Immigration Reform in the National Interest: An Audacious and Unnecessary "Grand Plan"

By Stanley Renshon and Stanley Renshon on April 18, 2013

The so-called "Gang of Eight" senators have released their plan for "comprehensive immigration reform" — The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. A comprehensive immigration bill, if enacted, would constitute, for better or worse, the most fundamental change to American immigration law since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act).

The new bill will attempt to address a number of highly complex and contentious immigration policy areas, including: adjusting the relative weight of work skills and family reunification preferences; providing for a sufficient number of low-skill immigrants to allow businesses to have a reliable source of labor; increasing the number of immigrants with technological skills for businesses that rely on them; implementing a program that ensures American businesses will only be able to hire those legally able to work in the United States; adjusting the status of approximately 11-12 million illegal aliens now living and working in the United States; ensuring that former illegal aliens take steps to become integrated into the American national community by learning English and taking other steps; ensuring the southern American border is secure; developing and implementing a system that allows the government to track the entry and exits of foreign visitors; and reducing the backlog of those who are awaiting a immigration spot because of various preference ceilings and geographical quotas.

This is a breathtakingly expansive list of social, economic, and political engineering initiatives. Adding to the policy audacity of the effort is the fact that the legislation has already been, and will continue to be, substantially shaped by the most elemental forces of political calculation and relative power.

In the words of one report, "The legislation would have a far-reaching impact on virtually every corner of the American economy", and is "ambitious in its scope". Yet, surprisingly, only two congressional hearings have been scheduled so far to examine this vast social, political, and economic experiment.

Also surprising is that this new massive immigration legislative effort is not required by any obvious national emergency, such as the economy's liquidity problem in 2008 or the terrorist attacks on 9/11. America's immigration problems developed slowly over time and have now been given political impetus by a president looking for legacy legislation and an opposition party driven by electoral panic fueled by a poor showing among Hispanic-origin groups in the 2012 presidential election.

There is no real immigration crisis; but there is legislative policy momentum driven by presidential ambition and the possibility of political gains that both sides of the aisle hope to gain. This is not the same as sound policy.

It is simply prudent to approach massive social-engineering legislation with caution and care. One major problem with it is that large-scale government solutions often do not work as intended, and worse still are likely to have both foreseen and unintended consequences.

The most recent example of this is the Affordable Care Act, sometimes called ObamaCare. It amply demonstrates that the federal government, and this particular administration, have not proved adept at either designing or implementing such massive and far-reaching policy initiatives.

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President Obama's health care legislation can be faulted for the rushed and highly political nature of the process that brought it into being. However, the problems that have, and will continue to surround this legislation, are not entirely the fault of the process the administration chose to pursue. Given the administration's effort to shape the enormous array of the nation's heath care choices, made every day by hundreds of millions of different kinds of people, through legislation that few read and fewer understood, it is not surprising that things are not going according to plan.

There is a large element of ambition unrestrained by prudence in such legislative efforts, and it is unlikely that comprehensive immigration reform will escape them, much to our likely regret further down the road.

With no actual immigration crisis, except the one ramped up by those wishing to benefit from the perception of it, real reform could be considered in a more substantive, less tendentious way, and stand a real chance of finding common group and public agreement.

In the posts that follow in this series, I hope to provide a way forward to find that common ground.

Next: The Jordan Commission vs. the "Gang of Eight"