Good for a Laugh, Not Much More : House report on immigration is a joke

A House of Representatives task force on illegal immigration, appointed by Speaker Newt Gingrich to advise him on that hot-button political issue, came out with its recommendations last week. And no one should be more disappointed in the predictably mean-spirited results than Gingrich himself. For if the Speaker and other leaders of the Republican majority in Congress are true to their get-government-off-our-backs philosophy, it will be hard for them to stomach some of the Big Government proposals in this immigration reform mishmash.

The ideas range from the dubious, like tossing the children of illegal immigrants out of school, to the laughable, like seizing the assets of people who cross the border illegally. (Fine, in the unlikely instance that a rich Hong Kong resident tries to sneak across, but what do you take from a poor Mexican peon?)

And despite the claim of their more enthusiastic boosters, like Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), that this report’s recommendations would halt illegal immigration, the proposals are unlikely to do much more than other immigration reform efforts have done. Which is to say they might slow the influx of immigrants for a while, or channel it in new directions, but they will never stop it. That’s because immigration, both legal and illegal, is one of the most complex social phenomena in the modern world. The flow of immigrants is as much a part of the emerging international economy as the flow of goods and capital across borders. And it’s every bit as hard to predict, much less regulate.

Immigration is prompted not just by enormous economic trends and demographic shifts but by the literally undeterminable motivations of thousands of individual human beings. It is, as even a pseudo-libertarian like Gingrich should know, precisely the kind of human behavior that governments are almost powerless to stop. This isn’t to say that government shouldn’t try to regulate immigration. But it must be realistic about what is attainable. The value of the work being done by former Rep. Barbara Jordan’s National Commission on Immigration is that it is focusing on practical and doable reforms while ignoring the extreme proposals of restrictionists who see an illegal alien under every bed.

The House task force report was not a serious attempt to grapple with the immigration issue. It was just an opportunity for a few members of Congress to try to exploit it. No surprise there. Proposition 187 has made immigrant bashing a safe strategy for pols who can’t find a better way to get voters’ attention. But they should not try to kid voters that a few acts of Congress are going to “solve” the problem of immigration. The real world is more complicated than that.