The American Revolution and Immigration Today
As we write on this July 4, the country is celebrating
Independence Day and representatives of the Episcopal Church are gathering in
Indianapolis for the triennial meeting of the General Convention, which runs
from July 5 to 12. My colleagues on the
Geranium Farm, Mother Crafton, Deacon Joanna "DJ", and Debbie Loeb,
will arrive Thursday to host the Farm's now-traditional Convention luncheon on
Friday, July 6. Mo. Crafton will present
the program to some 60 attendees (at last count), including at least two
bishops. I am unable to make the trip
this time myself, but I extend hearty best wishes to everyone out in Indiana.
July 4 this year is marked by considerable national
controversy. We could pick any number of
issues to talk on here – ObamaCare, for one – but in keeping with our
Ways-of-the-World practice at this season, we'll focus on one tied to the American
Revolution: immigration. This is a current
"hot topic", with last week's Supreme Court decision on the Arizona
enforcement law, but it certainly also has historical significance.
Gordon Wood, a prominent historian we have quoted before on
the Revolution, reminds us in a recent book, The Idea of America, that America
is unique among nations.
"We Americans do not have a nationality the way other peoples
do. Our sense of being a distinct
ethnicity was not something we could take for granted, the way most Europeans
could . . . . A nation like ours, made
up of so many races and ethnicities, could not assume its identity as a matter
of course. The American nation had to be
invented . . . ."[1] A great
expression of this difference comes from a speech by Ronald Reagan in 1990, at
a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. "I received a letter just before I left
office from a man. . . . He wrote that
you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but
you can't become a German, an Italian. He
went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. but he said anyone,
from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become
an American."[2]
All of which makes a bit unnerving the current controversy
over immigration. Surely there need to
be some laws about it. A country ought
to be able to protect itself from criminals and – especially in this era – from
terrorists. But beyond that, we sincerely
wonder what might be needed; do we need to protect ourselves from extra farm
workers or skilled economists (the profession we're most acquainted with)? At the same time, we have laws about
immigration, and a society founded, as ours was, on the basis of law ought to
enforce them. Gets tricky, doesn't
it? Thus it is that we actually agree
with the Arizona officials and those of other states who are trying to help the
Department of Homeland Security improve their enforcement.
More consternation: we're totally sympathetic to the young people
whose parents brought them or sent them here as young children and who now find
that they are really "illegals".
But the solution recently chosen by the President to skirt regular
legislative channels in an effort to help them only effects a short-term
expedient that does nothing to fix an obviously flawed law and ignores efforts
to that end that were already in process through a bi-partisan group in the
U.S. Senate. In a similar vein, after
the Supreme Court decision validating the key enforcement provision of Arizona's
SB1070 law was announced June 25, the Department of Homeland Security summarily
announced that very day that it would simply not respond to calls from Arizona
officers trying to report instances of lack of documentation.
As of the latest Census Bureau data, which cover 2010, there
were just under 40 million "foreign born" among the U.S. population
about 12 percent of the population. The
Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center both estimate that,
of these, about 11.2-11.5 million are undocumented. There is some enforcement, to be sure, and
during 2010, there were some 387,000 deportations and 476,000 "voluntary" returns.[3]
We've also learned recently that employers' efforts to
follow the laws when they hire foreign workers can prove prohibitively
expensive and time-consuming. Perhaps
this is deliberate, to give U.S. citizens first crack at job
opportunities. But the outcome seems often
to be that the employers, particularly of farm workers, choose to ignore the
law rather than participate in the relevant visa program or recruit American
employees. As an example, a North
Carolina Growers Association representative testified to a Congressional
committee last fall that if he used undocumented workers, local agents of U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) predicted that there would not likely be any
investigation. But when Growers
Association farmers hire workers through the H-2A visa program, they are processed
and audited not just by ICE, but also by the IRS, the FBI, the Department of
Labor and various state and local agencies, taking up substantial additional amounts
of time and financial resources. In
another labor group, skilled professionals, there were 15,000 government audits
of 27,000 employers of one class of them in 2009, a tremendously high audit
rate.[4]
So our laws are complex – just one specific law book on
professional worker visas runs to more than 2,000 pages – and, as we have seen
here, their enforcement is hydra-headed and unpredictable.[5] As a "nation" now, we are obviously
ambivalent about whether we want immigrant labor and how hospitable we feel
toward those people and their families.
But our nation was founded by immigrants and is unique in the world for
making ordinary people the heart of the political process. Those ordinary people continue to come – even
if they have no legal status – because they believe their lives will be better
here than in their native land. We need more than ever to work together to
rationalize this conundrum.
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We don't have room here to talk about recent immigration discussion events in which we have personal involvement and knowledge, and we will continue with this subject matter.
[1] Gordon S. Wood.
The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. New York: Penguin Books. 2011. Page 321 and numerous other references.
[2] Ronald Reagan.
"The Brotherhood of Man", a speech delivered November 19,
1990, at Westminster College, Fulton, MO, at the dedication of a statue at the
college's Cold War Memorial. Reproduced
here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/reagan-brotherhood/
. Accessed July 5, 2012.
[3] U.S. Bureau of the Census. American Community Survey. 2010. Also, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. "Table 36. Aliens Removed or Returned: Fiscal Years 1892 to 2010", page 94, and other
Homeland Security sources.
[4] Stuart Anderson.
"America's Incoherent Immigration System", Cato Journal.
Volume 32, Number 1, Winter 2012. Pp
71ff.
[5] Ibid.
Labels: American Society, Episcopal Church, Government Policies