Immigration Breakthrough

After years of trial and error, Congress is close to approving the first major changes in the nation’s immigration laws in a generation. Passage of immigration reforms would close the books on a major political battle, but it would open them on a new challenge: enforcing a new immigration law fairly and humanely.

Laws cannot completely control human motivations as strong as those that lead ambitious people from poor nations to migrate to the United States and other wealthy, industrialized nations. But the attempt had to be made. There is great public concern in this country over the presence of illegal immigrants, and the concern created political pressure to “solve” the perceived problem. The latest immigration-reform bill survived for that very reason. Some congressmen kept it alive as a way to control an influx of illegal aliens they fear is out of control, others because it provided a way to avoid more restrictive laws in the future.

The compromise leaves unhappy critics on both sides of the issue. Some provisions, like those that allow foreign farm workers to legalize their status, are delicately balanced between competing interests. Those tenuous compromises are acceptable, as long as Congress understands that the new law may need fine-tuning.

That it does understand is made clear in its order to the General Accounting Office to monitor the effect of the law’s sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. Restrictionists consider the sanctions the bill’s most important element because they think they will dry up the low-paying jobs that lure illegal aliens to the United States. The same sanctions are feared by Asian-Americans, Latinos and other ethnic minorities because they might intensify discrimination against citizens who look or sound “foreign.” To prevent that kind of discrimination the bill, somewhat ambiguously, would make it illegal.

Based on what Congress learns from the monitoring of the legislation, it should be prepared to make changes in the new law:

--Increase legal immigration quotas for Mexico, a nation with close historic ties to the United States that transcend international borders.

--Liberalize the so-called “amnesty” program that will allow some illegal immigrants now living in this country eventually to become citizens. The current bill’s amnesty date is January 1, 1982; a more recent date would be better.

--Allocate more federal money to state and local governments that may have to spend more on public services, such as county hospitals and public schools, to deal with an influx of newly legalized residents. The current bill’s offer of $1 billion per year, for four years, may simply not be enough.

--Spend more to improve the performance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the government agency that must oversee not just a potentially massive legalization program, but guard the borders against a new wave of illegal immigrants. The INS has a tarnished reputation. Many immigrants consider it bullying and hostile, and even its friends concede it is understaffed, overworked and often inefficient. We question the wisdom of allowing it to administer the new law, and if the job is not done well, Congress should create a new immigration agency and relegate INS to policing the nation’s borders.

Above all, Congress must never return to the policy of benign neglect that helped create the current immigration mess. The federal government must continue to study how people move in and out of the United States, and try to regulate that movement as best it can to make sure that fewer illegals slip though the cracks and become prone to exploitation. It must also make certain that foreigners who choose to stay in this nation are encouraged to become full and equal participants in American society, which is the best way to guarantee that they will defend their own rights.

It will be a big task. But projections that suggest most of this country’s future population growth will occur as a result of immigration rather than natural births also may make it one of the most profoundly important tasks the United States faces as it enters the 21st Century.