New Yorker
By William Finnegan
May 9, 2013
The long-awaited immigration-reform bill written by the haplessly named Gang of Eight in the United States Senate got buried this week, not unexpectedly, by a great mudslide of amendments—more than three hundred, at last count. The bill was eight hundred and forty-four pages to begin with. Some of the amendments were sensible and humane—Senator Patrick Leahy’s suggestion that the legislation include same-sex marriage in its definition of family, for instance. Many were malicious. Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, proposed that anyone who had ever lived illegally in the U.S. be barred for life from U.S. citizenship. The primary purpose of this overhaul, of course, is to offer the eleven million people believed to be living here illegally the chance to become legal—to give those who qualify a “pathway to citizenship.”
Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, who introduced seventy-seven amendments by himself, would forbid immigrants from visiting their home countries for any reason during the ten-year waiting period of provisional status mandated by the new legislation. Grassley would also punish South Korean immigrants until the South Korean government agrees to buy more beef from the U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, offered twenty-four amendments, including an expensive, redundant, intrusive proposal to make DNA testing mandatory. Senator Mike Lee, also of Utah, would permit undocumented immigrants to remain employed on the condition that they work in low-status, badly paid jobs, specifying “services performed by cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, care-takers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use.” (A pro-reform group called this the Chauffeur Carve-Out. I like the “footmen” touch.) Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, meanwhile, wants to stop low-income immigrants from achieving legality by requiring applicants for provisional status to have an income four times greater than the poverty line—that’s more than ninety-four thousand dollars a year for a family of four.
Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, is the Republican front man for the Gang of Eight, and he has been taking a beating from his Tea Party friends and other tribunes of the right—the cover story in this week’s National Review is “Rubio’s Folly.” The Heritage Foundation released a report on Monday calculating that the “lifetime fiscal deficit” created by the proposed immigration reform would total more than six trillion dollars. And yet conservatives are divided over the economics of immigration, and, as my colleague Ryan Lizza notes, the Heritage analysis was quickly rejected by a number of the foundation’s usual allies. (It did not help Heritage’s cause that one of its study’s co-authors turned out to have recently written a doctoral dissertation contending that Latinos are less intelligent than white Americans and that “the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue with.”) What nearly all conservatives agree on is the first-order importance of border security—one amendment filed this week would require the completion of seven hundred miles of double-fencing before reform can begin—and that the Obama Administration has bungled immigration-law enforcement.
Perhaps the most curious major character to emerge in the immigration debate comes straight from the enforcement side. Chris Crane is a deportation officer, based in Utah, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as the president of a union—a local of the American Federation of Government Employees—that represents some seven thousand ICE detention and removal agents. Crane is a passionate critic of the Administration’s immigration policies. When ICE first tried, two years ago, to shift its resources away from the indiscriminate deportation of every illegal immigrant it could catch, concentrating instead on dangerous criminals and security risks, Crane refused to let members of his union participate in training courses for field agents. The new rules were too vague, complex, and dangerous, he said. After President Obama announced, last year, with a memorandum known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that he was instructing immigration authorities to exercise prosecutorial discretion and give two-year deportation reprieves to qualified students, young graduates, and military veterans who had been brought to this country illegally as children, Crane and nine other ICE agents filed suit in federal court against Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security (and their boss), for violating immigration laws.
“The Administration is ignoring the laws as enacted by Congress,” Crane recently told Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, on Huckabee’s radio show. Crane makes the rounds of Lou Dobbs, Fox News, The Daily Caller. He addresses Congressional hearings under the encouraging watch of legislators such as Senator Sessions or Representative Lamar Hunt, of Texas. Still, he complains that, while illegal aliens and their supporters have the ear of government on immigration issues, the hard-won expertise of law-enforcement officers, the agents in the trenches, is routinely ignored. Crane recognizes the vulnerability of Senator Rubio to this argument, and successfully embarrassed Rubio into meeting with him on the eve of the introduction of the Gang of Eight’s bill. The bill is a fiasco, Crane believes—nothing but amnesty. “This bill will put the public safety at risk, without doubt,” he told a press conference organized by Sessions. Rubio practically begged Crane to go easy on him. Speaking of ICE agents, he said, “We have taken their input, we continue to seek their input. And I have nothing but the highest respect for the men and women who are on the front lines of trying to enforce our laws even though sometimes the politicians get in the way.”
I wrote recently about the erroneous deportation of Mark Lyttle, an American citizen. This abuse of power, and others like it, occurred in a context of political pressure on ICE officers to keep their deportation numbers high and growing. The Obama Administration has proudly broken the record for deportations every year since taking office. Conservative critics, including Chris Crane, believe the Administration is cooking the books, counting Border Patrol turn-backs as deportations, while true deportations are dropping off shamefully. A legitimate source of shame in our immigration system is, as it happens, now finally being addressed. Two weeks ago, the Justice Department, which runs the immigration courts, decided to start providing lawyers to mentally disabled defendants facing deportation. Had this policy been in place five years ago, Mark Lyttle might have been spared a great deal of suffering. The immigration-reform bill being marked up today in the Senate would provide lawyers to unaccompanied children and the mentally disabled in immigration court. This provision was requested, according to the Times, by the Obama Administration. The bill has a long way to go, of course, past many sworn enemies, before it becomes law.
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