Is the Immigration Debate Over?

The San Francisco Chronicle presented two OpEd columns today that give two very different positions on the issue of Immigration.

In the first, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, tells us that Supporters of open borders have lost on that issue.

Republican candidates must risk angering their base by ruling out mass deportation. Democrats should support closing the border tightly and quickly - and not cave in to open-borders pressure groups.

Making these tough choices now is what most voters want. The candidates of both parties in the next few months will either adjust accordingly or lose elections.

In the other column, Roberto Lovato of New American Media, believes that the McCain win puts the Latino Vote back in play.

During the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush's Spanish-language appeals and promises of immigration reform won him somewhere between 37 to 44 percent of the Latino vote, a major increase from what he got in 2000.

So, the Latino vote is not something that Democrats can count on if McCain runs. However, McCain is probably the only Republican Candidate about whom that statement could be made.

But when Democrats are evasive - as in Clinton's driver's license flip-flop or when Obama vacillated after being asked by Univision anchors about his vote for the border fence - I see the moral and political opening exploited by Bush in 2004, and McCain before 2008. My father and most Latinos reject the wall as a muro de la muerte (wall of death). That the immigration debate merits neither Clinton's attention nor Obama's abundant rhetorical powers explains Latinos' frustration (documented in the recent Pew Hispanic poll) and leaves many of us outside the wave of Obama-mania.

Our Green candidates need to make it clear that we understand that the solution to these problems lies not in fences and deportation but rather in allowing Mexico and other national economies to grow, to not saddle them with so-called free trade pacts whose effects are so obviously one sided.

The immigration debate is not over. Greens have a unique message. It is not about protecting American jobs or even our fighting the worlds terrorists by building a muro de la muerte. It is about allowing all people to fulfill their own destinies, to build their own economic future without having American consumerism crammed down their throats.

Immigration Reform, good for whom?

The most recent "agreement" on immigration reform is, notably, between Senators. It is not a done deal in it's present form. It still has to go before the house of representatives and we have not heard Pelosi comment on the actual form that this is taking. That serves as a lead to make several comments that are tied together only be the fact that they involve immigration.

For starters, you get an entirely different view of the issues on immigration is you pick up media aimed at the Indian immigrants. The May 2007 edition of India Currents gives us a Point / Counterpoint discussion on the question: Is loosening up of numerical limits desirable? Captions tell the story:

The H-1B cap is not preserving the wages of U.S. employees; rather, the jobs are being permanently moved to India!
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According to a Duke University study, immigrants founded 25 percent of the engineering an technology companies created in the last 10 years.

Next, since the new reformed immigration package would greatly expand the number of "guest workers" allowed to enter the United States, there is very real need to address the abusive practices of labor contractors. The United Farm Workers, obviously, sees the Union as the appropriate tool to do this. This morning, they emailed me a copy of their labor contractor action page. Unless this is solved, we have only moved the issue of human rights to a different context, we have not solved it.

In California politics, immigration is a big issue and often for the wrong (repressive) reasons. Orange County Representative Dana Rohrabacher has already been quoted (Costa Mesa Daily Pilot) as seeing the bill feeding an anti-Democratic backlash in the next election.

The battle over immigration is far from over and Greens need to be able to articulate a clear position, based firmly on the 10 key values of this party. Everyone who might think about spending time in any tabling or voter registration efforts should make sure that they understand the recent reform bill and to be able to discuss this bill in light of the current platform.