Immigration Policy Failures Invite Overhaul

Rep. Romano L. Mazzoli, a believer in the contributions immigrants make to this country, co-authored the exhaustively debated 1986 law that was touted as the remedy for the problems of illegal immigration.

But today the legislation is viewed as so unsuccessful, and concern over the issue has grown so intense that the moderate Kentucky Democrat is ready to start over. Remarkably, he believes that the time has come to consider what many regard as the ultimate weapon: He has asked Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to explore the merits of a proposed constitutional amendment that would revoke the sacrosanct right to citizenship for anyone born on American soil whose parents are here illegally.

“I want to provoke some thinking about the issue,” Mazzoli said recently. “I said when you’re going to sit down and think about this whole issue, you’ve got to think about it from the bedrock up. And I’ve asked her to start with the whole question of citizenship.”

Mazzoli’s admission is an unmistakable sign that the uproar over illegal immigration is no longer confined to a few heavily affected border states, particularly California, and the conservative end of the political spectrum. It reflects a new reality that the push for action is increasingly nationwide in scope and broadly bipartisan.

“In this decade, (immigration) will be the single most difficult problem we face together,” Reno said during a recent speech at the FBI Academy.

On Capitol Hill and in the White House, the issue appears to be approaching a flash point.

President Clinton has vowed to introduce measures to crack down on smuggling of aliens as well as streamline the severely backlogged and widely abused political asylum process. Clinton is well aware of the issue’s political volatility: his handling of rioting by Cuban immigrants at Ft. Chafee, Ark., contributed to his defeat for reelection as Arkansas governor in 1980 because he was not perceived as acting quickly or forcefully enough.

On Capitol Hill, the House recently overrode its own Appropriations Committee and approved an additional $60 million to add 600 agents to the nation’s Border Patrol.

More significantly, various lawmakers, including Mazzoli, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on international law, immigration and refugees, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have proposed their own plans to curtail the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, China and other Third World nations.

“Not to address it, I think, is to permit a situation to develop where people unfairly become scapegoats and there is a lot of antagonism that can lead to a kind of backlash, and that would be most unfortunate,” said Feinstein, the freshman senator who has wasted no time injecting herself into the immigration issue as a member of the Judiciary Committee.

The debate is unfolding amid anxiety in some quarters that the country’s lingering economic downturn has prompted an atmosphere that will make it difficult to address the legitimate problems evenhandedly. These fears have been fed by immigration fiascoes that seem to command Page 1 headlines weekly.

Most recently, the World Trade Center bombing and the smuggling of Chinese into New York and California spotlighted holes in the immigration dike. The Administration’s decision in January to turn back Haitian boat people at sea prompted heated debate. The failure of employer sanctions was highlighted by the revelation that Zoe Baird, former nominee for attorney general, had hired illegal immigrants as personal servants.

Unquestionably, the country is experiencing a historic level of immigration--both legal and illegal. A total of 8.9 million people have immigrated legally into the United States during the last decade and an estimated 3 million have entered illegally, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This influx is comparable to the great wave of European immigration at the turn of the century.

An annual United Nations report released last week estimated that about 10% of Mexico’s potential labor force lives in the United States. The report also estimated that illegal immigrants actually exceeded legal immigrants.

At the same time, immigrants are a far smaller portion of the U.S. work force than they were previously. Foreign-born workers make up 8% to 9% of employees today; they constituted 15% in the early 20th Century.

Mazzoli co-authored the 1986 immigration law with Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.). It granted amnesty to many of those already in this country illegally and slapped sanctions on employers who hired anyone without proper documents. The Kentucky congressman pointed out that America is, after all, a nation of immigrants that has benefited enormously from the drive and ingenuity of ambitious newcomers throughout its history.

But public opinion polls document growing hostility to immigration--reflecting the historical tendency to open the door when the economy is growing and to shut it when times are hard. A Los Angeles Times Poll of the city’s residents in February found that 61% thought “there are too many foreign immigrants in Los Angeles.”

At least some of the anti-immigrant sentiment appears to be based on fundamental misconceptions. In a recent New York Times/CBS Poll, 68% of the respondents said that “most of the people who have moved to the United States in the last few years are here illegally.” Immigration experts say that 75% to 80% of the new arrivals are in the country legally.

Many immigrant rights advocates say that racism is a factor. If the preponderance of newcomers were European instead of Latino and Asian, they say, the outcry would be muffled. In California, Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration projects that the state population will double in the next half-century to 60 million, if current trends continue, and a Latino majority will emerge in the year 2040.

The influx already has strained states and localities. In a much-cited study, Los Angeles County calculated last year that the net cost of providing public services to the county’s estimated 700,000 illegal residents was $308 million. School districts spent an additional $368 million to educate children of those here illegally, the study found. And the county received only $36.2 million of the $904 million in tax revenues generated by the illegal immigrants.

In recession-wracked California, Wilson estimated that the state spent $1.7 billion in the last fiscal year to pay for educational, medical and correctional costs associated with residents here illegally. And Reno said that 26% of federal prisoners are in the United States illegally.

Immigrant rights advocates say that such studies tend to overestimate the costs of illegal residents--who are not eligible for federal welfare and some other government programs--and underestimate the benefits, including the sales, property, Social Security, income and business taxes that many pay. But they acknowledged that there are significant costs to states and localities.

“Immigrants pay taxes, but the larger portion of revenue goes to the federal government, and the greater burden associated with immigrants goes to the states,” said Cecelia Munoz, senior immigration policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza. “The problem is that it’s being framed as, there shouldn’t be immigrants because they’re costing money.”

In any case, the perception is strong that illegal residents are taking jobs and services from others. At a town meeting in Montebello last month, Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente) was confronted by a middle-age Latino woman upset about illegal residents.

“Why can’t they cut a lot of these programs?” the woman said. “I can’t get any help. You have to wait for illegals to get any help before you can. I graduated from college and I can’t get a job because all the people who are here illegally are taking the jobs. They are coming for the American dream we can’t even have.”

This sentiment--echoed repeatedly in telephone calls and mail to California lawmakers and others involved in the debate--makes immigration political dynamite. It is not surprising that Feinstein and fellow California Democrat Barbara Boxer each met with Reno and stated a desire to move against illegal immigration within months of arriving in the Senate.

Even though virtually everyone involved in immigration issues agrees that the nation’s system for regulating its borders is not working, there remains intense disagreement about what steps should be taken to fix it.

“The underlying problem is that the issue of immigration and the effective and humane control of immigration has largely been neglected for decades in the United States,” said Michael Fix, an immigration specialist at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“We end up with laws that are very good by international standards--balanced, generous--but the implementation of immigration policies has been underfunded, neglected and politicized for years, and now we’re paying the piper.”

Most experts agree that a long-overdue first step is upgrading the Border Patrol--to prevent illegal crossings and to curb abuses and corruption within its ranks. Annual captures of illegal immigrants, which dropped by half, to 800,000 in 1987, the year after the Immigration Reform and Control Act took effect, have been edging upward since, hitting 1.2 million in 1992.

An INS spokesman contended that in part this is because the agency has taken such steps as building new barriers at the border, “the assignment of agents in troubled areas, lighting and other initiatives to improve our efficiency in catching those who come across.”

“The estimate is that we’re catching every other (illegal) alien in some areas; in the past it was one in three,” the spokesman said.

There is also agreement that the asylum process for political refugees needs to be speeded up--whether through more personnel, changes in the law or both. Another newfound priority is curtailing human smuggling through such steps as increasing penalties and expanding Coast Guard authority and overseas intelligence gathering.

But, generally, the debate remains polarized.

Immigration-rights, civil-liberties and religious groups contend that the solution to many problems is additional manpower and improved management at the much-criticized INS. They maintain that greater enforcement of wage-and-hour and workplace-safety laws will discourage exploitation of vulnerable newcomers and make low-paying jobs more palatable to American citizens.

And they say that economic development in the “sending” countries is essential to discourage residents from seeking a better life here. Some see the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement as a step in that direction.

Others, such as Simpson, say that it is time for another round of sweeping changes. Simpson has proposed an “expedited inspection” policy under which an asylum examiner could decide on the spot the credibility of an immigrant’s claim that he is fleeing political persecution. Immigrant rights groups say that this would result in expelling many legitimate applicants unable to make their cases for asylum upon arrival because they are exhausted, scared, lack documents or speak little English.

In a bid to counter pervasive document fraud, Simpson also is advocating adopting a single tamper-resistant card for those seeking work, a step that opponents say would foster discrimination.

The uproar over immigration and the reaction among policy-makers in the nation’s capital has rocked immigrant rights supporters back on their heels. They are scrambling to work with moderates like Feinstein to fashion reforms that would control illegal immigration even as they seek to fend off consideration of such measures as a new registration card or a despised constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to the children of illegal residents.

“The politicians, rather than leading the people, are appealing to those baser instincts which we’ve had historically in this country: nativism and anti-newcomer sentiment,” said the Rev. Richard Ryscavage, executive director of migration and refugee services for the U.S. Catholic Conference. “We have to be certain we don’t shut off our lifeblood as a country by all sorts of crazy restrictions.”

One reason Washington has been relatively slow to respond is that the impact is felt primarily in just a few states. California and other border states have sought to get the federal government to pick up a larger percentage of these costs--on the grounds that control of immigration is a federal responsibility--with limited success.

Clinton’s nomination of Doris M. Meissner, an expert on immigration issues, to head the beleaguered INS has been widely welcomed after the less-experienced appointees of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Even so, under Clinton’s proposed 1994 budget, the Border Patrol would lose 93 agents and shrink to 4,770 employees.

The biggest question may be whether the Administration will be willing and able to navigate between the well-organized immigration rights groups and the growing backlash.

“It’s the perfect issue for him to show that he’s a responsible and thoughtful and hard-headed President and one in which the politics for him are almost all favorable,” said California Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), the first Democratic lawmaker to urge tough measures to stem illegal immigration. “It’s a real problem that’s only going to get bigger.”

* SMUGGLED CHINESE: There was apparent progress in talks over Chinese immigrants in custody off Ensenada. A3