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MY POV - When White supremacists marched at Charlottesville with accompanying counterprotests, President Trump infamously remarked that there were “good people on both sides.”
Among all those involved in the immigration raids in Los Angeles, including law enforcement, the protesters, the rioters, and the looters, it should be fairly non-controversial to say that there are “bad people on both sides.” And if we broaden the circle to include politicians on all sides of the aisle, many of whom have been (to paraphrase Swedish writer Jan Guillou) “opinion-shitting like a Canada goose,” then we will find enough hypocrisy to go around for decades, in fact, so much so that if you were to write the word “hypocrisy” in 20 point type for each instance and lined it up, with or without a space in between, you would have a string of words long enough to reach from LA City Hall to Piscataway, NJ and back again.
Let’s start with some of the most obvious nuggets of nonsense that have come to the forefront during the recent raids and riots.
“Abolish ICE. Abolish DHS.”
While some people may not like how our immigration laws are being enforced, no, we’re not going (to) eliminate immigration and customs enforcement. We’re not going to eliminate the department of homeland security, and we’re not going to suddenly adopt an open borders policy.
Not going to happen any more than we’re going to “abolish the police” (though it seems that a lot of the same people who were crying the loudest about abolishing the police are the same people who think there should be no immigration enforcement or border security).
Then we have people like former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who issued a statement: “It is time to do what is right for our country and state. Undocumented people who are here for a number of years, have been contributing to our communities and our economy, and have no criminal record deserve a pathway to citizenship. I encourage our leaders to have a meaningful discussion to make this a reality.”
Rick Caruso seems like a really good guy, but if this statement sounds like a politician running for office, it may well be, and there is some very flawed thinking behind it that needs to be brought to light.
While many of us have enormous sympathy with our neighbors who may be here illegally, rewarding them with a pathway to citizenship is, simply stated, very bad policy in general. Problem is, if you do this across the board, you have given up the border and sent the message to all those who are playing by the rules, that not following the rules is a better option. It’s not only bad policy; it’s a bad message to send to all those who might want to immigrate to this country legally.
Amnesties with no consequences can only encourage others to break our immigration laws, leading to a vicious circle of illegal immigration.
We can only begin to think about various pathways to legalization if we secure the border. In some cases, border walls may be useful to stem the tide against illegal immigration, but there are even better tools, tools we refuse to use such as E-Verify, a DHS website that effectively allows employers to determine whether their employees are eligible to work in the US.
After some initial teething problems, E-Verify has both become reliable and efficient. If all employers would use E-Verify, only those actually authorized to work in this country would be able to work here. That would almost certainly stem the tide of illegal immigration to a trickle, at worst.
Only problem is that despite this extremely efficient system to determine employee eligibility, E-Verify is only required within the federal government and for federal contractors, but it is not mandatory in most states, and where it is mandatory it often is not actually used. Of course, E-Verify is not mandatory in California, but neither is it mandatory in Texas, a state that likes to brag about how it is tough on illegal immigration. It seems that Texas’s tough talk about immigration enforcement - despite their penchant for walls - is all hat and no cattle.
The problem is that there are people on both sides of the aisle who clearly want illegal immigration to continue with a wink and a nod. Labor unions used to oppose uncontrolled immigration, as it hurt their members’ position in the labor market, but they allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by a Democratic party that assumed new immigrant workers would be new and loyal Democratic voters. Now many union members are undocumented themselves, so unions can’t very well demand enhanced immigration enforcement, even if new undocumented workers would have the biggest impact in undercutting their current membership within the labor market.
While there are Republicans who clearly support border security and adherence to immigration laws, there are also many corporatist Republicans who love the steady supply of cheap labor when the immigration floodgates are opened and/or ignored.
Both sides are complicit in accepting a broken system, which is why mandatory E-Verify isn’t being introduced in Texas, let alone the whole country. As Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a DC think-tank that garnered notoriety in the past because its funding from state-sponsor of terrorism, Qatar, noted: expanding E-Verify is “not really in anybody’s interest.”
It’s not really in anybody’s interest unless, of course, they care about actually enforcing our laws.
It’s not really in anybody’s interest unless they recognize that, yes, we are a nation of immigrants, but also a nation of laws (and hopefully fairness).
It’s not really in anybody’s interest unless they want to fix our system so that the government is no longer in the business of charades.
The fact that these various groups are trying to use immigration to feed a spiral of interminable and unsustainable growth and a discussion of whether Ponzinomics is good for the country and the planet are subjects for another day.
Even assuming we can fix our broken immigration system and end the game-playing, we should distinguish between those who followed the rules and those who did not. At a US Conference of Mayors meeting several years ago when Obama was president, after a session on our immigration system, I brought this up with representatives from the administration.
With the implementation of mandatory E-Verify and securing the border, I suggested that people who are here illegally may (if they haven’t broken any other laws) merit a pathway to legal residency status, but that pathways to citizenship should be reserved for those who actually played by the rules. The exception would be the “dreamers,” i.e. people who were brought to this country illegally by their parents and who didn’t themselves make a choice to enter the country illegally.
The Obama staffers I spoke with at the time seemed to think that this would be a reasonable compromise. All these years later, nothing has happened, our immigration system is still broken, and we are refusing to use the best tools available to stop illegal immigration.
Expanding E-Verify is actually in all of our interests, as is a functioning immigration system, one that is not based on game-playing and charades. The time has come to hash out sensible and nuanced compromises that would lead to an immigration system in which the deplorable raids and riots in our part of the country would never have happened in the first place.
(John Mirisch was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 2009, and has served three terms as mayor. He is currently the city’s Vice Mayor. John is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com.)
