Immigration issues

Tankwoman raised some questions related to the current immigration debate - which we're having because of Republican attempts to demagogue to their hardcare nativist and racist supporters. It's not that they're worried that the nativists are going to vote Democratic. It's that they are worried the hardcore white fundamentalist base won't turn out in sufficient numbers to keep the House and Senate both safely in Republican control.

It's easy for us regular citizens to forget. But because the Bush team have committed some very serious crimes, they are terrified that the Democrats will take control of the House, which would allow them to launch aggressive investigations into the range of Republican misconduct, from massive lobbyist corruption to torture to illegal domestic spying to deceiving Congress on the Iraq War to the Valerie Plame exposure to the leaking of signals intelligence to Iran to war crimes like those at Haditha.

The are not just worried about the embarassment or impeachment. They seem to have little capacity for shame, so embarassment is not an issue for them. And they probably believe they are invulnerable to impeachment and especially from conviction on impeachment charges in the Senate, where a 2/3 vote is required.

But Congressional investigations could also make further criminal investigations unavoidable. Even if Bush is willing to use the pardon power to throw a wide blanket of immunity over his cronies, they would still probably feel they had to let some of the underlings take the rap. There would be a lot of controversy over what happened in any case, as each crook tries to point the finger at the others. It certainly would be a stumbling-block for the Cheney/Rumsfeld/neocon/Iran-Contra crowd to return to official positions of power.

Turning to some of Tanker's specific points.

Tougher employer sanctions would have to include giving employers an easily-accessable and reliable way to check the immigration status of their new hires without having to maintain a private detective agency on retainer to investigate every applicant. Something like a Web site that would verify that Social Security numbers actually exist, for instance, could help a lot. Better tamper-proof IDs could also play a role.

Stuff like that is not rocket science. But it probably would require some big software investments. And for that to be done right, it would take having the right kind of software project managers on board, and a real quality-based bidding procedure that wasn't rigged to give the contract to a crony of Dick Cheney's.

Is the motivation behind the immigration hoopla racist? I put a quotation in the sidebar from Arkansas' white Republican governor:

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Tuesday that he believes he knows what's behind the anti-immigration feelings of some Americans.

"If I were to say some of it is driven by just sheer racism, I think I would be telling you the truth," Huckabee said as he shared sandwiches and salad with close to 20 national and regional political reporters.

"I'm not saying everybody who is very, very angry [about immigration ] is a racist. I want to be very clear about that. But I've had conversations with people, and it became evident what they really didn't like is that people didn’t look like them, didn’t talk like them and didn't celebrate the holidays they do, and they just had a problem with it."

He said many politicians take advantage of that. "We've got people in my own state certainly that have used this as a way to fling red meat out at crowds," he said, without mentioning names.

Now in saying this, Huckabee was endorsing Bush's proposals of Monday evening and taking the big-business position against criminalizing undocumented immigrants, as the Republican House's ethnic-cleansing bill would do. So he's not taking a "liberal" position on this issue. Still, Huckabee is testing the waters to run to be the presidential nominee of the Christian Republican White People's Party. So his willingness to say explicitly that a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment is "driven by just sheer racism" is kind of like "evidence against interest" in court testimony. In other words, he's not likely to score any points with his party's hardline nativists or the Christian Right to labelling their xenophobia as "racist".

So if even a white Southern Republican governor can be this explicit about the bigotry of today's nativists, it would be silly for the rest of us to act as though we need to tippy-toe around that issue.

Nor do we need to worry about using weasal-words to acknowledge that not everyone concerned about the problem is acting out of racism or some other variety of bigotry. On the contrary, immigrant advocates have been pushing for a long time for a reasonable reform of the immigration situation. Immigrants themselves would obviously like to have an improved system, as would their relatives both here and in their home countries. As Tanker noted, states and localities are affected in the sense that they have to carry the financial burden of education, health and safety services for millions of immigrants without getting the same amount of tax revenue as from legal residents.

In general, taxes get collected from many undocumented immigrants. But in part because of federal revenue-sharing formulas, state and local governments wind up getting shortchanged on taxes collected. Though it's also pretty obvious that sales taxes on purchases by those millions of undocumented immigrants go to the states and localities just like those on the goods everyone else purchases.

My understanding is that the anti-immigrant sentiment shows as being higher in the polls in "heartland" states with relatively small numbers of immigrants than it is in states like California, Texas and Arizona with larger numbers. But the intensity factor tends to be greater in the high-immigration states - on both the nativist and pro-immigrant sides.

Mexican President Vicente Fox is visiting the US next week. The states of California, Washington and Utah are on his itenerary. According to Eileen Truax in La Opinión, Washington has 500,000 Mexican residents while Utah has 200,000. Truax says spefically "mexicanos", so one can only assume she is referring to Mexican citizens (both legal immigrants and otherwise), and not to American citizens of Mexican descent. But, of course, the estimated number of immigrants is very much an estimate because undocumented immigrants have an incentive not to identify themselves in surveys. The 11-12 million figure for the undocumented we've often seen in the press lately really is a guess.

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