Legislation

What steps are being taken by Congress?

The Senate is currently considering immigration legislation that would take strong steps aimed at halting illegal immigration. Among the proposals:Building a fence along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border; Imposing stricter penalties on employers of illegal workers;Making it a felony to be an undocumented worker; and Making it a crime for humanitarian groups to help illegal immigrants. The Senate legislation needs to be reconciled with a separate immigration bill that includes the measures mentioned above and was already passed by the House in the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437).

Is the Senate expected to pass the House version of the bill?

Experts say no. The Senate will consider the House version the week of
March 4 and bring it up for debate by the end of the month. But "the Senate is likely to pass a very different bill from the House version," says Steve Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. The Senate version of the bill may include provisions for a guest worker program and some kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, ideas supported by President Bush and influential Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA). But it will be hard to reconcile the contrasting priorities of the House and Senate. "There's a very strong law-and-order 'nativist' element in the House" represented by Rep. Tom Tancredo, (R-CO), says Julia Sweig, director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Extreme views that don't reflect the majority of Americans are becoming more accepted. The president's own initiatives on
immigration have gotten pushed back by the hardliners in his party," she says.

What is likely to result from the Senate deliberation?

Either a milder version of the House bill, or-- if the two chambers
are unable to agree in committee--no legislation at all. Experts say
the politicization of the debate has made any productive action very
difficult. "It's unfortunate the debate [in Congress] has become so
narrowly focused on border enforcement that it's no longer effective,"
says Deborah Meyers, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy
Institute. "The debate is so polarized that it's hard to ask the real
question of how to address U.S. labor needs, and what role Mexico
should play in that." Camarota agrees that the tenor of the debate is
not high. "In this climate, it's very hard to have a coherent
discourse, much less a coherent policy," he says.

Experts also say the Republican leadership, which favors amnesty and
guest worker programs, is increasingly out of step with its
rank-and-file members, who reflect public opinion that is increasingly
against immigration. "The House Republicans are afraid that if they
don't enact immigration protection, they'll be hurt in the [upcoming]
elections," Camarota says.

What role does border protection play in the recent federal budget?

Bush asked for a nearly 6 percent increase for Homeland Security in
his budget for fiscal year 2007. This includes $459 million more for
the border patrol to hire 1,500 new agents, raising the total to
14,000. The budget also calls for $100 million to be spent on cameras,
sensors, and other surveillance technology, and $410 million to add
nearly 7,000 beds for detainees. (When illegal immigrants are caught,
many are released again--within the United States--until their court
dates because of a shortage of detainment beds. Seventy percent of
those released do not show up for their court dates.)

But Camarota and other advocates of stronger immigration control say
these measures are ineffective without a stronger commitment to
enforcing existing internal U.S. laws. "What typically has happened is
we have a seemingly tough policy on the books, but the administration
is committed to a policy of non-enforcement," he says. He points out
the 14,000 Border Patrol agents have to try to seal a border 2,000
miles long, a nearly impossible task. "We spend as much defending the
Iraqi border as [we do defending] our own," he says.

Does increased investment in border enforcement reduce illegal immigration?

Not really. Experts say that over the last two decades, funds invested
in border control and measures to limit illegal immigration--by
doubling the size of the border patrol, increasing penalties for
smuggling people, and making it easier to deport false asylum seekers,
among other steps--have skyrocketed. But the number of illegal
immigrants is still increasing. In 1986, there were about two and a
half million illegal immigrants in the United States, says Meyers. In
2005, there were about 10.3 million undocumented workers in the United
States -- and about 57 percent of those were Mexicans, says Andrew
Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars.

A study done by Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor and
director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the
University of California, San Diego, showed that stronger border
controls have either "no statistically significant effect" on the
propensity to migrate, or actually encourage migrants to stay in the
United States longer. Cornelius found that, among the Mexicans
surveyed in his study, 37 percent stayed in the United States longer
than they had planned to because of the new regulations, and 79
percent knew someone who remained in the United States because of
stronger border controls.

Experts say that ultimately, stricter border controls and higher
penalties will not stop illegal immigration because they don't address
the root causes of the problem: a stagnant Mexican economy and strong
demand for cheap labor in the U.S. market. "I don't think it will be a
deterrent," Sweig says. "If you pass laws you can't enforce, you
[just] encourage lawlessness."

What is the rationale for this approach to halting immigration?

Advocates of the stricter policies say they address the problem by
enforcing U.S. laws--arresting, prosecuting, and deporting illegal
aliens--and expanding the legal verification of immigration status to
more workplaces. The goal is "to make it as difficult and unpleasant
as possible to live here illegally" and prompt illegal immigrants to
go home on their own, writes Mark Krikorian of the Center for
Immigration Studies in a report, Downsizing Illegal Immigration: A
Strategy of Attrition Through Enforcement. This way, the United States
can reduce the total number of illegal immigrants living in America to
"a manageable nuisance, rather than today's crisis," he writes.

How has the border issue affected U.S. relations with Mexico?

The relationship has been in a downward spiral over the last six
years, experts say. When Fox and Bush came to power in 2000, better
relations between the two countries were high on the priority lists of
both leaders. But after 9/11, the United States shifted its focus to
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East, and Mexico was pushed down the
list. At the same time, a strong current of anti-immigrant feeling in
America focused on Mexico, illegal immigration, and border issues.
Mexicans accounted for 91 percent of all apprehensions of illegal
immigrants and 74 percent of all formal removals of immigrants in
2003, according to the Migration Information Center.

As a result, the health of the relationship between the two countries
"was ceded to the hardliners" in the United States, Sweig says. The
Mexican reformers who argued that closer ties with the United States
would be good for Mexico "now have mud on their faces," she says. As
Mexico prepares for a presidential election in July, the immigration
issue will likely boost the nationalism of all the candidates and
foster the strong current of traditional anti-Americanism in Mexico,
Sweig says.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations