Painful as it may be, enforce immigration laws equally

We believe Congress had an obligation to enact an immigration reform bill that would have allowed this nation to provide for the orderly transition from a haphazard policy to a realistic one.

For a number of reasons, that didn’t happen. A side note: It was interesting to hear outgoing presidential adviser Karl Rove on the Sunday morning talk shows blaming Democrats for the failure of President Bush’s immigration reform initiative. Clearly, the bill was scuttled after Republicans refused to support President Bush’s proposal.

But regardless of the politics of why immigration reform wasn’t passed or who gets the blame or credit (talk radio, for instance, is more than happy to take the credit), the fact remains that for the foreseeable future, there will be no reform bill. Which leaves the administration with only one option: Enforce the nation’s immigration laws as they stand.

Hit them where they work

A particularly effective part of the nation’s immigration laws deal with preventing the employment of illegal aliens. It is not a difficult provision to enforce.

The law says that employers mayh only hire citizens or legal immigrants and proscribes those documents that are acceptable proof of legal residency. This is nothing new. Employers have been required to have copies of these documents on file for new hires for decades. But over the years, some employers have become lax and some employees have gotten better at fooling their prospective employers with falsified documents.

The administration has announced that it will toughen enforcement of existing laws. It threatened steeper penalties against employers and more vigorous worksite inspections.

That sounds like a good plan, but as in all plans, the proof of its value will be in the breadth of its enforcement and in the willingness of the public to accept its consequences.

The image presented by advocates for stiffer immigration reform is that of a crackdown on largely Hispanic immigrants who, the story goes, defy Americanization. But the enforcement of immigration law cannot be based on whether the violators have made a sufficient effort to Americanize or not.

And illegal immigrants aren’t all Hispanic. Slightly more than half of the nation’s illegal immigration is from Latin American countries. That leaves slightly less than half from other areas of the world.

It must be comprehensive

If immigration agents are going to crack down on employers, they are going to have to look beyond the farms of the South and West. They are going to have to look all over the country. At packing houses, at hotels, and cab stands, trendy bars and pubs, construction sites, big-box stores, office buildings, day care centers. And at airports, especially at airports.

One of the most famous illegal immigrants of the day, Elvira Arellano, had been deported once, re-entered the country and was working cleaning airplanes at O’Hare International Airport when she was arrested. She spent a year in a Chicago church, claiming sanctuary, making headlines along the way.

How many other people who work on airplanes are illegal immigrants? And while the vast majority just want to earn a living, the fact remains that it makes little sense to search a grandmother from Des Moines before letting her board an airplane if the cleaning crew given free access to that plane are illegal aliens.

Enforcing the nation’s immigration laws and denying jobs to illegal immigrants will have the effect of driving some of those immigrants out of the United States. Of course, the only ones it will affect are those who have been making an effort to work and have been providing a service of one kind or another. Immigrants who have turned to a life of crime won’t have to worry getting picked up in a sweep of a chicken processing plant or tomato field.

There are already reports of vegetables rotting in fields and fruit going unpicked in orchards and of unmilked cows suffering in barns in some states. Other segments of the economy that have been relying on immigrant labor — legal and illegal — will be forced to get by with fewer workers.

Prices will go up or quality of service will go down or there will be a combination of both.

But that’s the price Americans have said they are willing to pay. At least it is what Congress apparently thought they were saying when it abandoned its responsibility to pass an immigration reform bill.