Financial Times Editorial Comment: Immigration mess

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Immigration mess
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: May 9 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 9 2007 03:00


Senate leaders from both parties have been in talks with the White House for weeks over immigration reform, one of the most bitterly contested issues in Washington and in the country at large. In public, the president says a deal can still be done on comprehensive reform. In private, so far as that ambitious goal is concerned, everybody seems reconciled to failure. The American electorate is left confused and concerned, and in the vacuum individual states are making policy (mostly bad policy) on their own.

Lest anyone forgets, America needs the millions of illegal immigrants who live there. The US is not a place where unskilled immigrants can idle their days away while living large on handouts. They are hard at work, doing jobs that Americans do not want. If they could be sent home tomorrow, the dislocation would be immense. In that scenario - which many American politicians affect to regard as the ideal outcome, if only it could be done - the country really would have something to worry about. It is no use promising to enforce a law that is unenforceable, and that you would not wish to see enforced even if it could be. Some of the "tough" proposals now being floated on Capitol Hill fall squarely into that self-delusional category.

George W. Bush's proposed re-form, apparently now abandoned as too soft, sought to give many existing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, to make it easier for future immigrants to live temporarily in the US as guest workers, and to police the new rules more effectively. All in all, it was a good plan. Moving to appease those who call for a tougher stance, the White House has lately talked of charging guest workers punitive fees for their permits, and of sending them home for extended intervals. That would work about as well as the present regime: it would look tough and be widely ignored, while failing to put immigrants on a sounder legal footing.

Policy on the immigration of skilled workers is no less self-defeating - perhaps more so, since illegal immigration offers no vent to demand. Annual visa quotas are filled in weeks, and America then turns away highly trained, hard-working and ambitious people from all over the world, who would otherwise play their part in strengthening the economy and helping to pay down the budget deficit. In some cases, American firms are taking jobs to them, through high-tech offshoring, because they cannot bring the workers to the jobs. Altogether, what a sad and stupid way for a nation of immigrants to be conducting itself.