The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [126]
IT WAS IN this volatile atmosphere—with strong passions on both sides of the debate—that the U.S. Senate considered a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the spring of 2006. With hundreds of thousands of immigrants protesting in the streets and a group of self-proclaimed vigilantes called the Minutemen rushing to defend the Southern border, the political stakes were high for Democrats, Republicans, and the President.
Under the leadership of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the Senate crafted a compromise bill with three major components. The bill provided much tougher border security and, through an amendment I wrote with Chuck Grassley, made it significantly more difficult for employers to hire workers here illegally. The bill also recognized the difficulty of deporting twelve million undocumented immigrants and instead created a long, eleven-year process under which many of them could earn their citizenship. Finally, the bill included a guest worker program that would allow two hundred thousand foreign workers to enter the country for temporary employment.
On balance, I thought the legislation was worth supporting. Still, the guest worker provision of the bill troubled me; it was essentially a sop to big business, a means for them to employ immigrants without granting them citizenship rights—indeed, a means for business to gain the benefits of outsourcing without having to locate their operations overseas. To address this problem, I succeeded in including language requiring that any job first be offered to U.S. workers, and that employers not undercut American wages by paying guest workers less than they would pay U.S. workers. The idea was to ensure that businesses turned to temporary foreign workers only when there was a labor shortage.
It was plainly an amendment designed to help American workers, which is why all the unions vigorously supported it. But no sooner had the provision been included in the bill than some conservatives, both inside and outside of the Senate, began attacking me for supposedly “requiring that foreign workers get paid more than U.S. workers.”
On the floor of the Senate one day, I caught up with one of my Republican colleagues who had leveled this charge at me. I explained that the bill would actually protect U.S. workers, since employers would have no incentive to hire guest workers if they had to pay the same wages they paid U.S. workers. The Republican colleague, who had been quite vocal in his opposition to any bill that would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants, shook his head.
“My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants,” he said. “All your amendment does is make them pay more for their help.”
“But why would they hire immigrants over U.S. workers if they cost the same?” I asked him.
He smiled. “’Cause let’s face it, Barack. These Mexicans are just willing to work harder than Americans do.”
That the opponents of the immigration bill could make such statements privately, while publicly pretending to stand up for American workers, indicates the degree of cynicism and hypocrisy that permeates the immigration debate. But with the public in a sour mood, their fears and anxieties fed daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the country, I can’t say I’m surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled