Immigrants Still Deserve a Fair Shake

Liberty Weekend, and all America is celebrating the memory of those hardy immigrants who, symbolically at least, looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door. It’s a time to smile, to weep, to sigh contentedly.

Meanwhile, though we remain in 1986 the nation of immigrants, we are less open about it and perhaps more cynical. Officially, immigration is down from the great age we are celebrating this weekend. The United States will receive 490,000 legal immigrants and 70,000 refugees this year--roughly 40% of the 1.3 million immigrants who came in the peak year of 1907.

But everyone knows that’s not the whole of it. There are other immigrants coming illegally over the Rio Grande, or by boat into Florida or down from Canada or in through our airports with visitors’ visas that they intend to overstay. How many are coming is a matter of inference and conjecture; how many are staying--that is, truly immigrating as opposed to working for a time before returning home--is another mare’s nest of conflicting statistics.

Up to 4 Million Illegals

The best that can be inferred from Census Bureau and Immigration and Naturalization Service data is that there are 3.5 million to 4 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, and their numbers are growing by 250,000 to 300,000 a year. The count on how many flow in and out each year is far more conjectural, but it is probably more than 1 million and perhaps closer to 2 million.

You could call it our irregular work force--millions of people working here, as immigrants have always worked, but without the protection of our laws or the rights to social services that legal resident aliens enjoy. We may not like to admit it, but by tacitly tolerating illegal immigration, we are getting a work force on the cheap.

There ought to be a law, and several times in this decade the U.S. Congress has tried to pass immigration reform legislation. But it has failed, most recently in 1984. Among other reasons, federal and state governments could not agree on who would pay the cost of social services if illegal aliens living here were suddenly made legal residents. This year, the bone of contention is guest workers to pick the crops of the West and Southwest.

‘Guest Worker’ Bill

The Senate-passed immigration bill, sponsored by Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R.-Wyo.), provides for 350,000 guest workers who could come to the United States for 10 months a year to pick the crops. The immigration measure approved by the House Judiciary Committee just before the Fourth of July recess improves on that, giving the crop pickers resident alien status. The bill, sponsored by Committee Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D-N.J.), says, in effect, that if the farm workers are needed, then they’re entitled to an alien registration card--the “green card”--and the full protection of our laws.

The Rodino measure is correct, of course, if sincerely intended. But so bitter and divisive is the immigration issue that the measure’s seeming generosity may only be a tactical ploy in the long-running battle between Western growers and organized labor, which opposes the flow of unorganized workers into U.S. fields and factories. By raising the cost of employing immigrant labor, the “green card” amendment could effectively kill any chance for passage of immigration reform, again.

Most likely we will go through another session of Congress without an immigration law. This will benefit the growing ranks of immigration lawyers, whose current rate is $8,000 for working in the interstices of the law to obtain legal status for an illegal alien. Thus, we leave our irregular work force vulnerable to exploitation.

And our society vulnerable to backlash. Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, in “The Immigration Time Bomb” published this year, writes of the danger from illegal immigrants driving down wages, splintering U.S. society. It has been said before, specifically in the 1890s. Then, scholars at Columbia University warned that new immigrant strains, from Eastern Europe and from Italy, would disrupt our society. Further back, before there was a Statue of Liberty, the famine Irish were seen as a threat.

This has never been an easy country, for all the romantic images we’ll see this weekend. The streets were never paved with gold. But it offered work to people whose homelands offered no work. And it offered dignity and the chance for a better life--for the children. Our new immigrants are no less hard-working than those resilient folk in the faded photographs from Ellis Island. We should see that they get the same fair shake.