/s. The title is sarcasm. This post isn’t about explaining U.S. immigration policy. It’s about giving up trying to understand it, let alone explain it.
U.S. immigration policy is a stew cooked from ancient and modern quotas, agribusiness needs, humanitarian concerns, special exceptions, vestigial ethnic, racial, and religious bias, aftermath-of-war, left-over anti-communism, workforce shortages, national security issues …you name it.
It’s a dish where everybody gets to toss in an ingredient. Or maybe everybody who can pay to play gets to. It’s hard to tell.
Policy consists of turning a blind eye to the results, until it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.
And by “blind eye”, I don’t mean merely pretending that those folks don’t exist. Although there’s plenty of that.
It’s knowing they are there, and dismissing it with a shrug. Ever wonder why they don’t just impose stiff fines on the businesses who hire illegal aliens? I mean, putting all the right-wing nonsense aside, if nobody would hire you, there wouldn’t be much incentive to immigrate here illegally, would there?
Ponder this: About 44% of paid U.S. crop workers are illegal aliens.
Who says so, and how do they know? Who says that so many agribusinesses engage in such a gross violation of Federal law? The Federal government does. That’s straight out of the U.S. Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey. (From their 2019-2020 survey results summary, available as a .pdf at this link.) And that’s the percent of folks who were willing to be interviewed, and willing to admit that they lacked legal status to work in the U.S. But that’s after excluding all workers under H-2A temporary agricultural worker visas, from the sampling frame, to begin with.)
So it’s not as if this is some unknown, unquantifiable practice. It’s an integral part of the U.S. food supply. It continues because in normal times, nobody is quite crazy enough to try to disrupt that without having something else ready to take its place.
Which, needless to say, we ain’t got.
For the past few decades, the “politically expedient to do otherwise” periods seem to occur just after peaks in immigration.
And since we’re having a peak now, you’d expect another round of doing something about it. Beyond the billion or two we’ve been spending each year, now, to fix the worst holes in the Mexican border.
And so, I finally arrive at the cause of this particular screed.
By report, a large majority of U.S. Senators are on board with beefing up security at the Mexican border. Among other things.
But it sure looks like nothing will happen, because the Republican candidate for President sees it as too good a political issue to allow it to be solved on somebody else’s watch (reference). And as an added bonus, we can make Putin happy by hanging Ukraine out to dry. As part of our non-action on this issue. And the Governor of Texas can defy the U.S. Supreme Court, with impunity. Ah, that’s an overstatement, but it’s close enough. Narrowlly construed, I think the Court ruling merely means that the Border Patrol can continue to remove the razor wire that gets in the way of them doing their jobs, even as the Texas National Guard continues to lay more razor wire. Not because it makes sense, or is effective. But because that’s unbeatable political theater.
This is U.S. immigration policy? Yep, it’s what passes for it, in the current situation.
Define U.S. immigration policy? Apparently, it’s whatever the Republican executives want it to be. Nothing more and nothing less.
Maybe I see the past through rose-colored glasses. Maybe it’s because I spent a decade working for a U.S. legislative-branch agency, and ended up with a lot of respect for then- members of Congress. But I swear that the U.S. Congress didn’t used to be anywhere near this screwed up.
