Weekly Briefing

Most Americans have a very simplistic view of immigration policy. We tend to think about the issue on a macro scale - How many undocumented people are there? What can we do to curb illegal immigration? For which public services should immigrants be eligible? What we usually fail to grasp or acknowledge is that every overarching, big picture, policy gets implemented at the human level, on a person-by-person basis.

It's easy to demand, for instance, that every undocumented immigrant be rounded up and summarily deported to his or her country of origin, but the reality, of course, is much more complicated. Unless Americans want to imitate the regimes and systems of government we profess to abhor by crudely lumping vast groups of people together because of their race or skin color or ethnic heritage and simply dumping them at the border, we must acknowledge the hard truth that every immigrant has an individual story.

Each individual person has a reason for being here, a story to tell about what drove them to come, family members and relatives who may or may not have legal status, and often, connections to an employer, a religious congregation and the community in which they live. Now add to this reality the fact that each such person ought to have at least some opportunity to make their case - to explain their individual story to a neutral truth finder - and you begin to grasp the facts that immigration law is complicated stuff.

• On what basis should a person be subject to arrest and imprisonment (what we so politely refer to as "detention")? Should people be rounded up in the middle of the night?

• Who should have the burden of proof? What kind of due process should the person receive?

• Should people from certain countries receive more generous treatment? How bad should the conditions be in their country of origin in order to cut them some slack? Must the person face certain death? A good chance of it? Is the likelihood of political persecution enough? How about a natural disaster or just plain old grinding poverty?

• What about their family? Should they have a right to know where their loved one has been taken to? To visit them? To procure a lawyer?

Now, attempt to apply these and dozens of other relevant questions to millions of individuals and, well, the scope of the problem quickly mushrooms to a gigantic scale.

The Obama administration's year-one performance

Last week, experts at the Immigration Policy Center, a project of the Washington, DC-based nonprofit known as the American Immigration Council, released a detailed and thoughtful report on many of these difficult topics. The report - "DHS Progress Report: The Challenge of Reform" - assesses the performance of the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during its first year of operation. What has the new DHS done? How has it improved the federal government's response to the myriad complexities of the immigration policy arena? Where has it fallen short?

Here are some of the chief findings:

As a general matter, the new DHS Secretary (and former Arizona Governor) Janet Napolitano, has made important progress in shifting what one might call the overall tone of the nation's approach to immigration policy and enforcement. For the most part, gone are the days of the Bush administration's macho posturing and reckless assaults on American norms of fairness. In particular, the report credits the new DHS for:

• A pragmatic and compassionate response to the earthquake in Haiti and the people it has affected;

• Modest headway toward assuring effective counsel for people in "removal hearings";

• Moving away from the practice of large-scale work site raids and instead targeting employers who hire unauthorized workers;

• Creating a path to asylum for women victimized by domestic violence;

• Making some modest improvements in the detention system that warehouses thousands of people as they await the deportation process; and

• Reaching out to stakeholders and providing funding of community-based immigrant services organization.

Unfortunately, when it comes to many of the day-to-day workings of the immigration enforcement machinery, little has changed. According to the report:

• Due process remains a huge problem. The immigration courts are hugely overburdened, access to counsel is limited, and the appeals process is inadequate to assure every person a fair shake.

• Despite a public commitment to move toward targeting employers and individuals with serious criminal convictions, data indicate that these groups still comprise a tiny percentage of those targeted by enforcement officials.

• DHS continues to expand programs (like the flawed 287(g) program) that empower local law enforcement officers to play immigration cop and round up large numbers of people that pose no threat to the community.

• DHS continues to move full steam ahead with its flawed "E-Verify" program (a program that continues to generate large numbers of false positives and negatives in assessing the immigrations status of workers) as well as its court-clogging "Operation Streamline" (a program that mandates criminal prosecution for non-violent border crossers).

Summing up and going forward

Though dispensing plenty of credit to the Napolitano DHS for its efforts to implement change, the report's bottom line assessment of where the immigration system is and where it needs to go is pretty blunt: Right now, America's immigration system remains broken and beyond repair - at least so long as those repairs are confined to tinkering and tweaking around the edges. It's like trying to fix a broken a broken umbrella with duct tape.

Here's how the authors of the Immigration Policy Center report put it:

"…no matter how earnest the reform effort, it is likely to be eclipsed by the crushing burden of the broken immigration system. Although this document points out many areas where the Administration-without any act of Congress-can have a positive impact, ultimately it will not be enough. Secretary Napolitano herself identified the problem during her major statement on immigration in November 2009-the more we reform, the more we know we have to change the system. The immigration agencies themselves cannot possibly hope to succeed as long as we rely on them to create reason out of chaos. To that end, the longer we delay comprehensive immigration reform, the greater the burden will be on DHS to carve rational policy out of irrational laws, and the more difficult that task will become."

In other words, as with so many other issues, President Obama's immigration policy team deserves praise for some important and worthwhile policy shifts in their first year of running the show. Unfortunately, as with health care and financial reform, climate change and fiscal policy, much more dramatic and comprehensive reform will ultimately be required.

In this regard, Americans are right to keep their eyes on the big picture - just so long that is, as they don't lose sight of the impact of the policies they adopt on the lives of millions of their fellow human beings. Next week, a group of activists will be traveling through North Carolina as part of a national "caravan" designed to deliver such a message. Let's hope people listen to what they're saying.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Weekly Briefing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.