In the latest episode of the immigration reform saga, President Obama has decided … not to decide. From political point of view, it is easy to understand Obama’s inaction: when important policy decisions are subject to cycles of electoral politics, there are few incentives and strong disincentives to take action. As a panel of experts from the nonpartisan Scholars Strategy Network recently commented, inaction affects real people — Americans and immigrants — and creates opportunity for additional problems.
I wrote in that context that in the final analysis many aspects of the current immigration impasse are rooted in difficult tensions between our hearts and our wallets. At an emotional level, most Americans want national immigration policies that express who “we” are – either a tough-minded nation of laws or a welcoming nation of immigrants. But from an economic perspective, U.S. labor markets need workers for jobs that are not being filled by natives, and employers want to attract the best workers in the global competition for talent and innovation.
Wavering between heart and wallet — like any state of indecision — has real, long term costs. In addition to the suffering inflicted on Americans and immigrants who often are a part of the same communities, an indecisive approach to immigration and the tensions it creates introduces new distinctions in an already fractured society.
Consider from an historical perspective what the proliferation of people in temporary statuses means. After World War II, the United States and other Western countries mostly abandoned the use of ethnic criteria to select legal immigrants. Recently, many of those same nations, including the United States, have implemented temporary migration programs as a strategy to meet economic labor needs while preserving the imagined national community. Yet history reveals that temporary immigrants tend to overstay their legal status, and like undocumented arrivals who may or may not be temporarily exempted from deportation, they can end up with uncertain legal status. It is all too easy for a nation to accumulate more and more categories of immigrants who are less than full citizens. When our leaders refuse to take on the difficult problems of immigration or postpone action, the nation drifts in that direction.
If the United States pursues ever more contingent statuses for newcomers rather than viewing immigration as a step to a more permanent status — as had been the case historically — American society and democracy will be in for momentous and mostly undesirable shifts. Perpetually contingent relations between millions of less than fully documented migrants and their new home country will only bring more crises like the ones we have seen in recent years.
The United States urgently needs to work out a strategy to reconcile our hearts and our wallets. We need to find our way toward stable, wise decisions not dictated by cycles of partisan elections. Mr. Obama’s decision to postpone action — which is not unrelated to the House of Representatives’ abysmal failure and cynical politics in this domain — contributes to the formation of a class of people in uncertain status. Who will win and who will lose electorally is a question with an answer less settled than many believe. But we do know this: inaction that increases the number of people in vulnerable statuses will, almost certainly, hurt our democracy and our nation’s future economic prospects.
David Cook-Martín is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College and director of its Center for International Studies. He is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
The article is off-base in blaming the President. Sure, having large numbers of people in uncertain status is bad, but only Congress can resolve that uncertainty. A President cannot grant citizenship nor even permanent residency; he can only stay deportation, an action which a subsequent President could reverse with the stroke of a pen. There is a failure here, for sure, but it isn’t Obama’s/
Obama delayed action on immigration reform because he didn’t want to give the Republicans an issue that would energized their base in a mid- term election where they have a good chance of retaking the Senate. Now, the Democrats keeping the Senate may be a trivial matter in liberal academia but in the real world it’s pretty damned important.
Dumb article. The topic should be the cost of Republicans not passing immigration reform.
The tension living deep within American businessmen’s hearts, is really all about their wallet. They love money and hate paying it to the workers who earn it for them. A $15 minimum wage would take care of that.
When I saw the title, I thought great, finally somebody giving Obama hell for moving too slow on ebola. But, no, David Cook-Martín is upset about lack of action on immigration. Wait a sec. He’s actually blaming Obama when you have the most do-nothing House in US history AND demanding “stable, wise decisions” (which I think we can all get onboard with). Not to be deterred, he writes:
Let’s see, the US is now the third most populous country on earth after China and India. China’s illegal immigration problem is de minimus (North Koreans?), so the only comparison would be India, which at the high end, especially immigration from Bangladesh that Modi rails about, you’re looking at 20 million unregulated immigrants (out of a population of 1.3 billion). In the case of the US, top-end maybe 30 million out of 320 million. So yes, the US definitely has a more pressing problem. The problem is that you have about 250 million migrants on the move globally now. 10 million people in Syria alone are displaced, and you can imagine a situation where people in conflict zones or environmental disaster zones would try to get out of Dodge. Given that the US is no longer the real estate project it was in Jefferson’s day, it is hard to see why looking at the issue is so pressing. As FGS notes, a higher minimum wage would do wonders to regularize the employers that exploit inequity among economic opportunity immigrants. Also, what happened to the “brain drain?” Shouldn’t the US be trying to suck up all the global talent pool rather than trolling for cheap labor? And what happens when real resources need to be made available to real refugees like the Hmong, who were being exterminated? There are 7.3 billion people and all population growth is coming from the developing world. When you figure out how the line should work, then Obama can be accused of indecision.