Wave of U.S. Immigration Likely to Survive Sept. 11

Critics of the nation’s often-embattled immigration system were quick to condemn it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The White House swiftly shelved controversial proposals for an amnesty for illegal immigrants from Mexico. And federal authorities made it easier to detain multitudes of noncitizens.

But the most significant development in the national immigration debate is what hasn’t happened: No lawmaker of influence has moved to reverse the country’s generous immigration policy, which for more than three decades has facilitated the largest sustained wave of immigration in U.S. history.

Proposals to restrict a system that welcomed more than 9 million legal immigrants during the 1990s were not even accorded a formal hearing on Capitol Hill.

Although Congress will continue to fine-tune the system once it reconvenes Jan. 23, experts agree that major changes to the core system of legal immigration are not on the political radar screen.

“This reflects a sort of wise and grown-up attitude on the part of Americans about what immigration is vis-a-vis what [the Sept. 11 terrorism] was,” said former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner, who served under President Clinton. “We’ve got some serious fixing we need to do, but it doesn’t mean that the whole thing should be jettisoned.”

Those who argue that too much immigration is causing economic and social fragmentation--and who viewed Sept. 11 as an unexpected opportunity to plead their case--are disappointed.

“You’ve got two political parties with their heads in the sand trying to play this ethnic politics game,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors deep cuts.

Pro-Immigrant Groups Gain Savvy

The restraint is the product of political and demographic currents that have swept the nation since the mid-1990s, when the rhetorical tactic of blaming immigration for social problems was perceived to have run out of steam.

California Gov. Pete Wilson became the first major U.S. political figure in generations to capitalize on fear of immigrants during his successful 1994 reelection campaign. But that tactic was repudiated in the last half of the decade by the governor of Texas--George W. Bush, who publicly courted Latinos and championed immigrants.

The subsequent routs of the Republican Party in presidential, gubernatorial and legislative races in California and the deep alienation of the fast-growing Latino electorate served to discredit Wilson’s strategy in GOP circles.

Meanwhile, as the numbers of new arrivals continued to swell in a booming economy, pro-immigration forces regrouped with renewed focus and political savvy. The immigrant lobby today is more than an inchoate conglomeration of liberals, civil libertarians and ethnic special-interest groups. Corporate America, which increasingly relies on the brawn and brains of immigrant workers, is now firmly aboard. Organized labor and all major religious groups are pillars of a loose pro-immigrant coalition--as are many Republicans.

“I think Republicans saw what happened in California with Pete Wilson’s effort to play politics with immigration,” said Daniel T. Griswold of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that supports liberal immigration. “He won a short-term battle there but lost the war.”

Crackdown Expected but Never Occurred

As president, Bush had considerable latitude after Sept. 11 to put a brake on immigration. Experts say he could have cited the emergency to halt all new arrivals and seal the nation’s borders. One viable scenario was a reprise of the severe clampdown on immigration that followed World War I.

“If you sat in a room with a bunch of immigration junkies or experts on the 12th of September, the default option at the end of the conversation would have been: ‘We’re going back to the 1920s. We’re going to slam the door shut,’ ” said Demetrios Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research organization that studies immigration.

It never happened. Instead, the administration has painstakingly gone out of its way to separate the issue of immigrants and immigration from the 19 Middle Easterners who hijacked four U.S. airliners on Sept. 11.

Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner James W. Ziglar has repeatedly voiced the operative mantra: “These weren’t immigrants,” he has said of the hijackers, all of whom arrived on legal visitor’s visas. “They were terrorists.”

Maintaining that separation is politically tricky. While lawmakers often laud the nation’s immigrant heritage, polls consistently show that the public is ambivalent at best about immigrations.

Often overlooked amid these varying views is how institutionalized immigration has become in American society. Today’s polyglot influx is rooted in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That era’s champions of social equality could not overlook a system created in the 1920s that effectively barred new settlers from much of the world beyond western Europe.

Congress acted in 1965 to impose a more equitable process. Lawmakers largely eliminated geographic biases in favor of family unification and job skills.

The reforms opened the door to immigration from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, regions long shut out of the process. Immigration from those areas created a natural multiplier effect: New arrivals promptly petitioned on behalf of loved ones still abroad.

By the 1980s, Mexico’s chronic underdevelopment, and civil wars in Central American sent masses of unauthorized immigrants north. The growing convenience of international air travel made it easy for Asians and others to enter the United States on short-term visas and disappear into burgeoning new immigrant communities. Millions of illegal immigrants eventually received amnesty or otherwise won lawful status.

Trade Center Bombing Led to New Curbs

During the 1990s, more than 12 million new immigrants--legal and illegal--settled in the United States, according to estimates based on census data and INS numbers. By contrast, about 10 million arrived during the first decade of the 20th century, the heyday of that famed era of immigration.

It was against this grain that advocates of curtailed immigration made their case after Sept. 11. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had earlier contributed to a soured atmosphere that ultimately resulted in increased deportations, tighter rules on political asylum and other crackdowns targeting immigrants. That helped give rise to the last serious effort to reduce immigration levels--and it failed.

U.S. Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo.), who supports an immigration moratorium and heads an immigration restriction caucus, sees difficult odds this time as well.

“It’s kind of hard when both major parties are against you--as is the president,” said Tancredo, whose caucus’ membership more than doubled after Sept. 11. “We’re not going to have a hearing at all, as far as I can tell.”

Since the attacks, the major pro-immigrant organizations have embraced the White House strategy of publicly separating immigrants from terrorists. While troubled by Bush administration detention moves, the groups tempered their criticism and backed additional screening and other security measures designed to deter terrorist entry.

“We’re breathing a sigh of relief, to be honest” said Angela Kelley of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant umbrella group based in Washington. “So far, not all immigrants have been tarred with a tough legislative brush.”

The Bush administration is even proposing the restoration of food stamp eligibility to more than 300,000 legal immigrants who lost access as part of the 1996 federal welfare overhaul.

And there is hope among immigration advocates that the issue of legal status of millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico will eventually reemerge at the negotiating table. Some see an opportunity to reconfigure the nation’s border enforcement apparatus to concentrate on security threats--rather than on deterring economic migrants seeking their niche in the global economy.

“We have been obsessed with keeping out hard-working, peaceful Mexican workers who want to build buildings and work in our factories and hotels and restaurants,” said Griswold of the Cato Institute. “We’ve used resources that, in hindsight, should have been devoted to keeping out terrorists.”

Since the September terrorist attacks, authorities have zeroed in on tightening rules governing so-called non-immigrant visitors, who outnumber actual immigrants by more than 20 to 1.

Changes include fortifying border controls, giving federal authorities broad new powers to detain noncitizens and to eavesdrop on their conversations with attorneys, and the creation of an additional layer of State Department screening for visa applications from about two dozen nations with large Muslim populations.

Further restrictions, such as greater scrutiny of foreign students and other visitors and even more enhanced visa screening, appear certain.

The White House has launched a reorganization of the INS, separating its sometimes-conflicting enforcement and service functions. But none of this is likely to lower overall immigration levels.

“It’s all border control or process issues, rather than the substance of immigration policy,” complained Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports cuts in immigration. “The tension between high immigration and homeland security cannot be resolved by organizational restructuring.”

The debate is a fluid one and, as Sept. 11 demonstrated, unexpected events may jolt it in a new direction. A deepening recession could fuel a further backlash against immigration, as past economic downturns have done. Another serious terrorist strike could change everything.

“If there is another attack--I’m talking a big attack--all bets are off,” said Papademetriou, of the Migration Policy Institute. “I think you would likely see all this measuredness of our current response going out the window.

“I don’t know if we’re going to be as deliberate on anything if there’s a next time.”