Despite Flaws, Senate Immigration Bill is Worth Supporting

Written by Milton Fisk

While I never approved of the for-profit health insurance industry, I
eventually supported the Affordable Care Act. Nor do I now support
buying 400 miles of border fencing or the long waits for legal status
which the recently passed Senate immigration bill requires, even though
I would now support that bill. Not all support need be unqualified, and
mine in these cases is critical support.

Giving critical support is not an outcome of summing up our evaluations
of what we think are the positive and the negative features of a
proposal. We get a more reliable sense of the outcome of a proposal by
asking how its various features are likely to interact. A key element
in the immigration reform interaction will be the struggles sparked in
implementing the proposal. Will the positive features open enough space
for those they benefit and their allies to begin struggles against the
negative features?

The core of the Senate bill, which deals with undocumented immigrants
arriving before 2012, is a process with three stages. The first is
provisional residency with the right to work and travel without fear of
deportation. The second is permanent residency with the right to
means-tested benefits – like Medicaid and subsidies for private health
insurance – after five years as permanent resident. The third is
citizenship, which, with some exceptions, is available only 13 years
after receiving provisional residency. Each step is subject to income,
work, and fee requirements that many may fail to satisfy.

Each stage provides more protection for exercising rights. Even as
provisional residents, Immigrant workers will be less vulnerable. They
can protest unfair treatment without an employer’s threat to expose
them as undocumented. Support groups and unions can defend them on
grounds of worker rights. The Senate bill provides immigrant workers
protection from wrongful termination and withholding back pay. Of
course, employers will continue to use threats of dismissal, which if
carried out could ruin employees’ chances to advance to permanent
residency or citizenship. But such threats will not be as threatening
to workers with legal status.

This aspect of the Senate bill should encourage a trend toward
organizing for greater equality not just for labor organizing but also
for community organizing, principally in the cities.  Organizing around
transportation, schools, neighborhoods, and law enforcement should
integrate new voices when legal residency is not the issue. Over time,
this trend should give the immigrant community, working with its
allies, the strength it needs to begin to challenge the Senate bill’s
worst features.

The immigrant community will need this strength to ensure decent
treatment for immigrants arriving without documents after 2011. The
more heavily militarized border will still be porous. The Senate bill
simply kicks the can down the road.  Those who came before 2012 and
acquire legal status will become a force for weakening restrictions for
crossing the border on those who come later.

The treatment of blacks in the US also involved denying rights to a
people from elsewhere. The legal steps toward justice for blacks, taken
over the course of more than a century, were always partial. But each
step opened the way to a movement for greater equality at the next
step. Despite their limitations, those steps warranted critical
support.  In a parallel way, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 advanced
the trend toward health care justice despite its negative features. The
most striking way it did this was by expanding the single-payer domain
beyond Medicare to all those earning up to 138 percent of the Federal
Poverty Level. This now sets the stage for a movement to close the
remaining gap in single-payer coverage between 138 percent of FPL and
eligibility for Medicare.

Under the Senate bill on immigration, affluent immigrants will find it
easier than less affluent ones to satisfy many of the requirements for
residency and citizenship.  The requirements for fees, income,
language, education, and employment favor the better off.  Those who
entered the US before age 16 and have finished high school and either
two years of college or four years of the military – the DREAMers – can
get citizenship in less than half the time of others. Yet they are more
likely to come from more affluent backgrounds. Do these class biases
make the bill unsupportable?

In capitalist society, a bias favoring the more affluent enters into
most major legislative proposals.  Despite this, passing the Senate
immigration bill can lead to movements that remedy its own limitations,
thereby significantly lightening the burden of oppression on national
minorities.  Without actionable alternatives, failures to support
proposals like the Senate bill because of their negative features, and
in spite of their potential for encouraging positive movements, leads
in the direction of a total abstention from legislative politics.

In sum, the Senate bill deserves support for opening up several forms
of legal status to undocumented immigrants. It deserves criticism for
the numerous high hurdles it puts in the way of these forms of legal
status. It is regrettable that in a comprehensive bill like this many
features would, as stand-alone measures, deserve rejection. But those
who can get over the hurdles could, with their allies,  use their new
rights to lower those hurdles.

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