Left and right are both wrong about illegal immigration. Here’s how we can address it | Opinion
My great-grandparents, Hanna Daoud (John David) and Bandura Sama’an (Panola Simon), left their impoverished village of Abdelli, in the highlands above Batroun, Lebanon, for the good life along the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania. Like most of the would-be immigrants on our southern border, the American Dream of a more prosperous and secure life lured them and much of their extended family to the United States in the early 1900s.
Much like the migrants down south who hope to gain asylum status, my ancestors, as Arab Christians, and others probably embellished or even exaggerated when interviewed by Ellis Island examiners. They endured hardships as Maronites, many of whom suffered from repression under the Ottoman Turks before World War I and during the Great Famine of 1915-19.
My great-grandparents’ saga speaks to the misconceptions that both liberals and conservatives hold today about the migrant issue. Liberals naively assume that the vast majority of migrants are legitimate asylum seekers fleeing political persecution and/or social ostracism — that their lives are truly in danger.
This view overlooks the prevalent and preferred practice of authoritarian regimes to eliminate or at least imprison political dissidents and threaten their family members. These regimes such as the one in Nicaragua, rarely let oppositionists leave town. Moreover, if a person — say a Venezuelan dissident — fears for his or her life and can escape, he or she could apply for asylum in Columbia, Panama, Costa Rica, Belize, even Mexico, rather than trekking all the way to Nuevo Laredo.
Economic migrants are well aware that by claiming asylum, they can circumvent our immigrant visa process and leapfrog past thousands upon thousands of eligible intending immigrants patiently waiting their turn. These prospective immigrants had to fill-out forms, pay various fees, obtain health and police clearances, prove they would not become a “public charge,” and — in an interview with a State Department consular officer — substantiate their eligibility. The migrants at our southern border skip past all this.
But conservatives, too, are myopic and oddly oblivious to the huge demand for migrant labor. They routinely fail to acknowledge the lure of illegal employment. Jobs are indeed the ultimate magnet. A day spent driving around North Texas will reveal that there is an obvious labor market for migrant workers, whether legal or illegal.
Federal officers certainly have no trouble locating them. They’re present in slaughterhouses, poultry processing plants, large-scale corporate farms, construction sites, dairy farms, landscape and lawn care businesses, healthcare facilities and convalescent homes, laundries, auto workshops and on our roofs in 99 degree heat.
Alongside 370,000 farmworkers currently holding H-2A visas, there are an estimated 285,000 agricultural workers who are here illegally. According to the Department of Labor, there are 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers already picking and packing America’s fruits and vegetables. Migrant workers are indispensable to our economy.
They’re also indispensable to the well-being of family left behind. The remittances that migrant workers send home not only help their loved ones, they also ease pressure on their native country’s social safety net. That leads to the belief that countries like Mexico, which received about $55 billion in remittances last year, are more than happy to “export” their excess labor force. Doing so means less pressure on their own labor markets and social welfare and unemployment systems while remittances ease popular demands for income redistribution. My ancestors’ native Lebanon is the most remittance-dependent country in the world. Remittances totaling more than $7 billion annually account for more than half of its annual GDP.
So, rather than assuming that most intending immigrants on the border are bona fide asylum seekers or castigating them as ne’er do wells anxious to get on welfare, what can both liberals and conservatives in Congress do to rectify the situation? Here are several suggestions:
Hire and train more Customs and Immigration Services officers to interview migrants. A competent officer can quickly ascertain at the “credible fear screening” whether a person is a likely candidate for asylum or has concocted a phony persecution story. To corroborate a person’s claims of mistreatment, a psychological and/or physical exam can be carried out.
Allot additional resources to the Justice Department to speed the processing of existing asylum applications.The backlog is about 850,000 cases, and the average wait time for an applicant to have his or her day in court is an unconscionable 1,525 days.
End the practice of an asylum seeker absconding after being paroled into the U.S. and not showing up at a court hearing by holding interviews and adjudications at our consular border posts in Mexico. For those who do not qualify, consular officials could explain how they could apply for H-2A and H-2B visas and thus work legally in the U.S.
In collaboration with farmers, ranchers, and dairy operators, significantly increase the number of annual H-2A farmworker visas. Congress should also pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021-22 to regularize the employment of undocumented farmworkers who have toiled for years in the US. And lawmakers should demand that the E-Verify system be broadened to track H-2A visa holders.
Expand the H-2B program to cover workers in various industries where they are now illegally employed and raise the cap on these visas now set at 66,000, which is unrealistically low for labor needs.
Drastically increase the financial penalties for employers who knowingly hire workers here illegally and/or fail to comply with E-Verify.
One can’t begrudge people seeking a better life in the United States. But in fairness to the millions who abide by our immigration laws and procedures, migrants should not be allowed to abuse our asylum system. And a significant increase in work-based visas to align with the reality that upwards of 7 million immigrants are already working here illegally is long overdue.
George W. Aldridge was a U.S. diplomat for more than 27 years. He lives in Arlington.
