IMMIGRATION

Political Fences

As the presidential election season gets under way, the issue of immigration is once again heating up -- as are right-wing efforts. This past week, conservative senators introduced a package of punitive immigration measures, an effort to "put pressure on the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to take a tougher stance on immigration." Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has already abandoned his efforts at comprehensive immigration reform in order to appease this constituency. Whoever the next president will be, he or she will also inherit the Bush administration's "fence to nowhere" -- a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico meant to appease the right wing -- and a horribly mismanaged federal immigration agency notorious for politically-motivated raids and an inexcusable backlog in citizenship applications.

RIGHT-WING POSTURING: On Wednesday, a dozen conservative senators introduced 15 hard-right immigration measures, including ones that would require jail time for undocumented immigrants "caught crossing the border, make it harder for them to open bank accounts and compel them to communicate in English when dealing with federal agencies." This package of bills poses a challenge for McCain, who previously led the push for comprehensive immigration reform, but has since switched positions. "I think they're basically handcuffing the Republicans' presidential nominee," said William Frey of the Brookings Institution. "He's either going to have to denounce these people, which he's not likely to do, or it's going to keep him from moving a little bit toward the center." In fact, McCain is likely to choose a third path: skip the votes entirely. Earlier this week, The Hill reported that McCain plans to "steer far away from his day job" in order to avoid "politically sensitive votes." Campaign adviser Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) confirmed that voting in the Senate is not "a high priority" for McCain, who has already missed at least 57 percent of the votes this session.

BORDERING ON A VIRTUAL DISASTER: One of the right wing's favorite "solutions" to undocumented immigration is the border fence between the United States and Mexico. On March 14, 2007, McCain lamented that undocumented immigrants were able to cross into Arizona because his state did not "have the fences and the barriers that they have in California and Texas." But both the actual and "virtual" border fences are a mess. In October 2006, Bush authorized the construction of a 700-mile fence at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now, however, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) construction plans are facing opposition from Texans who object to the fence cutting through their property. U.S. attorneys acting on behalf of the Bush administration have resorted to filing lawsuits against resisting landowners. Conveniently, the border fence in one small town would "abruptly end" at the property owned by Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt, who was a Bush-Cheney campaign "Pioneer" in 2000 and "donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush's presidential library." Meanwhile, the virtual fence -- a "sophisticated mix of radar, satellites, sensors and computers" -- is plagued by cost overruns and delays. According to the Arizona Republic, "The $20 million project was such a shambles that the government gave Boeing another $65 million in December to fix the glitches." The first phase was supposed be completed by the end of 2008, but will now take another three years. Last month, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared this project a success.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND INSECURITY: Yesterday, Bush and top DHS officials celebrated the five-year anniversary of the agency. The mismanagement of the border fence, however, is just the tip of the agency's abysmal record on immigration and emblematic of larger problems. (Of course, none of these details were mentioned in yesterday's festivities.) Center for American Progress Senior Fellow P.J. Crowley called the failure of the virtual fence "inevitable," the result of "an unrealistic and heavily politicized policy imperative...and poor management by the federal government's least experienced bureaucracy." In the past five years, the number of undocumented immigrants has risen, as have the number of deportations and arrests at work sites. After Tam Tran, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, was featured in an October 2007 USA Today article and testified before a House committee on immigration, federal officers forcibly arrested her family in the middle of the night. Tran's family was detained on a "years-old deportation order," even though they have been in regular communication with immigration officials for almost 20 years since arriving in the United States. This week at a House hearing, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) noted that children at immigrant detention facilities have reportedly been "put in cells alone for hours, awakened in the middle of the night with flashlights in their faces and threatened with being permanently separated from their parents." Chertoff, however, defended these raids and detentions. Despite anticipating a significant uptick in applications, DHS officials did nothing to increase staffing to meet the demand. Immigrants are also now suing DHS after being forced to wait for years with little or no information about the status of their citizenship applications.

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin
www.americanprogressaction.org