The Revenge of Zorro on Immigration Reform
Written by Nativo Lopez - Mexican American Political Association
Sunday, 20 May 2007
Nativo V. Lopez is National President of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, and the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA)
Are you ready for the Zorro visas? I mean Z, as currently being hammered out in the U.S. Senate, a bipartisan effort to craft new immigration reform legislation before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) imposes his arbitrary deadline to introduce legislation similar to that approved by the Senate last year.
The essence of the current immigration debate, in fact raging for the past fifteen years, essentially is the management of an amble, but vulnerable, labor supply for corporations, large and small, urban and rural, and on their terms. At the heart of all the proposals this is the bottom line. And, this can be observed in the initiatives submitted by both Republicans and Democrats.
The general framework of all legislative proposals to surface on both sides of the aisle are heavy enforcement measures in exchange for some form of regularization of the estimated 12 million undocumented already in the U.S. and a massive contract-worker program as a way to enroll future flow entrants. The quibbling between the two parties as they work to reach a deal is more around the edges of the framework - the specific terms, the parameters of each measure, and the “triggers.” But the equation of onerous enforcement for regularization has never been in question, and the Washington-based lobbying groups that pretend to represent the interests of immigrants, have never questioned it either. Why wouldn’t they find this Faustian deal acceptable when they are actually sponsored and subsidized by the very corporations that clamor for the low-wage contract- labor program contemplated by the proponents? And they are even referred to as the “stakeholders” by some of the legislators. Degrees of vulnerability and uncertainty in this modern era labor management experiment can be observed in the details of the debates - six years versus eight prior to qualifying to apply for permanent residency, touch back and return or adjust status within the U.S., varying steepness of multiple fines, learn English and civics, criminal background checks, a tortuous point system premised on levels of education and skill set, proscribed from receiving any social safety net benefits, go to the back of the visa wait line and wait some more, pay all back taxes, contract workers recycled out of the country after completing the term of their contract or allowed to remain and stumble onto the path to permanency, and much more.
These are all punitive messages and measures directed against acknowledged hard-working immigrants for having entered the U.S. without inspection. Their penance, notwithstanding that they were drawn by the ever increasing demand for their labor and expelled from their countries of origin, particularly Mexico and Central America, due to the failures of neoliberal economic policies. [more]