie’s song today, not a
word is out of date.
Deportees, Then and Now, NYT, 7.9.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/opinion/sunday/
deportees-then-and-now.html
Immigration Reform, Finally
June 27,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Senate
on Thursday approved the most ambitious overhaul of the nation’s immigration
system in a generation. The vote on the bill was 68 to 32, enough to overcome a
Republican filibuster and to deliver, as its sponsors had hoped, a strong signal
to the House of Representatives that the measure has broad bipartisan support
and deserves to be swiftly passed and sent to President Obama’s desk.
Of course, as far as signals like those are concerned, the Republican majority
in the House has its hands over its ears and is going la-la-la-la-la. It does
not care about the Senate’s preoccupations, and it is unimpressed with the
months of debate and arduous deal-making that led to the historic vote. As John
Boehner, the House speaker, has said more than once, the House majority will do
what the majority wants, in its own way and on its own time.
And what that majority wants, apparently, is not a big, bipartisan immigration
solution, at least not one that turns millions of undocumented immigrants into
citizens. Mr. Boehner insists that he won’t even bring a bill up for a vote
unless a majority of Republicans support it.
To say immigration reform has uncertain prospects going forward puts it mildly.
Which is too bad, because the Senate’s bird in the hand — the Border Security,
Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act — is good for both
parties and, lest anyone forget what this is all about, the country. It is not
perfect, or even ideal, but it is a decent bill that could get better and offers
the best chance in decades to improve on a disastrous status quo.
It starts with a path to citizenship for as many as 11 million people now
toiling at the edge of society and outside the law. If offers them a chance to
live, work and travel without the suffocating fear of arrest and deportation.
Lifting that burden makes possible an outpouring of energy and hope such as this
nation has never seen.
The bill contains other good and sensible reforms. It gives a faster citizenship
path to farmworkers and to the Dreamers, the blameless young unauthorized
immigrants who came here as children, and whose advocacy has honored their
country. It allows some deportees to return from abroad to join their families
and creates a more generous and sensible future flow of temporary workers. It
reduces the backlogs that have kept millions waiting years to join their
families. It includes reforms to the cruel and corrupted detention system and
immigration courts and protections for vulnerable women and children.
The price of Senate approval for these good things has been a lot of foolish
expense and enforcement overkill. The bill includes a vast expansion of the
employment-verification system, whose implications for privacy and workers’
rights the country has yet to fully grasp or debate. It throws billions more
dollars at the southern border, soon to be gulped by private security
contractors, the for-profit prison industry and a constellation of enforcement
agencies lined up from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex.
And the citizenship path is far longer and costlier than it should be: at least
13 years and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per family, and strewn with
other burdens. Make it any harder and you would have to honestly start calling
it a path to limbo.
And for all these hard compromises, things could get worse. The House has a
handful of bills in the works, of varying degrees of awfulness, to criminalize
the undocumented and add new layers of self-defeating enforcement. Hard-liners
will be applying all the pressure they can to drag reform further to the right
or kill it dead.
But, even so, there is no reason to despair — yet. Democrats in the House can
apply pressure, too. So can Mr. Obama, the American people and any Republicans
who don’t want their party continue its estrangement from the American
mainstream. The failure of immigration reform would be a disaster, but it can be
avoided if Mr. Boehner gives Republicans and Democrats the chance to vote on
comprehensive reform. There is a strong chance that if he does so a good bill
could pass.
There is a historic chapter on immigration to be written this summer. Mr.
Boehner could help write it.
Immigration Reform, Finally, NYT, 27.6.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/immigration-reform-finally.html
Senate,
68 to
32,
Passes
Overhaul for Immigration
June 27,
2013
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER and JONATHAN MARTIN
WASHINGTON
— The Senate on Thursday approved the most significant overhaul of the nation’s
immigration laws in a generation with broad support generated by a sense among
leading Republicans that the party needed to join with Democrats to remove a
wedge between Republicans and Hispanic voters.
The strong 68-to-32 vote in the often polarized Senate tossed the issue into the
House, where the Republican leadership has said that it will not take up the
Senate measure and is instead focused on much narrower legislation that would
not provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in
the country. Party leaders hope that the Senate action will put pressure on the
House.
Leading up to the final votes, which the senators cast at their desks to mark
the import of the moment, members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” who drafted
the framework of the legislation, took to the Senate floor to make a final
argument for the measure. Among them was Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of
Florida, who is one of his party’s leading Hispanic voices. When Mr. Rubio
finished, the other senators in the group surrounded him on the floor, patting
him on the back and offering words of encouragement. “Good job,” one said. “I’m
proud of you,” another offered.
The future will show whether voters in Republican presidential primaries share
that pride.
After Mitt Romney’s loss in November, top Republicans immediately began
formulating a way to improve the party’s standing with Hispanics, who have
flocked to Democrats. A group of top Republican political and business officials
who support an immigration overhaul met at the downtown Washington office of the
anti-tax leader Grover Norquist on Jan. 17 with memories of Mr. Romney’s poor
showing in their minds.
Optimism ran high at the session, which included Mr. Norquist, the former
national party chairman Ed Gillespie and representatives of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and Republican “super PACs.” Reeling from a second consecutive
presidential loss and with Mr. Rubio taking the place of Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, as the face of the immigration reform movement, the
strategists were hopeful that the wall of conservative opposition that blocked
immigration legislation under President George W. Bush could be breached.
Now, even after the lopsided Senate vote, the prospects appear grim for the
pro-overhaul Republicans. And Mr. Rubio, the 42-year-old Cuban-American who is
seen as a prime White House contender in 2016, is confronting rising criticism
from conservatives for pushing legislation with Democratic boogeymen like
President Obama and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York.
“Before the Gang of Eight and the immigration debate, I think many conservatives
as well as some establishment Republican folks saw Senator Rubio as a possible
bridge candidate between the conservative Tea Party base of the G.O.P. and more
establishment G.O.P. voters,” said Greg Mueller, a conservative public relations
executive who opposed the Senate bill. “That position is on much shakier ground
today because conservatives and the Tea Party see the immigration bill as a
big-government piece of legislation resembling Obamacare.”
Republicans strongly opposed to the immigration bill said they had little
sympathy for Mr. Rubio.
“I don’t think we’re doing any damage to him,” said Representative Tim
Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas. “I think he’s done damage to himself with the
amnesty bill.”
Alex Conant, Mr. Rubio’s spokesman, said: “Immigration is a personal issue for
Senator Rubio, and he took it on because he thought it was the right thing to
do. There may be some political implications, especially in the short term, but
it wasn’t an issue he believed he could ignore. We don’t expect any parades for
our work on this.”
On Thursday, Mr. Rubio had little cover from his party’s right flank, much less
a parade. Not wanting to tempt primary opponents next year, the top two Senate
Republican leaders — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas — cast
“no” votes. And a potential 2016 presidential primary rival for Mr. Rubio,
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, also voted against the legislation, despite
making a show of announcing his general support for an immigration overhaul
earlier in the year.
The Senate bill provides a 13-year path to citizenship for the 11 million
unauthorized immigrants in the country, as well as tough border security
provisions that must be in place before the immigrants can gain legal status.
The legislation — drafted largely behind closed doors by the group of eight
senators — brought together an unlikely coalition of Democrats and Republicans;
business groups and labor unions; farmworkers and growers; and Latino, gay
rights and immigration advocates. Along the way, the legislation was shaped and
tweaked in a series of back-room deals and negotiations that, in many ways,
seemed to mirror its inception.
As late as Wednesday night, several members of the bipartisan group, including
Mr. McCain and his Republican colleague Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as
well as Mr. Schumer, found themselves calling Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey,
trying to shore up support. In separate calls, the senators urged Mr. Christie
to help persuade Senator Jeffrey S. Chiesa, Republican of New Jersey — newly
appointed by Mr. Christie — to vote for the bill. (Mr. Chiesa was one of the 14
Republicans who voted “yes” on Thursday.)
The first big deal on the legislation came at the end of March, when the
nation’s top labor and business groups reached an agreement on a guest worker
program for low-skilled immigrants. Disagreements between the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had helped doom a 2007 attempt at a similar
overhaul, but the two groups came together to create a program that would expand
and shrink based on economic indicators — like unemployment and job openings
figures — and offer a maximum of 200,000 guest visas annually.
The group of senators who wrote the legislation had originally hoped it would
receive overwhelming bipartisan support — as many as 70 votes, some senators
suggested — to help propel it through the House, and when the bill moved to the
Senate Judiciary Committee, the group took pains to win bipartisan support
there, too.
The bill passed through the committee, in a process that stretched over five
days and included the consideration of more than 300 amendments, on a strong
13-to-5 bipartisan vote.
The bill’s largest, and perhaps most critical, change came in a package that
promised to substantially bolster security along the nation’s southern border.
The proposal, by Senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North
Dakota, both Republicans, would devote about $40 billion over the next decade to
border enforcement measures, including adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents and
700 miles of fencing along the southern border.
The amendment, which passed Wednesday with broad bipartisan support, helped
bring along more than a dozen reluctant Republicans. But even that measure does
not seem to have altered firm House resistance to the Senate bill. Speaker John
A. Boehner threw cold water on any hope that the House would vote on the Senate
plan, and he insisted that whatever immigration measure his chamber took up
would have to be supported by a majority of his Republican conference.
“I issued a statement that I thought was pretty clear, but apparently some
haven’t gotten the message: the House is not going to take up and vote on
whatever the Senate passes,” he said Thursday morning. “We’re going to do our
own bill.”
As daunting to the pro-overhaul Republicans as Mr. Boehner’s apparent opposition
is the structure of the Republican House majority, strategists say. More than 70
percent of districts held by House Republicans have a population that is 10
percent or less Hispanic, National Journal reported. And the Republican
districts where there is a significant Hispanic population are in heavily
conservative terrain in California and Texas.
Senate, 68 to 32, Passes Overhaul for Immigration, NYT, 28.6.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/us/politics/
immigration-bill-clears-final-hurdle-to-senate-approval.html
Border
Injustice
May 27,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Those who
view fixing immigration as simply a matter of getting tougher on lawbreakers
tend to overlook how tough the system already is, an ever-growing web of agents,
cops, courts and prisons whose cruelty and deficiencies are appalling. Much
attention has focused on the excesses of local law enforcement, exemplified by
self-appointed immigration enforcers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County,
Ariz., whose department was found guilty in federal court on Friday of violating
the constitutional rights of Latinos for years through racially biased crime
sweeps, arrests, detention and harassment.
But the abuses of local officials like Sheriff Arpaio are well matched by the
federal government, which is guilty of its own overreach in the hunt to
prosecute illegal immigration. A new report from Human Rights Watch examines
many of these problems in detail, with prescriptions lawmakers should not
ignore.
While immigration enforcement used to be mainly a civil matter, the federal
government has devoted vast criminal law-enforcement resources to immigration
violators — particularly for the felony of illegal re-entry — ensnaring
thousands of people who don’t fit any reasonable definition of “criminal.”
Prosecutions at the border have exploded in the last decade. In 2002, there were
3,000 prosecutions for illegal entry and 8,000 for illegal re-entry; by 2012,
the numbers were 48,000 and 37,000. The Department of Homeland Security refers
more cases to the Justice Department for prosecution than all the other main
federal crime-fighting agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Drug Enforcement Administration, combined.
The federal government has said for years that its goal is to stop dangerous
criminals at the border and deter migrants from trying to cross illegally. This
would be understandable if the defendants were primarily a flood of dangerous
criminals, but they aren’t. Many have minor criminal histories or none at all.
Many are deportees trying to return to their families and jobs.
The system needs to be recalibrated to spare noncriminal migrants the harshest
consequences. The Human Rights Watch report recommends revising immigration law
to impose only civil, not criminal, penalties, for illegal entry and re-entry.
Or, at the very least, it says illegal entry should be punishable by two years
in federal prison, not 20.
The immigration bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last week would
improve the system in many ways, like providing a path to citizenship for
millions and allowing some deportees to apply to return to their families in the
United States. But it makes some things worse. For instance, it expands
Operation Streamline, a program in border-state federal courts where defendants
have little access to lawyers and barely any chance to fight the charges. It was
designed for the mass production of guilty pleas and should be abolished.
The bill has bipartisan support, but it also has many opponents who see
immigration through Sheriff Arpaio’s eyes. The challenge in the coming
Congressional debate will be to preserve the elements that make the system
fairer and more rational.
Border Injustice, NYT, 27.5.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/opinion/immigration-and-border-injustice.html
Judge
Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff
May 24,
2013
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS
PHOENIX — A
federal judge ruled on Friday that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies had
violated the constitutional rights of Latinos by targeting them during raids and
traffic stops here and throughout Maricopa County.
With his ruling, Judge G. Murray Snow of United States District Court delivered
the most decisive defeat so far to Sheriff Arpaio, who has come to symbolize
Arizona’s strict approach to immigration enforcement by making it the leading
mission for many of the 800 deputies under his command at the Maricopa County
Sheriff’s Office.
At 142 pages, the decision is peppered with stinging criticism of the policies
and practices espoused by Sheriff Arpaio, who Judge Snow said had turned much of
his focus to arresting immigrants who were in the country illegally, in most
cases civil violations, at the expense of fighting crimes.
He said the sheriff relied on racial profiling and illegal detentions to target
Latinos, using their ethnicity as the main basis for suspecting they were in the
country illegally. Many of the people targeted were American citizens or legal
residents.
“In an immigration enforcement context,” Judge Snow ruled, the sheriff’s office
“did not believe that it constituted racial profiling to consider race as one
factor among others in making law enforcement decisions.” In fact, he said its
plans and policies confirmed that, “in the context of immigration enforcement,”
deputies “could consider race as one factor among others.”
The ruling prohibits the sheriff’s office from using “race or Latino ancestry”
as a factor in deciding to stop any vehicle with Latino occupants, or as a
factor in deciding whether they may be in the country without authorization.
It also prohibits deputies from reporting a vehicle’s Latino occupants to
federal immigration authorities or detaining, holding or arresting them, unless
there is more than just a “reasonable belief” that they are in the country
illegally. To detain them, the ruling said, the deputies must also have
reasonable suspicion that the occupants are violating the state’s
human-trafficking and employment laws or committing other crimes.
Tim Casey, a lawyer for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said the office
intended to appeal, but in the meantime it would “comply with the letter and
spirit of the court’s decision.”
He said the office’s position is that it “has never used race and never will use
race to make any law enforcement decision.”
The office relied on training from the United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency, he said, adding, “It’s obvious it received bad training from
the federal government.”
The ruling is a result of a federal civil trial last summer in which Sheriff
Arpaio and his office were accused in a class-action lawsuit of singling out
Latinos for stops, questioning and detention. It says deputies considered the
prevalence of Latinos when deciding where to carry out enforcement operations,
in many cases in response to complaints based solely on assumptions that Latinos
or “Mexicans,” as some complainants put it, were necessarily illegal immigrants.
Regardless of the type of enforcement — workplace raids, traffic stops or
targeted patrols in areas frequented by day laborers — Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies
were required to keep track of the number of people arrested on federal
immigration violations, as well as state charges, Judge Snow said. In news
releases, Sheriff Arpaio’s office often referred to the operations as integral
parts of the sheriff’s “illegal immigrant stance.”
Cecillia Wang, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil
Liberties Union, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit, said, “Let this be
a warning to anyone who hides behind a badge to wage their own private campaign
against Latinos or immigrants that there is no exception in the Constitution for
violating people’s rights in immigration enforcement.”
Ravi Somaiya
contributed reporting from New York
Judge Finds Violations of Rights by Sheriff, NYT, 24.5.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/us/
federal-judge-finds-violations-of-rights-by-sheriff-joe-arpaio.html
The
Health Toll of Immigration
May 18,
2013
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — Becoming an American can be bad for your health.
A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer
they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood
pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more
money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.
The pattern goes against any notion that moving to America improves every aspect
of life. It also demonstrates that at least in terms of health, worries about
assimilation for the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants are mistaken. In
fact, it is happening all too quickly.
“There’s something about life in the United States that is not conducive to good
health across generations,” said Robert A. Hummer, a social demographer at the
University of Texas at Austin.
For Hispanics, now the nation’s largest immigrant group, the foreign-born live
about three years longer than their American-born counterparts, several studies
have found.
Why does life in the United States — despite its sophisticated health care
system and high per capita wages — lead to worse health? New research is showing
that the immigrant advantage wears off with the adoption of American behaviors —
smoking, drinking, high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles.
Here in Brownsville, a worn border city studded with fast-food restaurants,
immigrants say that happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. In America, foods like
ham and bread that are not supposed to be sweet are. And children lose their
taste for traditional Mexican foods like cactus and beans.
For the recently arrived, the quantity and accessibility of food speaks to the
boundless promise of the United States. Esther Angeles remembers being amazed at
the size of hamburgers — as big as dinner plates — when she first came to the
United States from Mexico 15 years ago.
“I thought, this is really a country of opportunity,” she said. “Look at the
size of the food!”
Fast-food fare not only tasted good, but was also a sign of success, a family
treat that new earnings put in reach.
“The crispiness was delicious,” said Juan Muniz, 62, recalling his first visit
to Church’s Chicken with his family in the late 1970s. “I was proud and excited
to eat out. I’d tell them: ‘Let’s go eat. We can afford it now.’ ”
For others, supersize deals appealed.
“You work so hard, you want to use your money in a smart way,” said Aris
Ramirez, a community health worker in Brownsville, explaining the thinking. “So
when they hear ‘twice the fries for an extra 49 cents,’ people think, ‘That’s
economical.’ ”
For Ms. Angeles, the excitement of big food eventually wore off, and the frantic
pace of the modern American workplace took over. She found herself eating
hamburgers more because they were convenient and she was busy in her
78-hour-a-week job as a housekeeper. What is more, she lost control over her
daughter’s diet because, as a single mother, she was rarely with her at
mealtimes.
Robert O. Valdez, a professor of family and community medicine and economics at
the University of New Mexico, said, “All the things we tell people to do from a
clinical perspective today — a lot of fiber and less meat — were exactly the
lifestyle habits that immigrants were normally keeping.”
As early as the 1970s, researchers found that immigrants lived several years
longer than American-born whites even though they tended to have less education
and lower income, factors usually associated with worse health. That gap has
grown since 1980. Less clear, however, was what happened to immigrants and their
American-born offspring after a lifetime in the United States.
Evidence is mounting that the second generation does worse. Elizabeth Arias, a
demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics, has made exploratory
estimates based on data from 2007 to 2009, which show that Hispanic immigrants
live 2.9 years longer than American-born Hispanics. The finding, which has not
yet been published, is similar to those in earlier studies.
Still, the data does not break down by generation. Ms. Arias cautioned that
subsequent generations — for example, grandchildren and great-grandchildren —
may indeed improve as they rise in socioeconomic status, which in the United
States is strongly correlated with better health.
Other research suggests that some of the difference has to do with variation
among American-born Hispanics, most of whom still do better than the rest of the
American population. Puerto Ricans born in the continental United States, for
example, have some of the shortest life spans and even do worse than whites born
in the United States, according to research by Professor Hummer, dragging down
the numbers for American-born Hispanics. But Mexican immigrant men live about
two years longer than Mexican-American men, according to the estimates by Ms.
Arias.
Why is a harder question to answer, researchers say. Some point to smoking.
Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at Brown University, found in 2011 that half of the
three-year life expectancy advantage that Hispanic immigrants had over
American-born Hispanics was because they smoked less. The children of immigrants
adopt health behaviors typical of Americans in their socioeconomic group. For
second-generation Hispanics, the group tends to be lower income, with higher
rates of smoking and drinking.
Other researchers say culture contributes. Foreign-born Hispanics are less
likely than American-born Hispanics to be raising children alone, and more
likely to be part of large kinship networks that insulate them from harsh
American economic realities that can lead to poor health.
“I’d love to have my wife at home taking care of the kids and making sure they
eat right, but I can’t afford to,” said Camilo Garza, a 34-year-old plumber and
maintenance worker whose grandfather immigrated from Mexico. “It costs money to
live in the land of the free. It means both parents have to work.”
As a result, his family eats out almost every night, leaving his dining table
abandoned.
“It’s a decoration,” said Mr. Garza, who is overweight and a smoker. “It’s a
place where we set groceries before sticking them in the refrigerator.”
The lifestyle takes its toll. The county in which Brownsville is situated,
Cameron, has some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the country.
The numbers are made worse by a lack of physical activity, including walking.
Immigrants said they felt so conspicuous during early attempts to walk along the
shoulder of the roads that they feared people would suspect they were here
illegally. Ms. Angeles recalled that strolling to a dollar store provoked so
many stares that she felt like “a bean in rice.”
“In Mexico, we ate healthily and didn’t even know it,” said Ms. Angeles, who has
since developed diabetes. “Here, we know the food we eat is bad for us. We feel
guilty. But we eat it anyway.”
Still, immigrants have better health outcomes than the American-born. A 2006
analysis by Gopal K. Singh, a researcher at the Department of Health and Human
Services, and Robert A. Hiatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at
the University of California, San Francisco, found that immigrants had at least
a 20 percent lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American-born
counterparts.
Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16 percent lower, for kidney
disease 18 percent lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24 percent lower.
“When my daughter was born, my doctor told me that if I wanted to see her 15th
birthday I needed to lose the weight,” said Gerry Ortiz, 37, a first-generation
Mexican-American in Brownsville. He managed to lose 75 pounds, motivated in part
by his grandfather, a farmer in rural Mexico who at 93 still rides his bicycle
every day. He stares down at the family from a black-and-white photograph
hanging in Mr. Ortiz’s living room. Four of the family’s six siblings are obese
and have diabetes.
And health habits in Mexico are starting to look a lot like those in the United
States. Researchers are beginning to wonder how long better numbers for the
foreign-born will last. Up to 40 percent of the diet of rural Mexicans now comes
from packaged foods, according to Professor Valdez.
“We are seeing a huge shift away from traditional diets,” he said. “People are
no longer growing what they are eating. They are increasingly going to the
market, and that market is changing.”
Joseph B. McCormick, the regional dean of the University of Texas School of
Public Health in Brownsville, said, “The U.S. culture has crept across the
border.”
Perhaps more immediate is the declining state of Hispanic health in the United
States. Nearly twice as many Hispanic adults as non-Hispanic white adults have
diabetes that has been diagnosed, a rate that researchers now say may have a
genetic component, particularly in those whose ancestry is Amerindian from
Central and South America, Dr. McCormick said.
Hispanic adults are also 14 percent more likely to be obese, according to 2010
data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate is even
higher for Hispanic children, who are 51 percent more likely to be obese than
non-Hispanic white children.
“We have a time bomb that’s going to go off,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, a
professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Texas Health
Science Center in San Antonio. “Obesity rates are increasing. Diabetes is
exploding. The cultural protection Hispanics had is being eroded.”
But at least for now, the older generation is still enjoying its advantage. In
the De Angeles snack bar, a favorite meeting place for elderly Brownsvillians,
one regular who is 101 still walks across the bridge to Mexico. Maria De La
Cruz, a 73-year-old who immigrated to the United States in her 40s, says her
secret is raw garlic, cooked cactus and exercise, all habits she acquired from
her father, a tailor who died at 98.
“He had very pretty legs, like mine,” she said, laughing. “You want to see
them?”
The Health Toll of Immigration, NYT, 18.5.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/health/the-health-toll-of-immigration.html
Tech
Firms Take Lead
in
Lobbying on Immigration
May 4, 2013
The new York Times
By ERIC LIPTON and SOMINI SENGUPTA
WASHINGTON
— The television advertisement that hit the airwaves in Florida last month
featured the Republican Party’s rising star, Senator Marco Rubio, boasting about
his get-tough plan for border security.
But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself
Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled
it: senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate
mostly to Democrats.
The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged
by technology companies and their executives.
They have managed to secure much of what they want in the landmark immigration
bill now pending in Congress, provisions that would allow them to fill thousands
of vacant jobs with foreign engineers. At the same time, they have openly
encouraged lawmakers to make it harder for consulting companies in India and
elsewhere to provide foreign workers temporarily to this country.
Those deals were worked out through what Senate negotiators acknowledged was
extraordinary access by American technology companies to staff members who
drafted the bill. The companies often learned about detailed provisions even
before all the members of the so-called Gang of Eight senators who worked out
the package were informed.
“We are very pleased with the progress and happy with what’s in the bill,” said
Peter J. Muller, a former House aide who now works as the director of government
relations at Intel. “It addresses many of the issues we’ve been advocating for
years.”
Now, along with other industry heavyweights, including the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, the technology companies are trying to make sure the law gets passed —
which explains the political-style television advertising campaign, sponsored by
a group that has revealed no details about how much money it gets from its
individual supporters.
The industry also hopes to get more from the deal by working to remove some
regulatory restrictions in the proposal, including on hiring foreign workers and
firing Americans.
Silicon Valley was once politically aloof before realizing in recent years that
its future profits depended in part on battles here in Washington. Its effort to
influence immigration legislation is one of its most sophisticated.
The technology industry “understands there’s probably not a tremendous amount of
resistance to their part of the bill,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview last week,
saying he welcomed the industry support. “But their future and getting the
reform passed is tied to the overall bill.”
The bill has a good chance of winning passage in the Senate. The hardest sell
will come in the House, where many conservative Republicans see the deal as too
generous to immigrants who came to this nation illegally.
Rob Jesmer, a former top Republican Senate strategist who helps run the new
Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit group that sponsored the Rubio ad, insisted that his
organization’s push is based on the personal convictions of the executives who
donated to the cause and who believe immigration laws need to be changed. Those
convictions just happen to line up with what their corporations are lobbying for
as well, he said.
“It will give a lot of people who are educated in this country who are already
here a chance to remain in the United States,” Mr. Jesmer said, “and encourage
entrepreneurs from all over the world to come to the United States and create
jobs.”
The profound transition under way inside Silicon Valley companies is illustrated
by their lobbying disclosure reports filed in Congress. Facebook’s lobbying
budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months
of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year.
That boom in spending translates into hiring of top talent in the art of
Washington deal-making. These companies have hired people like Joel D. Kaplan, a
onetime deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration who now works for
Facebook; Susan Molinari, a former House Republican from New York who is now a
Google lobbyist; and outside lobbyists like Steven Elmendorf, a former chief of
staff to Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader, who works for
Facebook.
The immigration fight, which has unified technology companies perhaps more than
any other issue, has brought the lobbying effort to new heights. The industry
sees it as a fix to a stubborn problem: job vacancies, particularly for
engineers.
“We are not able to fill all the jobs that we are creating,” Brad Smith,
Microsoft’s general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee late last
month.
Chief executives met with President Obama to discuss immigration. Venture
capitalists testified in Congress. Their lobbyists roamed the Senate corridors
to make sure their appeals were considered in the closed-door negotiations among
the Gang of Eight, which included Mr. Rubio and Senator Charles E. Schumer,
Democrat of New York, who have been particularly receptive.
In the many phone calls and hallway asides on Capitol Hill this year, those
lobbyists realized that they had to give a little to get a lot of what they
wanted. At the top of their wish list was an expansion of a temporary visa
program called the H-1B, which allows companies to hire foreigners for jobs in
the United States. There are a limited number of H-1Bs available each year, and
competition for them is fierce.
Companies like Facebook and Intel use them largely to bring workers to their own
offices. Consulting companies like Tata, based in India, use them to supply
computer workers at American banks, oil companies and sometimes software firms.
Critics of H-1B visas point out that they mostly bring workers at the lowest pay
scales. The technology industry’s main rivals in these negotiations were
lawmakers who have long been critical of guest worker visa programs, chiefly
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and groups that represent
American engineers.
Silicon Valley lobbyists told Senate negotiators they agreed that the H1-B visa
system had been subject to abuse. Go after the companies that take advantage of
guest worker visas and give us the benefit of the doubt, they told the Senate
staff members, according to interviews with several lobbyists.
“You know and we know there are some bad people in this system,” is how Scott
Corley, the president of Compete America, a technology industry coalition,
recalled the conversation. “We are simply trying to make sure that as they are
pursuing the rats they are not sinking the ship.”
That acknowledgment, several lobbyists said privately, helped unlock an impasse
in negotiations.
What emerged was a Senate measure that allows American technology companies to
procure many more skilled guest worker visas, raising the limit to 110,000 a
year from 65,000 under current law, along with a provision to expand it further
based on market demand. The bill would also allow these companies to move
workers on guest visas more easily to permanent resident visas, freeing up more
temporary visas for these companies.
But it requires them to pay higher wages for guest workers and to post job
openings on a Web site, so Americans can have a chance at them. And it draws a
line in the sand between these technology firms and the mostly Indian companies
that supply computer workers on H-1B visas for short-term jobs at companies in
the United States.
“This provision accomplishes the goal of discouraging abuse of the program while
providing an important incentive for companies to bring top talent to work in
the United States for the long-term, where they will contribute to our economy,”
said Mr. Kaplan, the former Republican White House aide who is now the vice
president for United States public policy at Facebook.
The bill is written in such a way that it penalizes companies that have a large
share of foreign guest workers among their United States work forces, eventually
making it impossible for them to bring in any more. It allows large American
companies that have many more American workers to continue to import workers.
And it includes a provision that exempts from the guest worker count those
employees that companies sponsor for green cards, essentially a bonus to
American businesses like Facebook whose work forces are growing fast.
Companies that provide temporary foreign workers say the move is intended to
push them out of the American market.
These companies, mostly based in India, have far less good will on Capitol Hill.
Their hope now rests with convincing lawmakers that it would be
counterproductive to punish them.
“Why are we in the United States? We are there because American corporations
want us,” said Som Mittal, the president of the National Association of Software
and Services Companies, which represents Indian companies. “We help them become
competitive and serve their customers better.”
In interviews, Mr. Rubio and an aide to Mr. Schumer said the draft bill takes a
balanced approach to penalize those who do not hire American workers for jobs
here. They say the proposal is good for the country, even as it may benefit
American technology firms.
In March, some of the biggest figures in the technology industry, including Mr.
Zuckerberg, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the venture capitalist John
Doerr, unveiled a new nonprofit advocacy group, called Fwd.Us, with its first
mission being to push Congress to overhaul immigration law. The group has hired
lobbyists and a staff of veteran political operatives.
One of its first campaigns was to bankroll the television ad for Mr. Rubio. Two
other ads backed Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and
Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, who is considered a critical swing
vote, in a state where there are many critics of the legislation. Mr. Jesmer
said the group spent “in the seven figures” on the ads.
Mr. Rubio has been a vocal ally. He says he understands the industry’s need for
talent and wants to prevent companies from having to ship work overseas.
To negotiate the details on the immigration bill, Mr. Rubio hired Enrique
Gonzalez, who took a leave from a law firm that handles H-1B visa applications
for many technology companies. Mr. Gonzalez said the assignment presented no
conflict of interest because he works with universities handling visas, not
technology companies.
The fact that technology lobbyists were given an unusual degree of access to the
negotiators on the bill is entirely justified, he said. “Because of the unique
needs of the technology industry, the newness of it, the novelty of a lot of the
issues they are confronting, I think that was why there were more engaged than
some of the other industries were,” he said.
Eric Lipton
reported from Washington,
and Somini
Sengupta from San Francisco.
Neha Thirani
contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.
Tech Firms Take Lead in Lobbying on Immigration, NYT, 4.5.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/us/politics/
tech-firms-take-lead-in-lobbying-on-immigration.html
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