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BIG CITY: Dare to dream

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Staff

By Kirk Ross

The president announced a shift in immigration enforcement the other day, leading to the outcry among his opponents that he was being overtly political about an issue they’d been hammering with overblown hyperbole since well before the Iowa caucuses.

Additionally confusing were the twin arguments that the president was overreaching and late in doing so.

There’s a chance, I suppose, that between the time this column gets typed up and when it’s printed, Mitt Romney or an officially sanctioned surrogate will deliver something approaching a coherent policy on immigration or even a cogent response to the new policy.

A chance, yes, but five bucks says it won’t happen.

Romney and most of other politicians who want to talk tough on immigration still haven’t figured out a way to finesse the finer points of the issue. When your policy position is something akin to “Hulk Smash!” there’s not a lot of room for nuance.

Now they can’t even get away with the traditional fallback of invoking state’s rights. The Roberts court pretty much shot that full of holes Monday, when it asserted in the case of Arizona’s outrageous new law that immigration is a federal matter and no state can draft laws on immigration policy that go places the federal laws do not.

The ruling, of course, was followed by much rejoicing among jingoist politicians in Arizona who proved that even though they were perfectly content to write law, they have no real understanding of the legal system. The “papers please” provision, the only part of the law that was upheld by the court, hasn’t gone into effect yet. Once it does, it’s likely one ACLU lawsuit away from being history.

Across the political spectrum, there’s a tremendous amount of frustration over the lack of federal action on immigration. It’s obvious the system is broken and abused. It continues to create an underclass of people who have almost no rights and little recourse that doesn’t involve putting themselves at risk of deportation, financial ruin or worse. Abuse and exploitation of undocumented workers has become institutionalized in some industries, while enforcement is spotty, uneven and open to all sorts of corruption.

Here in North Carolina we’re experiencing the same kinds of economic and political consequences of a broken immigration system and some of the same vitriol, but the legislature has yet to really work itself up into the same lather as its counterparts elsewhere. Last week, for instance, a bill to tighten rules on public benefits was quietly pulled because of concerns about how it would affect the large number of “blended” households in the state.

If passed, the law would have reiterated federal rules that non-citizens without work permits are ineligible for public assistance, but it would have also made it a crime for an employee of a state or local agency not to report someone they knew to be undocumented. The rules would have had a big impact on those families where one or both parents are undocumented but whose children are citizens. The practical result of requiring social workers or medical clinic staff to enforce immigration laws would be to cut off access to services for many who are legally entitled to it. Even proponents of the measure realized that starving kids and depriving them of medical care is not good public policy.

In light of the Arizona ruling, it’s now likely that the law would have been struck down because it created state law in an area where the feds have refused to tread, one of the Supreme Court’s major points on Monday.

That small bit of sanity in the debate over immigration is certainly a welcome sign that one day we’ll get around to reforming the system.

But as the court said Monday, the change has to come from Washington, not Raleigh. Dare to dream, but don’t hold your breath.

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