Caught in the overlap of two societies

NEARLY 20 YEARS ago, President Reagan signed landmark immigration legislation and made una promesa: Future generations would be grateful for Washington’s efforts to “regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value” of American citizenship.

Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 offered amnesty to those already here and employer sanctions to prevent more from coming. In the end, amnesty made 2.7 million residents legal, and many are now citizens.

But employer sanctions were never enforced, and the demand for workers surged. Nearly 11 million undocumented residents -- enough to fill a country between the size of Israel and Chile -- now live in the United States, from the border states to New York, from Georgia to Wisconsin.

Eleven million. The size of that figure numbs or enrages. It demands that we do something about our immigration policy -- and it prevents us from doing much of anything rational.

Last week, the House declared itself in favor of making the 11 million into felons. The measure is unlikely to pass the Senate.

President Bush is pushing a different promesa. In a November speech, he said we can be a welcoming society and a lawful society. He proposes we spend more on border guards to secure the line between the United States and Mexico. And as for the millions already here? They can step “out of the shadows” to become legal temporary workers but, sooner or later, they must go “home.”

Bush’s speech is a good example of this country’s profound “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” ambivalence toward undocumented immigrants. There is no shortage of get-tough talk for those who cross the border illegally and those who employ them, and yet illegal immigrants have always been as easy to find as the fields and factories where they work. Still, they aren’t being rounded up into temporary-worker programs or deported en masse. That’s because employers can’t manage without them.

Here’s the truth of the matter: As long as Mexico produces more than half a million surplus workers a year, one way or another some will make it to El Norte. Call it “insourcing.” We can’t outsource local poorly paid construction, farm and domestic service jobs to India, China or Central America, but the workers willing to do that labor will come to us.

And here’s another truth: They aren’t going to volunteer to become “legal” guest workers in the U.S., and even if they do, the country’s experience with guest-worker programs demonstrates that the guests stay. Moreover, in most communities, the undocumented don’t live deep in “the shadows.” We accommodate them. They are our next-door neighbors, our schoolmates. Their kids are as American as apple pie and chile rellenos. Without them, crops don’t get picked, babies don’t get tended while Mom and Dad work, and office buildings don’t get cleaned or built.

In 1998, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico’s former ambassador to the United Nations, spoke at a conference called “Alternatives for the Americas” at UC Berkeley. He understood reality. “Mexico is in the United States, and this has tremendous implications for the future of migration,” he said. “It’s not a question of labor markets anymore. It’s a question of two societies that are overlapping.”

And will continue to overlap. If 11 million immigrants have arrived in the U.S. illegally during what was supposed to be the greatest crackdown in history, how many more will arrive -- and want to stay -- in the next 20 years? And the next?

The immigration debate doesn’t need more false promises. What it needs is a Congress, a president and a citizenry that can confront the realidad of the millions who are here -- and those who will inevitably come.

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Tuesday: The reality Washington won’t face is everyday life in many California communities.