The Smart Way to Get a Handle on the Immigration Issue : Think incrementally, carefully (yes to required Social Security cards, and a border toll)--not emotionally or angrily

Boatloads of Chinese refugees offshore and foreigners arrested in last February’s terrorist bombing in New York--not to mention continuing immigration from Latin America--have combined to again put illegal immigration high on the national agenda. This is a sensitive and politically volatile issue, but nothing is to be gained by not discussing it, and even less is to be gained by fearing change.

CONGRESS GETS INVOLVED--BUT PERHAPS TOO QUICKLY: Congress yet again is looking for new ways to deal with a complex issue that was supposed to have been resolved with the monumental Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. The very fact that this landmark legislation did not solve all the problems associated with illegal immigration should give Congress and the Clinton Administration a much-needed reality check before they plunge anew into “immigration reform.” Some immigration-related problems are simply not amenable to easy solutions--and even when solutions are possible, they often will be expensive and controversial. But this is not to say that nothing should be tried.

Thirty different bills, by a recent count, have been introduced on Capitol Hill to deal with illegal immigration. Fortunately, only a few are harshly anti-immigrant. Although immigrants contribute much to this country--as they have throughout American history--they increasingly entail social costs. Like people in other countries, Americans are susceptible to anti-foreign appeals or nativist sentiment, especially in times of economic stress. It’s encouraging that Congress members who have taken the lead on immigration--particularly Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Reps. Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)--say they are doing so partly in the hope of preventing a nativist backlash against all immigrants. Such efforts are to be encouraged--even if in Feinstein’s case obvious political factors (a reelection campaign in 1994) in part motivate her interest in immigration.

MAZZOLI’S PROPOSALS--THE GOOD AND THE BAD: Mazzoli, who helped draft IRCA, has had some good ideas about immigration. But his proposal to deny U.S. citizenship to children born here to illegal immigrants is not one of them. That won’t help stem the tide. Illegal immigrants come to this country for jobs, not U.S. citizenship. Mazzoli’s prohibition would not stop them from coming, but could give the immigration debate a mean-spirited tinge that would be counterproductive. After all, the Constitution does guarantee citizenship to people born here. If denying children citizenship won’t stem the tide and is unconstitutional, what good is it?

Some other measures pending in Congress are useful, although they may need fine-tuning. Among short-term measures that Congress can act on quickly are bills by Schumer and Mazzoli to streamline asylum procedures. This country should always be willing to consider protecting foreigners who are persecuted in their homelands. But in recent years the nation’s outdated asylum procedures have been abused by refugees who are here only to make money and file claims for political asylum simply to keep their jobs as long as possible. This is what many Chinese refugees are doing, claiming asylum through the Bush Administration’s sincerely motivated but ill-conceived “China loophole”--which permits these claims because of their country’s restrictive childbearing policies.

ANTI-SMUGGLER BILLS--TARGETING A SHAMEFUL COMMERCE: Congress should also give higher priority to cracking down on the smugglers of illegal immigrants. Traffickers in human cargo have never faced the opprobrium this nation accords drug smugglers. But their trade can be every bit as cruel, as the deaths of many would-be illegal immigrants attest. Congress must toughen the penalties for this crime.

The Clinton Administration should also direct the Justice Department and the nation’s intelligence community to more closely monitor foreign smuggling operations, and to devise a more sophisticated system for keeping track of individuals who should be kept out of the country. Consider the radical Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, whose followers include the chief suspects in the World Trade Center bombing in New York. Because of an error at a U.S. consulate abroad, he slipped through the exclusion system and later set himself up in a New Jersey mosque. Clearly more reliable screening is needed.

Finally, to keep IRCA’s ban against employing illegal immigrants from being applied in a discriminatory manner against workers who look or sound foreign, especially U.S.-born Latinos and Asian-Americans, Congress must approve a controversial proposal to make Social Security cards tamper- and counterfeit-resistant. Since U.S. workers already have such cards, and must display them to get jobs, that is the simplest way to screen out illegal workers. It would be expensive--$2.5 billion by some estimates--but one reason this nation has been unable to get immigration under control is because it has never been willing to spend the money to do it right.

In retrospect, one key problem with IRCA was that Congress did not allocate enough money for all the good things it was supposed to do. While it included a generous amnesty for illegal immigrants who had lived here for many years, Congress shortchanged the handful of states--California foremost among them--where those immigrants live. Now California is desperately seeking federal aid to help pay for the schools, health care and other public services that immigrants and their families use. If Congress wants to mandate even more immigration reforms, it should be more realistic about paying for them.

FEINSTEIN’S PROPOSAL--A TOLL WORTH LEVYING: In that regard, Feinstein has come up with a useful proposal to charge a modest toll--she suggests $1 per crossing--for each individual who enters the United States from Mexico or Canada by car, ship or ferry. If such a toll had been in place in 1992, it would have raised more than than $400 million.

But while the border toll idea has merit--and indeed The Times endorses it--Feinstein’s proposal for spending the money raised is problematic. She would earmark the funds to hire more U.S. Border Patrol agents and to buy them more sophisticated equipment. While there is clearly a need get the borders under better control, throwing money at the Border Patrol is not good idea.

A key Senate committee last week approved an immigration package that includes hiring as many as 600 more Border Patrol agents. But a recent Times series on the Border Patrol documented how at least some of that troubled agency’s recent problems grew out of an effort to hire too many agents too fast after IRCA was passed. Ill-trained or poorly screened agents wound up brutalizing migrants and causing the agency other problems. Rather than repeating that mistake, Congress must look beyond Feinstein’s proposal to a General Accounting Office recommendation to create a new border management agency that would combine the Border Patrol with the more technologically advanced Customs Service. In making the recommendation to Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who oversees Customs, the GAO said that a new border agency is “the most viable option for preparing the government to meet the broader challenges posed by changing international business competition and increasing international migration flows.”

That is the kind of long-range thinking Congress must do if it is to get a handle on immigration, not just for now but in the 21st Century. While the present concern is Chinese refugees and Middle Eastern terrorists, next year other foreigners could surface as the problem of the moment. Or as opportunities.

THE NAFTA FACTOR--A POWERFUL INSTRUMENT OF NORMALIZATION: In many ways, the ongoing domestic debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement is related to the renewed debate over immigration, at least along our southern border. Between 60% and 70% of the migrants who enter this country illegally come from Mexico, and perhaps the strongest argument for NAFTA is that it would strengthen the Mexican economy so this historical migratory pressure eventually eases. Any Congress member who is sincere about stemming illegal immigration should vote for NAFTA.

But NAFTA could also set precedents for a future agreement on the free movement of labor in North America. As many economists--and thousands of small business people from California to Texas--know, the economy of the borderlands would be less prosperous without legal Mexican immigrants. (Most experts agree that legal immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take away in social services; as for illegal immigrants, no one knows for sure.) So, a cross-border labor agreement would only do what NAFTA aims to do with the cross-border movement of capital and goods: better regulate the economic integration that is already taking place among the United States, Mexico and Canada.

The laws of economics--and human nature--are powerful forces; no man-made law can stop human beings from trying to move from one place to another in pursuit of economic opportunity. A realistic and farsighted U.S. immigration policy must take that simple, but fundamental, fact of history and economics into account.

Rather than trying to completely stop the movement of people into this country, which is futile, the United States should try to regulate it better, control the costs better, relate better to our southern neighbors, insist that all foreigners obey our laws and, at the same time, avoid blaming foreigners for all our problems.