Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on February 15, 2013

Moderator: Edward Schumacher-Matos, Ombudsman, National Public Radio Speakers: Edward Alden, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Land, President, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention, and Eliseo Medina, International Secretary-Treasurer, Service Employees International Union February 14, 2013 Council on Foreign Relations

EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations for this program this morning on immigration reform. My name's Edward Schumacher-Matos. I am the ombudsman at NPR; I also am a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and have taught a lot on migration policy at the Harvard Kennedy school.

You know, we are here today because Congress seems to be, you know, on the verge, finally, of pushing through a comprehensive immigration that promises to be both historic and possibly even have profound effects on the nation. How historic? Let me sort of give this conversation this morning put in some kind of a historical context.

The U.S. was essentially an open country until the 1920s when it began to impose a series of national quotas. These ended, sort of, the 40-year-long Great Migration wave characterized by Ellis Island and about half our Hollywood movies. Immigration was reduced to a trickle for the next almost 40 years. Then, in 1965 in the midst of the whole civil rights movement, those quotas were greatly loosened and they were rearranged. What no one realized at the time was that they were setting in motion profound changes to the ethnic, racial and educational makeup of the United States.

And still -- so now it looks like Congress now -- another 40-year period having passed a little bit more may pass the third the third great change in the nation's immigration system. That may not have as radical an effect as the last two. Then again, it may. One, immigration is so politically explosive here and everywhere in the world, for obvious reasons. It's the policy that directly affects who your neighbors are, who your children are going to marry, who they're going to go to school with, and who are your fellow citizens.

The emerging consensus that Congress is likely to legalize the more-than 11 million immigrants living here illegally is likely to tighten the family reunification criteria, is likely to open up a high-skilled immigration in a way we never have before, is likely to reintroduce a large-scale guest-worker program, is likely to further militarize our Mexican and possibly even our Canadian border, and is likely to introduce workplace controls that will affect all American workers looking for a job.

The effort is being led in the Senate by what is being called the Gang of Eight. These include four Republicans McCain, Graham, Rubio and Flake and four Democrats Schumer, Durbin, Bennet and Menendez. Since the last effort to fix our immigration system failed in 2007 when President Bush couldn't even carry his own party, the Democrats have been pretty much irrelevant, and the game has been in the Republican Party because of the great opposition by its insurgent Tea Party movement and by the populist-right conservatives in this country. They're sort of opposed to any kind of comprehensive immigration reform until almost all the undocumented immigrants have been forced out and the borders controlled.

If Republicans in the Senate and in the House before 2010 were allowed to vote their conscience, we would already have comprehensive immigration reform. What has changed today, however, what finally has politically moved them to want to do something is that Romney got just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and about as bad among the Asians, if not worse. The demographic writing is on the wall, and so the great movement now in the Republican Party is to get with the program and try to do something on comprehensive immigration reform.

But as we get closer to a deal, you're going to see Democrats suddenly throwing up some of the roadblocks in the negotiations. I would like to caution you this morning not to think of immigration reform as Republicans versus Democrats. Since the beginning of the republic, immigration has always been an issue of strange bedfellows. On one side, you've got the humanitarian left, including many of the churches, united with the business right. And on the other side, you've got the unions, normally seen as from the left, but being opposed to bringing in all these workers, united with the populist, nativist sort of lower-middle-class and even middle-class in the country.

So, it's against that background that we're really fortunate today to have our panel. And let me say we have two of the sexiest bedfellows we could have.

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CFR-Politico Online Chat on U.S. Immigration Policy

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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