Taxpayers held hostage: Day 55.
Today marks the 55th day that Congress officially gave up trying to work out a resolution to the crisis that is our immigration system.
During their session, both parties used the issue as a political football and now the game is going into overtime.
How much more can we debate this topic to death before Congress takes action?
When is Election Day again?
No doubt our immigration laws are a complex, contradictory mess that doesn’t take into account the needs of employers. Would-be immigrants have to wait years to legally obtain work visas.
Rather than try to work out a compromise – which is what we expect our elected leaders to do – they took a political way out: holding off until the lame-duck session following the mid-term elections.
In the meantime, they’re allowing the public to sit in on Congressional field hearings being held across the country. The first hearing was held July 5 in Philadelphia and the last one is scheduled for Sept. 1 in Dubuque, Iowa.
Call it the Wedge Issue Follies.
That traveling show is coming to Aurora Wednesday, where local “experts” will regurgitate facts and figures on the cost of implementing various immigration laws – including a Congressional Budget Office study released Aug. 18. It doesn’t matter that these studies are already available to members of Congress. It doesn’t matter that new research is being conducted as you read this.
Research is important, but at a certain point tough decisions have to be made: How should we secure our borders? What sort of sanctions should we put on employers who flagrantly circumvent U.S. immigration law? How do we match workers to employers without hurting U.S. workers? How do we keep unscrupulous employers from exploiting undocumented workers? How should we rework trade agreements so that tens of thousands of displaced Mexican workers regain their livelihood?
We do not need more studies. The American public wants action. Yet congressional leaders, including Sen. Wayne Allard, who is chairing the Aurora hearing, insists the hearings are important: “I’m of the view that we need to resolve it as soon as possible,” Allard told me last Thursday. “In order to get a compromise worked out we need to look at the figures.”
The figures he’s talking about include pseudo-research by The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who is known for using questionable methodology. Why call upon a researcher at a reactionary propaganda tank that twists facts to promote anti-immigrant polices?
Could this all be part of a larger plan to confuse the masses and keep them focused on illegal immigrants as the source of our ailing economy? Meanwhile, the federal government is finding creative ways to use this issue to funnel even more money to its pals.
The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers already has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million to Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to create “detention centers” for illegal immigrants in the event of an emergency. (For those who forget: Vice President Dick Cheney once ran the company and still receives deferred payments. He received $211,465 from Halliburton in 2005, more than his VP salary of $205,031.)
Politicians need to stop using this wedge issue as a diversionary tactic to keep us from realizing what’s really hurting American workers: real-wage decreases, the increasing number of workers who lack health insurance, and the decline of the middle class.
“There is a growth of inequality,” says Lisa Duran, executive director of Rights for All People, a non-profit agency that advocates for immigrant workers. “Some CEOs earn $30,000 an hour and what is the minimum wage?”
We need to recognize that the flow of immigrants is tied to trade agreements that have devastated local economies in Mexico while making the CEOs of U.S. companies that displaced those workers even wealthier. (As well as lining the pockets of the Mexican elite.)
If more Americans were aware of the abuses that hurt low-wage workers on both sides of the border, we wouldn’t let politicians get away with their Wedge Issue Follies. We would demand action now.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Contact her at 303-954-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
