GUTS AND IMMIGRATION REFORM

GUTS AND IMMIGRATION REFORM
Chicago Tribune: It's impossible to predict with certainty what could have saved the 11 immigrants found dead inside a rail car in Denison, Iowa. Or the hundreds of other Mexican and Central American immigrants who die every year in the deserts of the Southwest, trying to make it into the United States to find work.
No one can say exactly what could have saved them. We do know, however, what couldn't save them: America's dysfunctional immigration system, which remains unchanged, trapped in politics and serving the interests of neither the country nor immigrants.
The Bush administration, which came into office talking grandly about overhauling the U.S. immigration system and establishing a new relationship with Mexico, quietly has shelved that part of the agenda, figuring there is no political payoff. Indeed, fear of terrorism -- and immigrants -- following the Sept. 11 attack, has made amnesty for illegal workers or other reforms look like political stink bombs for the Republicans.
An immigration reform proposal unveiled earlier this month by House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt looks like nothing but an obvious pre-election play for the votes of immigrants. Where has Gephardt been for the last year, two years, three years? Latino voters -- to whom Gephardt was throwing a last-minute political kiss -- shouldn't fall for something so transparent.
Economic repercussions
Stories of immigrants dying to get here to work are as tragic as they are ironic -- the U.S. economy needs them. It's hard to imagine the economic repercussions if the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in the Chicago area were deported. Or if the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants working nationwide were gone overnight.
Yet while the United States tacitly recognizes that -- and profits handsomely from illegal immigration -- proposals to deal with it honestly and rationally get trumped by politics and demagoguery.
The last census proved what everyone suspected. The population and economic prospects of large metropolitan areas like Chicago would have shrunk if it hadn't been for large influxes of immigrants, legal and illegal.
In Iowa, illegal Mexican labor has become essential to sectors such as agriculture and meat packing. Indeed, Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack two years ago proposed bringing in immigrants to stanch population declines in most of the state. Even in tiny Denison, banks and hospitals have hired translators and there's a Mexican grocery downtown.
To deal with this reality the federal government needs to bring illegal immigration out from the shadows, and work with Mexico to establish a system of guest workers that will provide needed labor in the U.S. while preventing abuses and even tragedies like the one in Iowa.
Keeping millions of illegal immigrants underground does not serve economic, national security or any other purposes. They are here, the country needs them and it's time to face that.