'Sensenbrenner immigration bill' creates more problems than it solves

An op ed column from the Sacramento, Calif. Bee says Rep. F. Jim Sensenbrenner's immigration bill makes a lot of sense if you are a career politician from suburban Wisconsin, but very little in a border state that actually has to deal with the illegal immigration issue:

Immigration fights undermine support for social services

By PETER SCHRAG

There's not much chance that HR 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Act that the House passed last Friday, will ever become law in its present form.

The bill is as unworkable as it's punitive, faces too much resistance from an almost unprecedented coalition of labor, business, church and civil rights groups and hasn't a prayer of solving the problem it pretends to address.

As wedge politics at a time of increasing concern over illegal immigration, it makes perfect sense. It carries more than a faint echo of California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 and his "they keep coming" re-election refrain in 1994. For a career pol like its sponsor, Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, who's held public office almost from the day he finished law school in 1968, and a scandal-plagued Congress, it may be perfect.

But in failing to deal with the country's appetite for cheap immigrant labor, or of addressing the complex problem presented by the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants -- many of them in families with millions of legal residents, many of them citizens -- the Sensenbrenner bill would create far more problems than it solves.

For two decades, the country has been toughening border enforcement, building more fences, adding thousands of Border Patrol agents and making it more costly and dangerous to cross. The result: Many more illegals, who were once part of the seasonal circuit _ north in spring, south in the late fall _ stay here permanently, sending for families and driving up an explosive growth in the illegal population, from roughly 4 million 15 years ago to today's 11 million.

Given the spike in Latino naturalization and voter registration in California-- almost all Democratic -- after the 1994 election, maybe a lot of the 239 House members who voted for Sensenbrenner's bill are expecting that the bill will be radically modified -- indeed, counting on it -- when the Senate takes it up next year.

For the past decade Republicans, led by George W. Bush, have been trying to repair the damage generated by Wilson and Proposition 187, the initiative that sought to deny schooling and virtually all public services to illegal immigrants. It's hardly news to say that Latinos represent a rapidly growing proportion of the electorate. California is no longer the dominant destination of Latino immigrants. They may now be settling even in Sensenbrenner's suburban Milwaukee district.

But Sensenbrenner's bill and the message it sends also ought to be a wake-up call for the left --not because the national backlash against immigration will result in mass deportations or in driving illegal immigrants still further underground and to the economic and social margins of American society, but because both the numbers and the backlash will make it ever more difficult to generate support for progressive public policy.

In the long run, the country benefits economically and culturally from immigration and always has. But given the nation's tax and public service structure, in the short run at least low wage immigrants put burdens on local and state social services -- schools particularly -- that their taxes don't pay for.

The taxes they pay -- Social Security in particular -- goes largely to the federal government, which is augmenting its budget with billions from illegal workers. The costs of emergency health and schools -- and the special challenges that immigrant kids represent -- goes largely to the states and local districts.

The left properly complains about the failure of retailers such as Wal-Mart to provide decent benefits, even encouraging employees to seek health care from Medi-Cal. But that's little different from -- and often identical with -- the larger cost shifting to taxpayers by virtually all employers of low wage workers. A sizable proportion of the lowest paid are illegal immigrants.

But the economic data -- always controversial -- aren't as important as the politics. Illegal immigrants are already denied most social services, including welfare and all but emergency health care, but the widespread belief that they suck up taxpayer dollars has enough evidence in the costs of schooling to support it.

The point, a point reinforced by a number of studies in other contexts, is that the more that the beneficiaries of social programs are perceived to be undeserving groups, the less likely those programs will get generous support. And illegal aliens, whether as code for Latinos or simply because they are people who are seen as having no legal right to be in this country, are prime candidates.

The more the recipients are perceived as "others," the less likely public services are to get strong public support. That perception overwhelms virtually all arguments that the nation's future, and California's particularly, will largely depend on the skills of those others.

The only solution to the immigration problem is a combination of a reliable identification system, tougher enforcement of employer sanctions and labor laws, a guest worker program and measures to allow the illegals who are already here to come out of the shadows. The Sensenbrenner bill is a measure of the fever; it is not a remedy.