With HR 4437, Congress lays a diversionary egg

by Phillip Bannowsky

 

The folks in Congress who brought us Medicare Prescription Drug Reform and NAFTA laid another big egg with HR 4437, the hysterically misnamed “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.” This House bill proposed to convert some 12 million immigrant workers into felons with the stroke of a pen. Anyone who assisted them—clergy, social workers, or union organizers—would be transformed into felons, as well. Recoiling from such a draconian measure, The Senate Judiciary Committee has offered an alternative, one with its own strict and even problematic provisions. The two houses may split the difference. However it is resolved, immigrants should not be diversionary scapegoats for congressional incompetence and corruption.

 

How did the House plan to enforce their new law? Would an army comprising Border Patrol, National Guard, local police, and Minutemen wannabes descend on America’s farms, restaurants, hotels, big box retailers, construction sites, churches, union halls, and immigrant communities to seize millions of men and women before the eyes of their native-born American children, load them into boxcars, and ship them to prison camps built by Haliburton?

 

The improbability of such an outcome demonstrates the law’s absurdity. However, such scenes are conceivable, depending on how local officials, granted authority to enforce the new law, would behave. HR 4437 would certainly create within our borders a great mass of human beings beyond both the regulation and protection of the law, subject to exploitation and extortion by real criminals, and denied rights guaranteed by Article Six of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 

Drawn here to satisfy the needs of employers and consumers and largely driven from South America by NAFTA-related policies that have bankrupted their farms, these immigrants are only guilty of following the human instinct to seek work. Some of them, from Guatemala, for example, are fleeing genocide. Note than over twenty-six thousand Guatemalans were deported in 2004, to face what God only knows, or cares about, apparently. Enforcing the unenforceable, instead of processing the inevitable, results in some 200 immigrants dying en route every year.

 

The relative number of foreign-born in America now is no higher than in previous waves of immigration, That so many are without valid status—a civil violation, not a criminal act—is because the immigration system is broken, incapable of processing the prospective citizens who seek and sustain the American Dream.

 

Congress, for its part, has undermined the economic and political underpinnings of that very Dream. It has promoted the de-industrialization of the USA with NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAA. It has given tax incentives to encourage the offshoring of American jobs. It has countenanced the firing of over twenty-two thousand American workers per year for trying to join a union.* It has failed to consider serious immigration reform. It is also caught in a web of corruption, and it has surrendered its authority to the Executive Branch. Congress has forgotten that Human Rights is an American value.

 

The legislation considered in the Senate, while a step in the right direction, still panders to misconceptions about immigration. Anyone who has ever signed a falsified paper, even when demanded by employers as a condition of employment, would be ineligible for citizenship. Its strict language requirements cater to the myth that this generation of newcomers is uniquely resistant to the American way. How many of our grandparents fit the description in the song sung by both Sophie Tucker and Connie Francis, “My Yiddishe Momme,” in her “humble/East-side tenement; Three flights up in the rear.”?

 

Temporary work permits, proposed by the President, would not only invite a repetition of the current mess, but they would make worse the downward pressure on all workers’ wages.

 

Immigration is not the crisis, although immigrants face a crisis in misunderstanding and scapegoating. America’s crisis is the dismantling of the social contract that guarantees, for example, that our country will care for victims of natural disasters, that workers will be free to choose union representation, or that America’s leaders will be guided by principles of human rights.

 

“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .” Immigration reform should treat new arrivals just as we were treated. When Lady Liberty needed our muscle, she made us her own.

 

Phillip Bannowsky of Newark is a retired autoworker and educator who has organized several forums on Delaware’s immigrants for the Phoenix Community in Delaware, Inc., an ecumenical ministry with a global perspective since 1954.

 

*1993-2003 NLRB Annual Reports, cited in Rights at Work, http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/resources/23cite.cfm.