From San Diego to Philadelphia, dueling Republican congressional hearings this week were aimed at selling the emotional points of view - AFTER both houses of Congress had already approved sharply differing laws. The far-flung hearings symbolize the collapse of the center on this issue. As with Humpty Dumpty, this egg may be scrambled beyond all reasonable repair.
Even though current immigration law is an unenforceable mess, it might be best to muddle along with what we've got now. Better that than fall into an immigrant-bashing abyss that proves to be unworkable.
We have a chaotic system that can't prevent millions from coming here and doesn't give them any timely avenue to citizenship, but isn't serious about treating them as criminals to be jailed or deported either.
How much harm this does depends upon whether you are an employer needing cheap labor, a small-town mayor concerned about crime and overcrowding, a hospital executive concerned about red ink from care for uninsured immigrants, a family desperately seeking a green card for a relative, a Border Patrol agent pleading for more money and assistance or a rural-state governor alarmed about getting the state's crops harvested on time. But the system sort of works.
On this issue, President Bush displays more sense than he does on many other issues - and more than most in his party do. "We're not going to be able to deport people who have been here, working hard and raising their families," he said Thursday, dismissing the harsh enforcement-only House bill.
The House-run hearing in Imperial Beach, Calif., featured border agents and local sheriffs warning about Mexican terrorists who were eager to sneak into our country to blow up things. The participants scorned any plan to grant illegal immigrants citizenship rights as "amnesty."
The Senate-run hearing, held in Philadelphia, featured employers and politicians bemoaning future labor shortages in local businesses. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg predicted his city's economy would collapse without immigrant labor, which is 40 percent of the population there.
The House hearing was billed as an investigation into "Border Vulnerabilities and International Terrorism." Not much left to the imagination there. All the House wants is to build a wall.
When it comes to politics, the terrorist scare trumps the economy. But the Senate bill worries about the economy and the future of the undocumented workers already here. So the Senate will fight back on Monday in Miami with its own patriotic pitch, billing a hearing topic as "Contributions of Immigrants to the U.S. Armed Forces."
So who's right? Both sides, of course. A great deal of anecdotal evidence is bandied about in this argument, and very few hard facts.
The U.S. government is not even certain about the number of illegal aliens in this country. This October the Census Bureau will release its very first preliminary estimate of how many unauthorized immigrants live here. We usually hear a figure of 11 million illegals in a nation about to reach an overall population total of 300 million. But that figure is not universally accepted, in part because illegal residents are difficult to count. There could be more; there could be less.
If the House bill that seeks mass deportation goes into effect, undocumented workers will go further underground and we will never understand the extent of the problem - or even whether it is a problem at all.
A Congressional Budget Office report in May said the proposed Senate immigration bill, with its steps toward alien legitimacy, would reduce the wages of high school dropouts by 4 percent over the next 10 years but increase the living standards of better-educated workers through cheaper products and services.
The CBO report estimates that 4.6 million unauthorized immigrants already here would be eligible for some kinds of federal benefits by 2016 as they gradually meet the criteria for citizenship. The Senate bill would cost $54 billion in federal funds over the next decade but the cost would be more than offset by $66 billion in new tax revenues from immigrant workers, the CBO concluded.
The conservative Heritage Foundation, which favors the punitive House bill, speculates there may be 20 million illegals in the country today, rather than 11 million. In that case, an HF report predicts the annual cost to government would balloon to $65 billion, including support for children and elderly parents. But the HF report's author, Robert Rector, concedes "We really don't know how many illegals are here. . . we don't know what the social implications of that are."
Our population growth has been fueled by a longer life expectancy and the flow of immigrants, legal and illegal. This is, on the whole, a good thing, adding to the national tax base and the available pool of workers and compensating for the strain on pensions, social services and health programs.
Properly measuring the economic and social consequences of immigration may be impossible. But we are an optimistic country and we can cope with changing demographics.
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Marianne Means can be reached at the e-mail address means@hearstdc.com
