|
A fracture in the ruling-class alliance that had
propelled the Senate immigration bill forward resulted in the collapse on
June 28 of a sweeping attempt to reshape U.S. policy to suit the
long-term desires of the largest employers of immigrant labor.
The coups de grace came in a 56-43 vote against a
procedural move by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to end the floor
debate. President Bush’s effort to win supporters to his bill was
rebuffed; 37 Republican senators and 15 Democrats voted to kill it—with
18 senators defecting to the “no” camp in the final two days.
The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), an
employer lobby credited with drafting the Senate bill, splintered into
competing interests in its final days.
Bosses in need of low-skilled workers grumbled that
changes to the bill sacrificed their interests in securing a legal
low-wage workforce. They charged favoritism to their peers in high-tech
industry. They also criticized the national ID card and a related
provision that would have forced them to verify their employees’
identities.
When a majority in the Senate voted on May 23 to slash
the guest-worker quota to 200,000 per year and fix that number in place
indefinitely, a group of employers broke discipline and joined the
opposition. The National Association of Home Builders made it an open
break. “There is a huge prejudice [in the bill] against the kind of
immigrants typically hired by home builders,” said Jerry Howard, the
association's chief executive officer, in an interview with Time.
Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and Marriott were conspicuously
absent from the list of endorsers in the paid ad that the EWIC had taken
out in the final days before the bill’s demise.
Southern Republicans took credit for knocking together
a voting bloc of Senators of diverse views to defeat the bill. They
marshaled the largest group of “no” votes around their refusal to
legalize any portion of the nation’s undocumented workers. Though it was
a minority view, the mass media endowed the anti-amnesty bloc with great
significance.
In truth, the reasons for senators voting to kill the
bill were as numerous as its many provisions and reflected the reasons
for employer discontent. They wanted more guest-worker visas. They wanted
to remove or install pitfalls in the pathway to legalization. They
opposed a national ID card and new system for verifying employee status.
They wanted to retain the family-based visa system, and so on.
News commentators have declared that to reintroduce
the bill would require a Democrat in the White House. But the triumphant
Republican majority will not sit on its hands in the meantime.
The Heritage Foundation, an authoritative think-tank
of the Republican Party, published a strategy document concluding that
passage of what they consider to be the bill‘s more desirable aspects
“can be done incrementally.”
They state: “Congress should ensure the enforcement of
laws already on the books, such as the REAL ID Act and the Secure Fence
Act”—in other words, continue the process of border militarization,
workplace raids, and home invasions.
The authors go on to propose that Congress stage
public hearings across the country, as it did last summer to promote and
capitalize on the ravings of the nativist fringe to ban bilingual
education, cut off immigrants’ access to social services, and improve the
networking between federal agents, local police, and employers.
Interestingly, a guest-worker program also factors into their plans.
"Together,” the paper concludes, “these
elements—along with a general rejection of amnesty—offer a real
possibility for strengthening national security and replacing, over time,
an undocumented labor force with temporary workers and new legal immigrants.”
These children of Sensenbrenner have entirely
forgotten the lesson of May Day 2006. In their euphoria they discard the
most effective weapon of their class, the illusion of amnesty in the
minds of the workers. Without it, ICE and the Minutemen are left alone to
hold back the next surge. Their celebration is thus shortsighted. And
their victory may be short-lived.
The split in the immigrant-rights movement can be
buried alongside the Senate reform. In 14 months of unrelenting ICE
assaults and more than 20,000 arrests, the Democrats acted primarily to
extinguish the workers’ outrage with empty promises of amnesty. Kennedy
lured valuable forces away from immigrant defense with his false claim
that passing the Senate bill would stop the raids. While Chertoff
destroyed hundreds of immigrant families, Kennedy stood on their ruins to
call for a reform that granted greater police powers.
The death of the Senate reform gives new life to calls
for a united front to mobilize working-class power against ICE and for
amnesty. Chertoff betrays a clear awareness of his new vulnerability in
his angry recriminations of the Senate’s failure. "We don't really
have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this
country in a way that's truly effective," he moaned.
A year has passed and the ruling class has walked in a
complete circle. Its failure to resolve the immigration crisis now tilts
the relationship of forces back to their 2006 alignment. But the old
landscape has become more foreboding, with the frustrated hopes of
millions for amnesty and their resentment over ICE abuses gathering like
dark storm clouds overhead.
|