Showdown On Immigration Looms

The Nation: Divisive Choices Abound, With No Permanent Answers

(The Nation) 

Initially, the supporters of reform appeared to have a good chance at success. An odd-fellows coalition stretching from pro-business Republicans to liberal Democrats agreed on the broad outlines of legislation, framed in the so-called McCain-Kennedy bill, that would toughen border controls but also create a legal way for Mexican workers to come to the United States and, most important, provide for eventual legalization of the millions already here. Representative Raúl Grijalva, a liberal Tucson Democrat who after initially worrying about institutionalizing the same sort of second-class status that his parents, themselves braceros, had suffered, became one of the McCain-Kennedy bill's major supporters. "I have come full circle on guest worker," Grijalva says. "We won sufficient guarantees of worker rights to make it acceptable."

While the AFL-CIO recently withdrew its support for the idea, saying it feared the "creation of an undemocratic, two-tiered society," one of the country's biggest unions, the Service Employees International, which has been focusing on organizing immigrant workers, supports the program, in part because Grijalva and other progressive legislators have hammered out what they argue are acceptable and realistic compromises.

Some believe meaningful reform is still imminent. "I smell victory in the air," Sen. Ted Kennedy yelled out jubilantly to a recent rally of immigrant hotel workers in Washington, D.C. But Kennedy's optimism still prevails among only a few. The entire tenor of the immigration debate has radically shifted in the past year — and all in the wrong direction.

Infuriated by the prospect of what it called an "amnesty," the anti-immigrant right seized the political initiative in the escalating legislative fight. The President, frightened by the populist, Minutemen-like rebellion on his right flank and worried about splitting his party in an election year, has retreated, thereby opening up even more political space for the xenophobic fringe.

The Senate debate on immigration pits Republicans against Republicans — the Wall Street faction against Main Street, reformers against restrictionists. And in the House the restrictionists are surging. Representative Hayworth's clarion call at the Phoenix Restoration Weekend to close the borders was only the opening act for the undisputed hero of the nativist Republican right, Representative Tom Tancredo. A Colorado backbencher who rode the anti-immigrant wave to national prominence, Tancredo brought loud cheers from the conservative group as he ripped directly into any notion of liberalized immigration. "Yes, many who come across the border are workers. But among them are people coming to kill me and you and your children," he said.

Tancredo heads the ill-named House Immigration Reform Caucus, now about 90 members, which has assumed enormous clout in blocking reform. With the support of Tancredo's caucus last December, Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner Jr. pushed through a House measure intended to torpedo any liberalization. Even if the Senate passes a reform bill, it would have to reconcile it with Sensenbrenner's. And that might be impossible.

The Sensenbrenner bill reclassifies all illegal aliens as felons and radically increases penalties against anyone who aids, hires or counsels them. The bill would also require a new, 700-mile wall along the border, which stretches for 2,000 miles. Conspicuously absent from the House measure is any guest-worker program or mechanism to legalize those already here. And Tancredo is happy to take full credit for the bill. "The Wall Street Journal calls this the Tancredo Wall," he said with a smile. "Hey, it's got a great ring to it. The Journal says I want to turn America into a gated community. I say, You bet!"

There was plenty of negative reaction to Tancredo's rant from his fellow Republicans. Speaking the next day, Missouri Lieutenant Governor Pete Kinder told the conservative crowd that Tancredo's position could do to the national GOP what Pete Wilson did to the California branch of the party when he surfed the last anti-immigrant wave of the mid-1990s: Decimate it. "I'm warning you," Kinder told his Republican audience, "that the tone is going to turn a lot of people off."