Late last September it looked like so-called immigration reform, a veiled attempt to deny immigrants' rights, was finally dead. The sweeping law that had aroused passion and prejudice, that Congress had debated, revised, and fought over for some three years, was quietly put to rest by a procedural motion. Then, less than two weeks later, the bill was passed by the House of Representatives. A month later President Reagan signed it into law.
A primary reason for the law's resurrection: calls and letters to members of Congress from constituents who complained about increasing crime, violence, and drugs along the U.S.-Mexico border and who said they were scared for their safety, their jobs, and their children.
Last November an initiative to make English the "official" state language in California passed with an overwhelming 74 percent of the vote. USENGLISH, a 260,000-member national organization, played on age-old pride, fear, and resentment against immigrants to garner the support of millions - including many Californians of Hispanic descent - for Proposition 63. The law threatens to eliminate bilingual state services for some two million California residents and drastically curtail the state's bilingual education program, which serves almost 600,000 children.
Meanwhile, residents in Texas' Rio Grande Valley were working to keep Central American refugees out of their towns and neighborhoods. Their complaints forced Casa Romero, a four-year-old shelter for refugees operated by the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, to close its doors temporarily. When church officials began trying to relocate the shelter, residents mounted another campaign, symbolized by a drawing of a house with a slash through it, next to the words "Casa Romero No!"
Such finely orchestrated persecution and oppression of the strangers in our land are not limited to California and Texas, or to Congress and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. USENGLISH officials report that at least 20 state legislatures are considering similar laws.
Nor is such xenophobic hysteria anything new. The scapegoating, persecution, and ostracism of ethnic minorities have been a common American reaction to economic, political, and social instability. In the 1880s Chinese immigrants were targeted; Mexicans were deported en masse during the Great Depression; and the Japanese were incarcerated during World War II.
Now, with structural changes in the U.S. economy throwing millions of middle- and working-class laborers out of work, and downward economic mobility the national norm rather than the exception, the government and U.S. employers are once again in need of a vulnerable scapegoat on which to blame the nation's political and economic problems. And the workers who are struggling to get or keep their jobs see immigrants as threats to their livelihood.
Throughout U.S. history, immigration policies, both governmental and societal, have fluctuated like crude economic and political indicators - as if the human rights of immigrants are measured by the unemployment rate or the "official" language; as if only card-carrying Americans deserve the opportunity to live in peace and make a decent living; as if we have rejected our own immigrant histories. Such attitudes and practices have influenced U.S. immigration policy for decades. But only recently have they actually been incorporated into law, now aimed primarily at Hispanics and the so-called "brown tide" of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the United States enters a new era of immigration policy. The law formally creates a society of documented, legal persons and undocumented, "illegal" persons, and it employs frighteningly comprehensive methods to control and regulate both classes. The major provisions of the law cover employment and amnesty, and they provide for a dramatic increase in the size and jurisdiction of the INS.
Under the new law, all new job applicants must fill out a government form certifying their citizenship or other authorization to work in the United States and provide supporting documentation. Employers must verify the citizenship status of all new employees within 24 hours after they are hired, and employers who hire undocumented immigrants are subject to civil fines.
Some critics of the law see this provision as a first step toward a national identification card. In practice the provision constitutes a labor "pass law" and will likely result in discrimination against Hispanics and other "foreign-looking" job applicants.
Another provision of the law allows agricultural employers to hire a total of 350,000 foreign farm workers for no more than nine months a year. However, the law provides no means for legalization of those workers. Therefore, it enables employers to exploit immigrant labor by providing extremely low wages and horrible working conditions, while denying laborers basic human and constitutional rights.
Supporters of the law point to its amnesty provision as a major gift to immigrants, a first step toward citizenship for millions. However, because of the specific rules that determine eligibility for amnesty, it is likely that the number of immigrants who do not qualify for amnesty will be far greater than those who do. And the situation of those who do not qualify will be worse than ever under the new law. It will be harder for them to find and keep work, and without work they will not be able to survive.
For example, amnesty is available only to those who have maintained "continuous" residence in the United States since before January 1, 1982. More than half of the estimated six million to 10 million undocumented immigrants arrived after 1982, and many immigrants have left the United States for more than 30 consecutive days.
Immigrants seeking amnesty must also provide substantial paperwork to prove their length of residence. Yet many of these people, who have been forced to live in the shadows, cannot produce such paperwork. Proposed application fees of $100 to $250 per applicant will deny amnesty to millions. Some immigrant families would have to pay $1,000 or more. Other eligibility requirements disqualify immigrants who have received public assistance and those who have criminal records.
THE NATION'S NEW IMMIGRATION policy, like the old ones, does nothing to address the causes of immigration, the reasons why people come here. Yet many of the causes, such as war, repressive military governments, and abject poverty, are created by U.S. foreign military and economic policies. As always the new immigration policy is designed to protect what we have, to the exclusion of others. And like so many other U.S. policies, it is based on a fallacy, the notion that our prosperity is self-made and that we have rights that other citizens of the world, other children of God, do not have, simply because we were born here. The new law raises the question of how far we are willing to go to protect what we have, to preserve our opulent way of life.
The answer is up to us, we who are also strangers in the land, and the answer is provided in scripture. "When aliens live in your land, do not mistreat them," Leviticus 19 reads. "The aliens living with you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt."
Vicki Kemper was new editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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