An exhilarated yet orderly crowd of 75,000 rallied at Denver’s “Day Without an Immigrant” demonstration Monday, ranging from former Mayor Federico Peña to Mario Rodriguez, who kissed a dollar bill and exclaimed, “This is my green card!”
They were joined by many more across the nation at events that energized a sense of purpose for participants and once again focused the nation’s attention on the issue.
It’s worth noting, though, that millions of Latinos – citizens and undocumented, native-born and foreign-born – did what they usually do on a Monday: They went to work and went to school. An estimated 1 million demonstrated, while the nation’s total Latino population is more than 40 million.
Many who went about their normal business perhaps shared the completely sensible view of Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who commented, “I would hope people could have demonstrated during their off hours. … I believe it’s important for all kids to stay in school and for workers to stay at their jobs.”
Salazar and the rest of Congress have their own job to do – trying to craft legislation that will sensibly address the many aspects of immigration, from border security to guest workers to employer responsibilities.
The House has passed a bill heavy on border security and criminalization of illegals, while Senate debate has focused more on on creation of a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship.
Much remains to be done, and it’s anybody’s guess if Congress can agree on this volatile issue in an election year.
One thing lawmakers should do is some homework on the last big effort to tackle immigration, the reform law of 1986. In many ways, the flaws in that act have helped create today’s problems.
Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000 and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, has a perceptive analysis of what was done wrong in 1986 and what went wrong after that.
While the law created a successful path to legalization for millions and created a system of employer responsibilities, that system failed because of inherent flaws and weak follow-through, Meissner argues.
The law provided no reliable way for employers to verify legal status of workers and allowed applicants to use more than two dozen different kinds of documents, most of which are easy to counterfeit.
Meissner also notes that resources for employer enforcement have been “puny,” with fewer than 100 investigators available nationwide in 2005, compared to more than 500 in 1990.
Despite calls now for a border wall, border enforcement actually has gotten significantly tougher since the early 1990s. But it can’t work without a sound employer verification and enforcement system, Meissner and others believe. Her analysis is that neither the House bill nor Senate proposals currently contain adequate employer provisions.
Congress needs to take three key lessons from the experience of the last 20 years:
Border and employer enforcement only have a chance of working together, not one or the other alone.
Employer enforcement and a guest- worker program require easily verifiable and secure identification documents.
Laws without the money and manpower to enforce them are dead letters.
