Immigration Clearinghouse

WASHINGTON – At a recent meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, lawmakers implored Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to make sure new passport requirements don’t get in the way of French-Canadian grandparents crossing the U.S.-Canadian border to visit their grandchildren.

There was no mention of how those new rules might hurt Mexican grandparents trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border to visit their grandkids in Arizona, California, New Mexico or Texas.

“There’s been very much a double standard in dealing with the two borders,” said Jim Kolbe, the former Republican congressman who represented the Tucson border area for more than 20 years and is considered an expert on immigration issues. He said Northern border residents would be “aghast” if the federal government erected the kind of fences and barricades there that line the Southwestern border.

That double standard could come into play as President Barack Obama and Congress look to take on immigration reform this year or early next.

Experts say the different treatment stems in part from economic reality. Canadians, unlike Mexicans, have not endured the kind of poverty that drives immigrants to cross the Southwestern border illegally in search of jobs. Last year, officials apprehended 723,840 people trying to enter the country illegally. Nearly 662,000 were from Mexico; 610 were from Canada.

But there also has been a perception, refuted by Homeland Security officials, that nothing bad is going to come across our border with Canada, where the lifestyles and appearance of the residents often mirror those of middle-class Ameri- cans.

In truth, there is growing drug-related violence in Vancouver near the U.S.-Canadian border, where drug-dealing gangs caught up in a turf war have killed several high-school students this year and gunned down a 23-year-old mother as she was driving. Her 4-year-old son was in the car.

But that violence has not garnered the same attention as the drug-cartel killings along the U.S.-Mexican border.

“Every time I mention that there is a gun and a drug problem along the Canadian border, people are incredulous,” said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. “They don’t believe me.”

This year, Northern border residents are being forced to think of their border as “a real border” for the first time because of federal efforts to beef up security to keep out terrorists. That realization, which Napolitano called a big “culture change” for the North, is spurring lawmakers far from Arizona to take a new interest in border issues just as Congress is trying to tackle comprehensive immigration reform.

“I think the Northern border members have had a wake-up call,” Van Schoik said. They are now beginning to realize how much border security and immigration legislation can affect them and are taking a bigger interest in the debate, he said.

Equal borders?

When the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative took effect this summer, requiring U.S. citizens for the first time to show passports or passport cards to re-enter the United States from Canada or Mexico, it was one of the few times when a new law treated both borders equally.

Enforcement has focused largely on the Southwestern border, where a fence more than 600 miles long has been erected. There are about 10 times as many Border Patrol agents guarding the nearly 2,000-mile Southwestern border as the nearly 4,000-mile northern border.

“People have been used to going back and forth across that (northern) border pretty easily as if it were not a real border,” said Napolitano, Arizona’s former governor. “I think it’s fair to say that, that (new passport requirement) is a big change for that area of the country.”

Another factor making Northern lawmakers more sympathetic to the concerns of their Southwestern counterparts is that immigrants from Latin America are increasingly making their way into the Midwest, North and Deep South to find work.

“The immigrant experience is now being felt in almost all parts of the country,” said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “Places that have not been traditional destinations are seeing immigration. As a result, there are people in Congress who are active in the immigration debate who never would have been before.”

The debate now includes New Yorkers pushing for guest-worker programs to ensure that apple farmers get help from immigrants to pick their crops and Vermonters seeking year-round visas for Mexican and Central American immigrants to work on dairy farms.

“I hope that some who have stood in opposition to sensible immigration reform will recognize that hard-working farmers and their communities are as much the victims of their misguided obstructionism as are the immigrants they seek to punish,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urging reform in part to help his state’s struggling dairy farmers.

New proponents

Most Northern border lawmakers supported efforts in 2006 and 2007 to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The measures stalled in the House because of opposition from Southwestern and Midwestern members who thought they were not tough enough on border enforcement.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is working on immigration-reform legislation that he hopes to introduce this year. He has taken pains to court the upstate New York farmers who increasingly need immigrant labor to pick their crops and milk their cows.

At a recent hearing of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on immigration, Schumer, who chairs the panel, reached out to Southwestern border lawmakers.

Turning to Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Schumer said senators from both border regions share “long and rich histories of welcoming immigrants from all over the world.”

“I hope that my colleagues will agree to work together to capitalize on areas on consensus rather than exploit areas of disagreement,” Schumer said.

Kolbe said he finds it amusing that Northern lawmakers suddenly care about issues such as balancing security and commerce at the border.

“They’re suddenly facing up to the some of the same difficulties we’ve faced up to for years and years,” he said. “When we brought up these issues, they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s not our problem.’ Well, now it is.”

SOURCE

REMEMBER WHEN STATE and local officials couldn’t wait to get their 15 minutes of fame by cracking down on illegal immigration? Well, thank goodness, that trend might be coming to an end — in part because of the economic crisis.

According to a recent article in USA Today, some of these saber-rattlers have lost their appetite, moved on to other issues, or simply confronted the economic reality that local enforcement measures cost money — something that is suddenly in short supply. Others figured out that one consequence of tackling the immigration issue locally is that you foster divisions and wind up — in the words of one local official quoted in the article — “pitting neighbor against neighbor.” Still others are concerned about negative publicity or the cost of fighting legal challenges — especially at a time when, as another local official put it, “we don’t know whether illegal immigration is a financial plus or minus.”

If such a trend is developing, it would be quite a departure from what occurred during the great immigration scare of the last few years. You’ll recall how many state legislators, mayors and city council members, county supervisors and sheriffs — just about anyone who stood for re-election and wanted to distract voters from other issues — used the presence of illegal immigrants as a way to establish their toughness bona fides.

Meanwhile, the local crackdowns the politicians proposed must have been terribly confusing to the illegal immigrants, given that, in their view, these places invited them in by offering them jobs. Then they want them out? And, when some leave — either to neighboring states or back to their own countries — employers want them back? In Arizona and Colorado, where lawmakers tried to make their states inhospitable to illegal immigrants, they’re now devising plans for their own labor agreements with Mexico.

Many of the efforts were so clumsy and imprecise that they seemed aimed at all foreigners in general. As such, they appeared to be motivated less by a desire to enforce the law than a desperation to turn back the clock and return communities to what they were before the latest immigrants arrived.

A prime example is any law or ordinance that declares English the official language of a city or state. That has nothing to do with securing the border or running off illegal immigrants.

It’s about making English-speakers feel comfortable amid changing demographics. In Iowa, lawmakers declared English the state’s official language and required that most government documents be printed solely in English. Democratic state Rep. Bruce Hunter now wants to repeal the law because he thinks it sends “the wrong message about the state of Iowa.”

There was similar concern in the small town of Oak Point, Texas, about 35 miles north of Dallas. The town adopted an English-only resolution in 2007 — only to rescind the measure a year later amid worries about negative publicity.

In both Utah and Alabama, officials have tried to tone down or delay implementing laws that crack down on those who hire illegal immigrants.

At a time when states are hurting financially and desperate to keep businesses from relocating elsewhere, anything that might scare off companies risks being tossed overboard.

Something similar happened in Arizona, where voters recently passed a ballot initiative to soften one of the toughest employer-sanction laws in the country. Whereas employers previously could lose their business license for repeatedly hiring illegal immigrants, now that only happens if they “knowingly” do so.

And so, in what has to be seen as a positive development, more and more local officials seem eager to put the illegal immigration issue back where it belongs — in the hands of federal authorities.

That’s the point. Just because you don’t think that English-only laws should be mixed up with immigration reform doesn’t mean you support an open border.

We should be tough on illegal immigration. We should speed up deportations, continue workplace raids, stiffen penalties for smugglers, crack down on employers, create a tamper-proof ID card for employees, and give the Border Patrol agents on the front lines the tools they need to do their jobs.

We should do all that and more — as long as we do it at the federal level.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.