Los Angeles Times

 

EDITORIAL
A Stonewalled Migrant Bill

July 26, 2004

Few projects in the current deeply divided Congress have had the support of
63 senators, including 27 Republicans and 12 committee chairmen, only to
still end up blocked by the Senate majority leader.

Yet that's just what Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) did this month with a modestly
useful little immigration bill. Fearing a reaction from the extreme
conservative wing of the GOP, the White House asked the measure's sponsor,
Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), not to offer it up. And for good measure, it
asked Frist not to let it come to a vote if Craig did present it.

Needless to say, the measure died.

Last week, speaking at a Latino gathering, Bush called for immigration
reforms including a guest-worker program and "a system that would grant
legal status to temporary workers who are here in the country working." He
might have been talking about the bipartisan measure he had just worked so
hard to kill.

Craig's measure was cosponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.); a
companion measure in the House was offered by Reps. Howard L. Berman
(D-North Hollywood) and Chris Cannon (R-Idaho). The proposal would grant
about 500,000 foreign farmworkers currently in the U.S. legal permanent
residence, though not citizenship, if they continued to work for a certain
time in agriculture. It also would provide for an updated guest-worker
program, allowing others to enter and leave the country legally.

No industry is more dependent on foreign labor than agriculture, and no
state is more dependent on agricultural labor than California. An estimated
80% of the workers in the field today are undocumented. The existing
guest-worker program is regarded as too cumbersome and bureaucratic for
seasonal labor.

Craig has announced that he will submit the bill again before Congress
adjourns this fall. Bush should reconsider his opposition, given his appeals
to Latino voters.

There are humane as well as business reasons to pass Craig's S 1645. Heavier
border enforcement after 9/11 has turned off the old circularity of
immigration that allowed field workers to harvest the crops, go home and
come back. More than 300 people died last year trying to illegally cross the
border from Mexico.

With 8 million to 12 million undocumented people in the United States, there
is also a security need to know who they are, where they are from and
something about their backgrounds.