Title:	Undecided Nation
Authors:	Tony Payan Erika de la Garza
Keywords:	Nation
Issue Date:	2014
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	America’s immigration system is irrevocably broken, and it is getting progressively worse. The failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform—and by that I mean a system that stands by its commitment to families, helps US workers by creating new and better jobs, reduces the incentives for exploiting workers, chooses its immigrants in ways that help them and the communities in which they settle to succeed, and meets the US economy’s ever-changing needs—has left the US divided and unable to keep up with game-changing shifts in the global economy. While a number of piecemeal tweaks have become law since the last two pieces of substantial legislation were passed almost three decades ago, the cumulative effect has been one of falling further behind, if not outright failure. The longer we wait to act in a systemic way, the farther we will drift away from an immigration system that reflects both our values and economic needs. As this volume goes to the publisher, the prospects for reform have become—if anything—less clear and certainly less straightforward. The slow economic recovery with its accompanying jobs’ crisis, the fever pitch to increase enforcement efforts (because politics, rather than policy, demands it) with no agreement on what “success” in this regard would look like, and the growing polarization in the US Congress are contributing to a playing field that is becoming, once again, toxic. Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, continues to show a dangerous indecision on immigration reform. The US—now nearer to passing large-scale reform than any time in the recent past—must work diligently to not waste this moment. The consequences of inaction are important to understand. One byproduct of the federal government’s failure to address immigration in a holistic manner has been states taking matters into their own hands. We have seen a cascade of state and local “solutions” that have been quite reactionary and dissonant with the country’s constitution, values, and economic interests. Arizona’s controversial SB 1070, for instance, required state and local police officers to inquire into the immigration status of anyone they stopped if they had "reasonable suspicion" they were here illegally, leading to claims of racial profiling. Other responses were much more generous, such as the establishment of “sanctuary” cities determined to welcome immigrants regardless of their legal status, yet still a symptom of the same larger problem. Many of these responses are dealt with in this volume. Support for comprehensive immigration reform picked up noticeably after the 2012 elections. Some perceived Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s poor performance with Latino and other ethnic and minority voters as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican Party. Post-election polling continued the secular trend of showing that most Americans wanted to fix the system through a combination of tougher enforcement measures (including a system to prevent employers from hiring unauthorized workers), expanding opportunities for workers to come to the US legally, and, crucially, creating a path to regularize the status of the 11 million or so unauthorized workers already in the country. Different requirements typically garner different levels of support, but the “tougher” the requirements are—such as fines composed of paying back taxes and admitting to breaking US law—the greater the support
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53103
ISBN:	978-3-319-06480-2
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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