Amy Traub

Compromising Away the Path to Citizenship

I've been critical of President Bush's immigration policy in the past, taking issue with both the President's misguided focus on militarizing the border and the ways that a guest worker program, like the one the President has proposed, would undermine the American middle class by providing a constant source of cheap and disempowered labor.

But throughout, the one positive point in President Bush's plan has been his recognition that the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States are a vital part of our nation's economy who must ultimately have some means to acheive citizenship. According to today's New York Times, that one positive point is now open to compromise. Or, as the Times put it, "One Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship."

What's left without a path to citizenship?

There's the House's draconian enforcement-only bill, which fails middle-class Americans by ineffectively trying to deport the millions of undocumented workers our economy depends on, while successfully driving these workers further into the shadows so that they will provide even more desperate and disempowered competition for U.S. workers in the labor market.

And there's a guest worker program which provides no hope of permanent legal status in the country, guaranteeing a permanently marginalized group of workers without the ability to stand up to workplace exploitation. I have argued that this is the general tendency of even the best guest worker programs, but a guest worker program which offers no prospect for every joining the mainstream of the American economy and American life does far more to create a permanent underclass. What's more, it provides no outlet at all for workers who are currently in the country illegally -- most of whom would, despite all enforcement efforts, remain working and competing with American workers under increasingly desperate conditions.

The President's compromise may or may not turn out to be good politics for Republican congressional candidates in 2006, but it's clear that it's bad for immigrants, and bad for the middle class.

Posted by Amy Traub at July 5, 2006 06:06 PM