Immigration
Misery
EDITORIAL,
NYTimes on the Web, March 15, 2007
A screaming baby girl has been
forcibly weaned from breast milk and taken, dehydrated, to an emergency room, so
that the nation’s borders will be secure. Her mother and more than 300
other workers in a leather-goods factory in New Bedford, Mass., have been
terrorized — subdued by guns and dogs, their children stranded at school — so
that the country will notice that the Bush administration is serious about
enforcing immigration laws. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of poor
Americans, lacking the right citizenship papers, have been denied a doctor’s
care so that not a penny of Medicaid will go to a sick illegal immigrant.
As the country waits for Congress and the president to enact immigration reform,
the indecency of existing policies is becoming intolerable. The immigrant
underclass is in a growing state of misery and fear. States and localities
have rushed to fill the vacuum of Congressional inaction with a jumble of
enforcement regimes. Farmers are worrying about crops rotting as their
immigrant workers retreat further into the shadows. Officials in Colorado
have settled on one solution: replacing those workers with prison chain
gangs.
Senator Edward Kennedy, infuriated after visiting a New Bedford church basement
and hearing tales of separated families and sick children, has given up on
drafting a new immigration bill. He has decided instead to get Congress
moving quickly by reintroducing a bill passed last year by the Senate Judiciary
Committee. That bill — sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter, then the
committee’s chairman — was seriously flawed to start and further distorted by
harsh Republican amendments.
Mr. Kennedy clearly believes that the urgent priority is to get the bipartisan
coalition for immigration reform back on the bus and to fix problems while the
bus is moving. His frustrations are understandable, but he will have to
work hard to make sure that he and the bill do not compromise too much.
And there is a lot in the Specter bill to be concerned about. Parts of it
were cut and pasted from a cruel immigration bill that passed the House,
including draconian measures to speed immigrants’ deportation and deny them
protection in the courts. It came with an arbitrary cutoff date, leaving
anyone who arrived here illegally after 2004 in the cold.
What is urgently needed is decency, proportionality and bipartisanship to
resolve this festering debate. Whenever and however the Senate revisits
immigration, the bottom line must be the same: a bill that combines border
security and workplace enforcement with diligent protection of workers’ rights
and a path to citizenship for immigrants who work for it. The alternative,
the blundering and punitive status quo, is a path of misery.
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