Bishop Thomas Wenski drew on Catholic social teaching and the Jewish holocaust to put a tight
frame around the discussion of illegal immigration during a 2004 conference at Notre Dame on
migration and theology.
"I think we can make a summary of Catholic social teaching in one phrase: No human
being can ever be considered as a problem," said Wenski, then chairman of the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration.
"When we consider a human being as a problem, we depersonalize him, we offend his
human dignity,'' he said. "When we allow any class of human beings to be categorized as a
problem, then we give ourselves permission to look for solutions. And as the history of the 20th
century has proven, sometimes we look for final solutions."
It was a provocative warning, drawing a straight line between anxiety about illegal
immigration and the atrocities of the Nazis. Nevertheless, anger about the federal government's
failure to stem the flow of mostly poor, poorly educated workers from Latin America has swept
the country, spreading from familiar territory in California to small towns and big cities in
Indiana, Iowa, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
At a time when globalization is bleeding away millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs that
once provided immigrants a path to the blue-collar middle class, and when multiculturalism and
ethnic pride have sought to discredit old notions of Americanization and melting-pot
assimilation, the cultural, political, economic and demographic stakes of the influx are
enormous.
The populist charge against illegal immigration is led by such figures as CNN's Lou
Dobbs, who rails against "broken borders" and what he calls the abandonment of American
workers by an indifferent and incompetent federal government.
It is joined by such environmental advocates as former journalist Roy Beck, founder of
the grassroots restrictionist organization NumbersUSA, who warns that unbridled immigration
could push the nation's population from its current level of about 300 million to half a billion by
the middle of the century
Most provocatively, it is boosted by radio talk-show hosts and by self-styled border
watchdogs called Minutemen who proclaim their willingness to enforce the nation's borders if
Washington won't.
Meanwhile, immigrant advocates -- with Wenski and his fellow bishops in the lead --
have rallied to the defense of the undocumented. They have joined hundreds of thousands of the
immigrants at rallies from Los Angeles to New York.
With a boldness and political daring, they call their efforts a new civil rights movement
and demand that the federal government provide legal status to the estimated 13 million illegal
immigrants who have taken up residence in the country.
The politics of immigration produce the strangest of political bedfellows. The alliance of
advocates is even more powerfully eclectic than the coalition of restrictionists.
"It lines up the Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing libertarians like the
Cato Institute with left-wing liberals like the ACLU,'' said demographer Michael Teitelbaum.
"And it brings in ethnic lobby groups, church groups, employer organizations like the National
Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."
The electoral implications have seized the attention of the White House, where President
Bush's advisors fear that the crusading anti-illegal immigration efforts of such conservatives as
representatives Tom Tancredo of Colorado and James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin will
permanently estrange the rapidly growing Latino vote.
"It's a dangerous game the Republicans are playing," said Cecilia Muñoz, vice president
of the National Council of La Raza, who warned that Republicans nationally should take a lesson
from former California Governor Pete Wilson.
Wilson, a Republican who won re-election in 1994 after sounding the alarm against
illegal immigration, antagonized Hispanic voters who saw racist undertones in Wilson's
campaign and moved heavily into the Democratic column.
"Maybe in the short term it helps you win elections," Muñoz said. "But in the long term it
helps convince Latinos that this isn't a party where they can be comfortable."
An anxious America
Immigration restrictionists want a crackdown. They claim that a flood of illegal immigrants
threatens to overwhelm communities, drag down wages, strain social cohesion and harden into a
new underclass. They scorn legalization proposals as an amnesty that would reward illegal
behavior and invite more illegal crossings of a vast southern border that in many places is
marked with a three-strand barbed-wire fence.
Immigration advocates say only an offer of legal status, including a path to citizenship,
can end the exploitation of workers too fearful to organize and halt what they call the wink-and-nod hypocrisy of employer-friendly federal policy. One former official of the Mexican
government described it as "Don't come, don't come. But if you can get past the Border Patrol,
we have a job for you."
Immigrants, legal and illegal, clearly boost economic growth. Some work as engineers
and entrepreneurs at the highest levels of the economy. Many others provide cheap, flexible
labor that serves not only business but also homeowners with lawns to tend and parents with
children to care for. As consumers, they benefit retailers, grocers and landlords.
While most of the gains generated by their labor are privatized, primarily benefiting
employers, the costs associated with low-wage immigrants tend to be socialized. They are
absorbed by taxpayers who pay for the schools, hospital care and other social services needed by
a rapidly rising population concentrated at the bottom end of an increasingly polarized U.S.
economy.
As the illegal immigrant population nationwide has been growing at a rate of about
500,000 per year, the influx has ratcheted up the competition for jobs and housing and social
services. While illegal immigrants are not entitled to welfare benefits, their U.S.-born children
are.
"It puts a big strain on the system -- on schools, hospitals, roads, everything," said Joel
Kotkin of the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Kotkin celebrates the history of U.S. immigration, saying it "has been an incredibly
positive force" in the growth and development of the country. But he understands the concerns of
those like a county commissioner in Georgia whose recent complaint to The New York Times about Mexican immigrants -- "They done took over the population" -- expressed the
widespread bewilderment at a decade of stunningly fast immigration growth far beyond the
million or so immigrants who enter the country legally each year.
"There is a huge anxiety out there," Kotkin said. "A lot of people feel a sense of
displacement, a sense that there is no control."
That came through loud and clear to Columbus, Indiana, Mayor Fred Armstrong a few
years ago, when he called federal officials about the surge of Mexican immigrants to his town
about an hour south of Indianapolis.
Armstrong said he was told: "If you've got a guy who's murdering people, we want to
know about it; otherwise we're not going to deal with it."
The failure of enforcement
In 1986, Washington declared that it had outlined a solution to illegal immigration. Congress
passed legislation intended to combine the compassion of amnesty for illegal immigrants with
the toughness of a crackdown on employers. In Los Angeles, an INS official declared that
employer sanctions -- fines and jail sentences for those who knowingly hired illegal immigrants
-- "put real teeth into immigration reform."
While amnesty went ahead as planned, enforcement flopped. A counterfeit-document
industry sprung up overnight to produce the phony social security cards and drivers licenses that
workers produced to demonstrate that they had a right to work in the United States.
The failure was predictable because Congress had ignored the centerpiece of a national
strategy outlined in the 1981 report "U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest." The
report was written by a blue-ribbon panel led by Father Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, then president
of Notre Dame and former head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The report drew a clear line between legal immigration, which it called "useful in every
important respect," and illegal immigration, which "erodes confidence in the law generally, and
immigration law specifically."
Hesburgh and his fellow commissioners said that in order to maintain public commitment
to the "front door" of legal migration, Congress needed to take firm action to shut the "back
door" of illegal immigration.
The centerpiece of their immigration reform proposal was a national identification card to
ensure that all persons who applied for jobs were eligible to work.
Civil libertarians and immigration advocates reacted angrily, warning that Hesburgh
would put the country on a slippery slope toward Big Brother totalitarianism. President Reagan's
secretary of the interior, James Watt, helped to ice cabinet-level discussion of the card when he
declared: "I would like to suggest another way that I think is better. All we have to do is tattoo
an identification number on the inside of everybody's arm."
Suggestions that those who want to stop illegal immigration have a more sinister motive
have long cast a pall over the national debate.
"Even timorous attempts to initiate an honest public discussion of the issue can earn one
the cheap slander of 'racist,'" says Victor Davis Hanson. A classics scholar, Hanson is the author
of Mexifornia, a book that argues that mass illegal immigration has overwhelmed the state's
capacity to incorporate newcomers.
When Hanson came to Washington to discuss his book, he was harangued as a
"xenophobe" by an aide to U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who, like most
Democrats, favors broad-based legalization.
Yet Father Hesburgh was not the only progressive voice that called for serious steps to
stem illegal immigration. More than a decade after his report, as public opinion polls recorded
persistent public frustration about illegal immigration, yet another special commission reported
to Congress. This one was headed by former U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan of Texas, who
echoed many of Hesburgh's concerns.
"If we are to preserve our immigration tradition and our ability to say 'yes' to many of
those who seek entry, we must have the strength to say 'no' where we must," Jordan said as she
presented the plan to Congress.
"Any nation worth its salt must control its borders," Jordan insisted. And that, she said,
required a computerized registry that employers could check, drawing on information provided
by the immigration authorities and the Social Security Administration.
Congress once again balked, not wanting to antagonize the powerful left-right coalition
of immigration advocates that saw the National Association of Manufacturers make common
cause with the National Council of La Raza. President Clinton, meanwhile, effusively praised
Jordan's work but did nothing to advance it.
Unwilling to take the decisive but politically dicey choices that Jordan said were needed,
federal authorities poured themselves into managing the political dimensions of illegal
immigration. In order to calm border communities most affected by the illegal flows, they
mounted such localized operations as Operation Gatekeeper, which began in San Diego in 1994,
massing Border Patrol resources to squeeze illegal crossings from Tijuana.
San Diego residents were relieved, and property values near the suddenly calmed area
shot up. But the migratory stream continued, though it detoured away from urban areas and into
the desert. There the migrants paid a price not only in rising smugglers fees but also in deaths
due to exposure to the desert's brick-oven temperatures.
Demographer Jeffrey Passel of the Urban Institute drew the political moral of the story.
"It's much easier to build more fences and put more people at the border and try to make
life more difficult for illegals than to try to bring employers in line,'' said Passel.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service did make one concerted effort to roll back
the wave of illegal hirings, launching Operation Vanguard in 1999 at meat-packing plants in
Nebraska.
Doris Meissner, who directed the INS at the time, said the firestorm of criticism stirred
by the industry, church leaders and immigrant advocacy groups forced her to shut it down. "I
certainly didn't understand the support that existed among churches and other humanitarian
organizations" for illegal immigrants, said Meissner.
New growth centers
In 1986 illegal immigration was largely a matter of campesinos -- Latino peasants -- leaving
seven or eight states in central and northern Mexico and moving along immigration lines
established by the braceros -- field hands invited to the United States between 1942 and 1964.
Most immigrants in those days headed for the fields of California and Florida. Some also headed
to Chicago neighborhoods once settled by workers beckoned by now-moribund steel plants.
Immigration economist Philip Martin of the University of California, Davis, says the
1986 one-year amnesty program led to a vast territorial expansion of the immigrant communities
that have become a powerful second magnet for illegal immigration.
First, it allowed Mexican immigrants to move out of farm work in the West and into new
kinds of jobs in new places.
"They quickly saw that it was easier to get ahead with a construction job in Phoenix or in
the Midwest," Martin said.
Second, amnesty provided immigrants with permanent residence, allowing them to bring
relatives legally into the United States.
"One thing led to another and networks were established," he said. Then word went back
to Mexico that there were new places where other Mexicans were willing to help migrants gain a
foothold in the United States. So amnesty granted to illegal immigrants created a magnet for
more illegal immigrants.
Mexican demographers report that 96 percent of Mexico's 2,420 county-sized municipios send immigrants to the United States. The exodus is the churning human equivalent of a
downpour that suddenly floods a river with the flow of a thousand new streams.
Now the Latin American diaspora has spread across the United States, from Oregon to
Nebraska to the East Coast. Demographer Passel calls 19 states "new immigration growth
centers" because their foreign-born, largely Mexican populations grew by at least 50 percent in
the 1990s.
Katharine Donato, an immigration scholar at Rice University in Houston, said those
effects converged with a broad U.S. economic expansion that made businesses desperate for
workers.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants who had tended to concentrate in large cities,
Mexicans were willing to spread into Small Town America, Donato said. She added that such a
dispersal was encouraged by the relative ease of travel and the portability of popular culture.
"You can get Televisa almost anywhere now," she said, naming a popular Spanish-language television network, widely available on cable.
Meanwhile, immigrant entrepreneurs opened restaurants and shops and Spanish-language
radio stations to provide the familiar flavors and sounds of home. Immigration, even of the
illegal variety, lost some of the old, fearful features of a shadowy life in a strange land.
Harvard's Samuel Huntington is troubled by the panorama. "Mexicans and other Latinos
have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and
linguistic enclaves and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream,'' he
wrote. " Demographically, socially and culturally, the reconquista of the southwest United States
by Mexican immigrants is well under way."
Similar concerns were voiced more than 100 years ago, when the last major immigrant
influx drew millions of desperately poor from Eastern and Southern Europe. Representative
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, for instance, warned that the newcomers came from "races
most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes . . .
and do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States."
Immigrant advocates today confidently invoke the success of that last immigrant wave to
predict that today's immigrants will duplicate their achievement of the American dream.
Restrictionists point pessimistically to the intense concentration of Spanish speakers among
today's immigrants and to the nation's steady loss of blue collar jobs that allowed immigrant
families to achieve the American dream.
But in many places around the world, particularly in rural areas where farm workers
compare their poverty with gleaming televised images of life in America, the pressure to
emigrate remains strong.
Immigration fever has spread from Mexico and Central America into South America,
drawing Peruvians, Ecuadorans, Colombians and Bolivians by the tens of thousands. The most
recent surge has been from Brazil, where an entire industry grew up to exploit another
fundamental flaw in American border policy.
Smugglers flew young Brazilians to Mexico City, bused them to the border and hired
rafts to float them across the Rio Grande. Instead of instructing their clients on how to avoid the
Border Patrol, the smugglers directed them to seek out the patrol. They had learned that because
the Border Patrol lacked the budget or facilities to hold non-Mexicans for the several weeks it
took to process them for deportation, the immigrants were being released -- with orders to
appear for an immigration hearing once they reached their destination.
The instructions, which demoralized Border Patrol agents sardonically called "orders to
disappear," were routinely ignored, as the released immigrants -- including many from other
countries -- disappeared into American society.
Stories about the bizarre hole in border policy provoked congressional outrage. "Is
anyone in charge here?" an astonished Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, asked
Border Patrol officials at a Capitol Hill hearing.
The agency quickly stepped up a program of "expedited removal" that put the immigrants
on a fast track for deportation. While the removal was expedited it frequently still took several
weeks, during which the 20,000 detention beds in the federal immigration system can fill up,
forcing a return to the improbable policy of "catch and release."
A balancing act
In the spring of 2006, the Senate passed legislation intending to impose order on the chaos of
illegal immigration. It proposed to allow illegal immigrants a chance to seek citizenship, to
establish legal channels for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers to enter the country
each year and to double the Border Patrol in an effort to contain illegal flows.
The bill's principal congressional advocates were Massachusetts Democrat Edward
Kennedy, who praised illegal immigrants as "people who work hard and want to be part of the
American dream,'' and Arizona Republican John McCain, who said it would end the horror that
each year sees several hundred immigrants die in the desert furnaces of his home state.
After the legislation passed a key vote in the judiciary committee, Frank Sharry of the
National Immigration Forum slapped the back of Kevin Appleby '84, who directs the Office of
Migration and Refugee Policy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
"The Catholic boys did it!" Sharry exclaimed, referring to the intense lobbying of
Catholic clergy on behalf of immigrants and against a House bill that they condemned as an
effort to make criminals of those who provided humanitarian assistance to illegal immigrants in
desperate straits.
Appleby had helped the bishops launch their Justice for Immigrants campaign that he
said was based on church teaching.
"There are certain rights that people have as part of their human dignity, and one of them
is the right to migrate,'' said Appleby, who also said the bishops acknowledge that governments
have the right to control the flow of immigrants into their country.
"But there is a balancing test there," Appleby said, introducing a theme that received
considerable attention at the 2004 Notre Dame immigration conference. "Nations with more
economic and political power have a greater responsibility to try to accommodate them.
"In the situation of migration to the United States, the church would say that it's a win-win situation because not only is the universal common good served in that migrants can come
and work and support their families but also the national common good is served because
immigration is a good thing and enriches the country."
The story of immigrants' success is part of our national mythology, our sense that the
United States has an almost mystical power to provide opportunities and a way up -- if not
immediately, then across generations.
Senator McCain made it clear that he expects the same of the current wave of
immigration. "The reason they don't move up the ladder now is that they live in this shadow
world" of illegal immigration, he said.
Others warn that globalization is threatening the upward mobility that is central to the
American dream and which allowed the United States to be the first nation in the world to create
a blue-collar middle class.
"The relatively stable unionized jobs in manufacturing that were common 50 years ago
have been replaced either by high-technology development jobs or by very low-skilled service
jobs," UCLA's William Clark warned in Immigrants and the American Dream.
Clark noted that the United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs in recent
decades. "At the same time, the U.S. economy has generated a vast service sector of low-skilled
and relatively low-paying jobs, which have little if any security and even less chance of
occupational advancement."
Immigration scholars Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut took stock of the losses in
their 1990 book Immigrant America.
"The structure of the American labor market looks less and less like a pyramid, where
successive generations can move up gradually along multiple layers of blue-collar and white-collar occupations," Portes and Rumbaut wrote. Instead, they said, it resembles an hourglass,
with large groups at both ends of the wage spectrum and a narrowing band of middle-income
manufacturing jobs in the center.
The darkening economic panorama and the apparent shrinking of the American dream
cast a shadow over the optimism behind the Kennedy-McCain blueprint to welcome millions of
low-skilled immigrants into the country.
This raises questions about the prospects for immigrants like Sergio and Becky Mendoza,
from the Mexican state of Chiapas, who have worked double shifts at a McDonald's in the
Maryland suburbs of Washington, within earshot of the Capitol Beltway.
Two months after Bishop Wenski spoke at the Notre Dame conference, Becky was about
to sit down with friends for a Christmas Eve dinner of chicken mole. Then the phone rang. The
call came from the McDonald's manager, who pleaded with Becky to work another shift. Her
promise of double pay pulled Becky out of the house, with thoughts of sending some extra
money back to her two children in Mexico.
She dreamed of bringing them to the United States but wondered how she and Sergio
could balance work and child-care duties. Children left unsupervised by overworked parents are
"a recipe for gangs," said Professor Jorge Chapa of Indiana University.
Alienation of the young is an enormous problem for Hispanic immigrants, whose
children are at the lowest end of the performance scale in the highly respected schools of
Maryland's Montgomery County, just outside of Washington. There Hispanic students have the
highest dropout rate and the lowest rates for attendance and graduation.
Clearly, the American dream is in danger for many of the nation's newest immigrants.
Yet the Senate has shown an almost blithe indifference to the demographic consequences of their
legislation, which proposes to solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing those who
are here and providing legal channels for millions more.
The House of Representatives, taking a hard line, has insisted upon tough enforcement to
take control of the border. That position prevailed with last fall's passage in both houses of
legislation to build 700 miles of border fence. But there was no agreement on proposals to
require that workers present tamper-proof identity documents to employers who then would be
required to verify their eligibility to work in the United States by checking the documents against
a centralized data base. In this controversial area, many employers prefer the status quo, which
provides them easy access to workers.
President Bush has found shelter in aphorisms. Praising the determination of illegal
immigrants, he has declared: "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." Citing the rise in
low-wage jobs, he talked often of matching "willing worker with willing employer."
"People are coming to our country to do jobs that Americans won't do, to be able to feed
their families, and I think there's a humane way to recognize that," Bush said as he outlined his
proposal a year ago. He wanted to provide work visas -- temporary but renewable -- for the
millions of illegal immigrants who have found work in the United States. The president also
wants to allow employers to bring in more workers from around the world when Americans
cannot readily be found. On the sensitive topic of whether to provide the workers a path to
citizenship, he remains ambiguous.
Many labor economists and immigration experts dismiss the notion that a shortage of
low-wage workers exists, saying Bush's plan actually would help sustain a glut of low-wage
workers that is pushing down labor costs in an expanding array of U.S. industries.
The president's plan "basically takes all the low-wage labor employers say they need and
wraps it up for them with a big ribbon," said Jared Bernstein of the liberal Economic Policy
Institute.
The White House hopes that a generous immigration policy will appeal to Hispanic
voters, but many Hispanics share the anxiety of other middle-class Americans. That is why, in
2004, exit polls in Arizona showed 47 percent of the state's Hispanics voted for a proposition
aimed at stopping illegal immigration -- even after a well-funded publicity campaign led by
most of the state's political and business establishment had branded it as racist.
Immigration has become a divisive issue even in Iowa, where the state's Catholic
Conference issued a statement urging a welcome for illegal immigrants: "The love of God does
not stop at national boundaries," the statement reads. "Immigrants crossing into the United States
are in need of the love of neighbor that was commanded by Jesus."
Kirk Martin, who coordinates local migration and refugee services for Catholic Charities,
told the Des Moines Register in July that some Catholics resent the call for an unconditional
welcome to strangers.
"We get angry calls," Martin said. "There has been some backlash against immigrants."
In Manassas, Virginia, Gerardo Jimenez, who rode the 1986 amnesty to a place in the
middle class as head of a dry-walling crew, shares the anxiety. The ceaseless flow of hungry
young men willing to work for half his wage threatens his hold on the American dream, said
Jimenez, who hails from the Mexican state of Jalisco, home of tequila and mariachi music.
Said Jimenez, "Somebody has to bring some order to this situation."
Jerry Kammer, a correspondent in the Copley News Service's Washington bureau, received a
2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
(January 2007)
