Will Congress (Finally) Reform our Broken Immigration System?

The Senate Gang Is Off to a Good Start, But Beware a Re-run of Past Efforts Gone Awry

Immigration reform is here! Well, wait, we’re talking about a proposal in the Senate, where momentum dies and good bills just fade away. Witness gun legislation. Just last week it seemed like background checks were a done deal. With that in mind, I convened an e-mail roundtable of experts to discuss the proposed legislation being husbanded by the so-called Gang of Eight: ImmigrationWorks USA President and CEO Tamar Jacoby, who has been deeply involved in the legislation; Alexandra Starr, who has written about immigrant families for years; and New York Times reporter Jason DeParle, who is writing a book about one immigrant family’s experience moving to the U.S. Our conversation—condensed and edited—is below. 

Andrés Martinez: Tamar, let’s start with you. For those of us witnessing this on the outside, it looks like an artful proposal: get beyond the old fight about whether to offer only legal status or a pathway to citizenship to the millions of undocumented workers already here. The proposed reform also creates a new type of visa for unskilled workers going forward, and affords some flexibility in terms of the numbers of such visas allotted each year. If this were the ultimate immigration reform that goes into effect—and I realize that remains a very big if—would it work in the real world?

Tamar Jacoby: You’re right, this is a thoughtful, carefully crafted package—almost a civics lesson in the art of bipartisan compromise.

Consider just a few of the trade-offs. A humane, practical answer for 11 million unauthorized immigrants is balanced by tough-minded determination to secure the border and enforce the rule of law. The nation’s traditional commitment to family-based immigration is balanced by recognition of our growing need for foreign workers, skilled and unskilled. There is a path to citizenship, but not a special or automatic path.

The one piece the Gang of Eight didn’t get quite right can be improved as the bill makes its way through the legislative process.

The senators recognized, wisely, that any overhaul must go beyond the millions of unauthorized immigrants living and working in the United States. The heart of reform is fixing the legal immigration system so it works for America in the future, preventing future illegal immigration by creating a legal way to enter the country—a visa program—for the less-skilled workers we need to fill empty jobs. 

The problem: The Gang of Eight’s less-skilled worker-visa proposal is much too small—less than half the size it needs to be, perhaps less than a third. And if the new visa program isn’t ample enough, it won’t succeed in replacing illegal immigration with a legal workforce.

The good news: This is just the beginning of the process—there are many steps to come in the Senate and the House.

Andrés: Those visa numbers do look low, but I hear you on this being a first step. Alexandra, with that caveat in mind, what strikes you about this compromise?

Alexandra Starr: First off, I have to say that I think this is an impressively smart and strategic bill. Irrespective of what you think about the quantity of low-skill visas (or so-called W visas), it makes so much sense to design them to potentially lead to permanent residency and allow visa holders to switch employers down the road.

Something else that stood out to me was the adoption of a points system to bring more skilled workers in the United States. As I wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy, there are some potential downsides to adopting that approach. Currently, we have a demand-based system: Broadly speaking, employers and individuals are requesting visas for future employees and family members. A points system is “supply” based: The government is determining which immigrants they believe will thrive in the U.S. economy. To work well, a government has to respond quickly to events on the ground. As we know, the U.S. Congress doesn’t have a history of being proactive when it comes to changing our immigration policies.

Putting aside the caveats I’ve laid out above, this bill is an excellent start. As Tamar pointed out, the so-called Gang of Eight demonstrated impressive bipartisanship—a quality that has been sorely lacking on Capitol Hill.

Andrés: Jason, you’ve been spending time in Texas tracking one (legal and recent) immigrant family’s experience in Galveston for your book project. You’ve been doing reporting on the schools there, which is where all of these macro immigration issues become everyday reality. How are Galveston schools coping, and what has surprised you about today’s immigrant experience?

Jason DeParle: I’m following a family of Filipino immigrants—a mother, father, and three young children. The mother had dreamed of coming to the United States for decades, but Galveston wasn’t what she had in mind. She was picturing Disney World, not a struggling blue-collar town.

I’ll mention two developments—one encouraging, the other less so.

On the upside, the transition to school appears to be going well. The kids spoke little English when they arrived, but they are soaking it up—so rapidly that their parents’ main worry is that they will forget Tagalog. Though the district serves lots of disadvantaged students, their elementary school is orderly and welcoming. And the teachers appreciate the traits the new kids have brought: respect, discipline, and eagerness to learn.

For people who think of immigration as a force of renewal, this family (an “N’’ of 1, as the social scientists say) is a case in point. They work hard, study, go to church, and respect authority. They haven’t found the idealized America they sought, but they brought a good bit of it with them. They are what they hoped to find.

On a more cautionary note, their economic situation is only so-so—and the mother, a registered nurse, is much higher on the economic ladder than many new immigrants. She is making more than $50,000 a year, but her husband is not working. Although he has an engineering degree from the Philippines, it is worthless here, and like many immigrant professionals, he is likely to face a downward move in status.

Even in Texas, where housing costs are low, expenses are much higher than the family expected. The husband and kids have no health insurance and the kids arrived needing thousands of dollars in dental work. Meanwhile, they are sending thousands of dollars home to retired parents and sick relatives.

Obviously, immigrants see opportunity here or they wouldn’t come in such large numbers. But it’s worth remembering a green card is not necessarily an economic jackpot and upward mobility is not a given.

Andrés: Tamar, one of the reasons immigration reform has been politically toxic, especially if you throw in that “comprehensive” adjective, is because we did all this back in the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan. Millions of undocumented immigrants were then amnestied, and everyone said this was a one-time deal, and that we were going to henceforth be more careful about not hiring undocumented workers. But here we are again. What should Congress make sure is in this legislation so as to prevent us ending up in the same place a decade or two from now, with millions of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows of our formal economy and rule of law?

Tamar: That’s a great question, Andrés—and you’re not the only person asking it. Virtually every congressional office I’ve visited in recent months has raised the same issue—especially House Republican offices.

There’s been a sea change among Republicans since the November election. Even the most skeptical are starting to grasp, as several have said to me, that Congress needs to “do something” about immigration. But virtually all make the same point: “I don’t want to be back here again in 10 or 15 years, wondering what to do about a new 11 or 12 or who knows how many million illegal immigrants.”

How to avoid that? Better border security will help. So will more effective immigration enforcement in the workplace—mandatory electronic employment verification and sanctions for employers who persist in flouting the law. And all of these components are in the bill, big time—as they should be.

But as we learned the hard way over the past three decades, enforcement alone will not be enough. The best, most effective antidote to illegal immigration is a legal immigration system that works.

We need immigrant workers—high-skilled and low-skilled—and will need them increasingly as the economy moves toward a full recovery. The American workforce is changing. American families are having fewer children: Our birthrate is well below replacement level.

If anything, our need for less-skilled workers is growing. In 1955, 25 cents of every dollar spent on food was spent in a restaurant; today it’s 50 cents out of every food dollar. And one of the fastest growing occupations in America is home-health aide.

Bottom line: We need immigrants. One way or another, they are going to make their way to the U.S. to fill empty jobs. And without a workable temporary worker program, the nation can have no hope of ending illegal immigration. The challenge in the months ahead is to make sure Congress understands.

Andrés: It’ll be interesting to see if e-Verify sticks. Meaningful workplace enforcement of immigration was one of the promises made at the time of the 1980s reform that was not followed up on, though clearly we’re in a different moment now in terms of the will to do this, and the technology available to do it in a less burdensome manner.

Alexandra, what would you say are the critical things to watch for in terms of ensuring we are not back in the same place a decade or two from now?

Alexandra: That’s a good question. Ideally, as Tamar says, we would create reasonable mechanisms for people to come here legally. The so-called W visa for low-skilled workers will fill a gaping hole in our current immigration code, and that will reduce the flow of unauthorized migration.

In addition to providing legal venues for people to come here, we could put teeth in our current efforts to reduce the hiring of immigrants without work authorization. Basically, make it even more difficult to be an unauthorized immigrant in the United States (and it’s already a pretty brutal road for a lot of those men and women). In the Senate bill, that would be done largely through the e-Verify program you mention, a computer system that is designed to ensure employers only hire those with permission to work here.

Finally, though, we have to accept that we will never have the same kind of control countries like Canada or Australia or New Zealand have over who comes and settles here. We are not an island nation, and we do not share our sole border with the world’s economic powerhouse. “We” are that nation, and that means we will always attract migrants from neighboring countries. Migration from Mexico has gone down, true, but it continues unabated from Central American countries. And with an uptick in our economy there will be more people clamoring to come here, and not all of them will qualify for W visas, even if the numbers allocated go upwards. There are steps we can take to cut down on unauthorized immigration, and the Senate bill would take us in that direction. But we should not think we can ever eliminate it entirely.