The Obstacle to Comprehensive Immigration Reform

We call for comprehensive immigration reform on a regular basis here and on Facebook. We haven’t had meaningful immigration reform since 1986, the year Madonna released True Blue, Bon Jovi released Slippery When Wet, Paul Simon released Graceland, and Janet Jackson released Control. Nirvana's Nevermind and grunge were still five years away. The first iMac was still 12 years away, MTV mattered, and America’s favorite movies were Top Gun (the original), Crocodile Dundee, and The Karate Kid, Pt. II.

We’re two years from the 40th anniversary of that legislation, and a recent story weekend in The New York Times highlighted both the need for the change and the reason it hasn’t happened.

In a story titled “New York Employers Are Eager to Hire Migrants. They Can’t,” Jesse McKinley and Luis Ferré-Sadurní look at the challenge in New York State, where employers are looking for workers, migrants are looking for jobs, but the law keeps these two parties from connecting. 

“Migrants are prohibited by federal policy from securing work permits until 180 days after an asylum application is filed — a process that has resulted in monthslong backlogs and has frustrated both business and elected leaders, especially in upstate New York, where farms and small rural towns mix with a series of often hard-strapped Erie Canal cities,” McKinley and Ferré-Sadurní write.

“‘I’d hire probably 20 people tomorrow,’ said Mr. Buicko, the president of the Galesi Group, a Schenectady-based developer, who said prospective workers are still waiting for legal authorization. ‘It’s crazy that we can’t fill a void, we don’t have population growth, and we’ve got people that we’re just bringing in, sitting around doing nothing.’”

Buicko and the employers in the story echo the frustration we have tracked this year as governors around the United States have similarly seen lingering job vacancies slowing their state economies and have tried to imagine legislative solutions to help make it legal to hire the available immigrant workforce. We’re less impressed by some of those efforts since many seem to be still fundamentally uninterested in the immigrants as people and view them solely as warm bodies to fit into jobs.

Part of the problem is reflected by a dairy farmer from upstate New York. McKinley and Ferré-Sadurní introduce Ray Dykeman, who has long employed migrant workers. He relies on them and considers them “friends and family,” but “‘Do I want to take a chance on a bunch of people that they just trucked in?’ he said. ‘No.’”

The idea that the immigrants we know are fine but the ones we don’t are scary is hardly new, and in this situation it may trace back to a number of sources. Some politicians and parts of the media have been relentless in their efforts to present asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants as threats, and because of their status or lack thereof, there are few immigrant voices to speak up for themselves. It’s also very possible that employers feel their businesses’ futures are precarious, so much so that they’re reluctant to take on new hires that come with nagging doubts.

Fear is rational, but no one makes good decisions out of fear, and whether it’s fear for the businesses or fear of outsiders, that fear is a drag on us as an economy and a culture. We have politicians stoking fear and manipulating it for political advantage because where immigrants are concerned, all the studies show the reality of the impact of immigrants on America is much more positive than the examples they isolate and sensationalize.

While we keep beating the drum for comprehensive immigration reform that deals more honestly with the place of immigrants in the United States, the best things we can do is keep putting good information out to meet prejudices and anxieties with reassuring facts, and fight fear, which only makes us smaller.

Photo by caroline gunderson on Unsplash.