What we keep forgetting about immigration reform

A good part of this discrimination is the legacy of IRCA and the unwillingness of our national politicians to tackle a massive problem that simply will not go away. Since President George W. Bush was close to a labor management deal just before the events of 9/11, federal immigration initiatives have been few and far between. One result of this federal lethargy is that state legislatures eventually moved into the political void. But local politicians’ slew of legal answers to a broken federal policy, beginning in Arizona and quickly spreading to both other border and non-border states, did little but further damage our weak economy and generate even more stereotypes about recent immigrants. 

Perhaps it is the so-called Dreamers, the children of illegal immigrants, who best seized the imagination of many Americans by simply revealing the core humanity of their lives in their new country. Risking immediate deportation by identifying themselves as illegal, these sons and daughters of immigrants — sons and daughters who never themselves chose to immigrate — bravely began telling their individual stories to anyone who would listen. Frequently crossing the border before they reached the age of ten, these criminalized children worked hard in public school to learn English and get good grades but then, after graduating from high school, ran squarely into a wall as thick as any concrete border buttress. Coming out of the shadows en masse, all that these children of illegal immigrants asked for was a chance to continue to work hard and to build a secure, safe, and legal life in a place far different than their country of origin.

The stories of the Dreamers, and  Obama’s executive order allowing them legally to remain two years within our borders, are  stories that most Americans found not just credible, but compelling. Again, unless you are a Native American or brought here as a slave, how could the personal stories of Dreamers not undermine the stereotypical sludge thrown at this generation of new immigrants? Dreamers were able to humanize the impact of bad federal immigration legislation and, in so doing, demonstrate that IRCA excelled at wasting human lives in a country whose history is filled by achievements of immigrants — from Albert Einstein to Arnold Schwarzenegger.    

Here are my three low-cost immigration reforms which will improve our national security and also reduce the number of deaths at the border.

First, require our Border Patrol agents to have a minimum of a college degree, and send them to the Border Patrol Academy for a full six months rather than the current 53 days. The result will be a more efficient, thoughtful, and well-trained federal law enforcement agency, now the largest in our land.

Second, reduce the hostile work environment for female agents within the Border Patrol. Allow zero tolerance for managers and agents who discriminate against fellow agents based upon gender, promote agents based upon merit rather than gender, and provide gender-sensitive training to all agents. In 2013 it is a public embarrassment that only 5 percent of all Border Patrol agents are female.

And third and last, hire well trained, educated, and experienced Border Patrol agents to provide contract supervision over all the subcontractors, big and small, who provide services for this law enforcement agency. Make it impossible for the Border Patrol to spend more than one billion taxpayer dollars on a “virtual” border fence that never worked, or $250 million on a radioscopic spectrometer that never functioned properly.

We are a nation of immigrants and should be proud of this legacy of achievements and contributions. Next month, when the Senate debates immigration reform, let us constantly remind our elected politicians of their responsibility to negotiate new immigration laws which finally bring sanity and fairness to all Americans and, as well, to those who would choose to become new Americans.

Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.