Amnesty Proposal Doesn’t Add Up

Eighteen men are drenched in morning light on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, hoping to get lucky. When a car slows, there’s a surge, each man thinking this is it -- the job that gets him and his family through another day.

After striking up a conversation, I ask how many of these day laborers are legal citizens. Three of them claim to be.

Now, if 15 of 18 guys standing on a corner are here illegally, it’s about time we admit the Mexican border is now somewhere near Oregon. That’s the upside of President George W. Bush’s immigration reform proposal.

It says to immigrants: OK, you need us, and we know the advantages of having you here, so let’s make a deal.

But despite back slaps for Bush from Mexican President Vicente Fox and some immigration groups in the U.S., there’s a better chance of California annexing Tijuana than the Bush proposal getting through Congress.

It’s getting knocked from the right as a free pass for law-breakers, and rapped from the left for not going far enough, and the international bureaucracy required to make it happen sounds like a bigger nightmare than Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform plan.

The proposal is virtually impossible to implement and practically dead on arrival, so it may end up looking like little more than an election-year attempt to keep agribusiness and other employers happy while blowing a kiss to Latinos.

Having said that, some of the men on Sunset Boulevard are genuinely flattered that Bush offered to make them honest.

“It benefits me and the American government if I have a good job and spend my money,” said Alberto Juarez, 40, who has been in the United States 16 years but is not a citizen.

But what’s a “good” job?

Not cleaning houses for $50 a day, or standing out here on a corner, wondering whether you’ll go home hungry and penniless.

But how do you move up to something more substantial in just three years? That’s the length of the visa Bush is offering, with no guarantee of a green card at the end.

How many people are going to report to an office and sign up for a program that gives them a shot at a job no citizen wants, and has the added bonus of getting them deported in three years?

Some of the country’s estimated 8 million to 12 million illegal immigrants would go for it, no doubt, just to come in out of the shadows. In a mid-1980s legalization program, 2.7 million people came forward.

But with a temporary visa and no guarantee of permanent status, some people are going to disappear into the underground at the end of those three years.

I say we decide, once and for all, whether we’re going to have open borders or closed borders. No more of this charade we’ve got now, in which we spend half the time locking the gate and the other half looking the other way.

And instead of three years of temporary legal status, let’s make it full amnesty. That’s right, if we’re going to put an end to the wink-and-nod program, let’s be completely honest about it.

Let’s say “olly olly oxen free,” and everyone who’s already on U.S. turf becomes a citizen. How can you do anything else but surrender when 15 out of 18 guys standing on a corner are illegal and unafraid to tell you so?

But then we raise the fences and man the border as if we actually mean it. We clamp down hard, controlling the flow of immigration for a given period -- three years, five, 10 -- then take stock of the economy and reconsider throwing the gates open again.

The problem isn’t the existence of illegal immigrants in the United States, the majority of whom bring nothing but good intentions and strong backs. The problem is the never-ending, unregulated, uncontrollable flow of people in such great numbers that their own hopes are crushed.

What kind of life is this, standing on a corner day after day, no guarantees?

Just as we’re driving down wages for the sake of buying an $8.63 polo shirt at Wal-Mart, we’re driving down wages for legal and illegal gardeners, housekeepers, sweatshop seamstresses, strawberry pickers and assembly line workers at the chicken factory.

In Los Angeles, our schools, hospitals, prisons and highways are overwhelmed.

When do we reach capacity, and what do we do when we get there?

Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute told me he supports the idea of full amnesty for those already here, and he also supports controlling future immigration through something like the guest worker program Bush proposes.

“But we never take a hard look at the employer hiring undocumented immigrants,” Pachon said, “whether it be the giant chicken or produce manufacturer in Arkansas, or the sweatshop operating in the Bronx or in South-Central Los Angeles.”

You could go a long way toward solving immigration abuses, Pachon said, by imposing huge fines and sanctions against companies that recruit or exploit illegal immigrants. And you could go a long way toward stemming the flow, he adds, by investing in economic development on the Mexican side of the border. Maybe we could divert some of the billions earmarked for Iraq.

On Sunset Boulevard, 24-year-old Ricardo Rocha tells me he’s been in Los Angeles illegally for six years, and he likes the Bush proposal. He likes it, that is, until I tell him about the three-year part of the deal.

He shakes his head no, that’s not the way it is.

“Si, tres anos, y adios!” another man tells him.

Rocha gives a thumbs down to that. He turns and walks down the street, illegal and free, one lucky break away from his next meal.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@ latimes.com, and read previous columns at latimes.com/ lopez.