Vox
By Dara Lind
August 4, 2015
Three
days before the first Republican presidential debate, where Jeb Bush
will go head to head with the man who displaced him at the top of the
polls for the first time,
Bush's campaign released a proposal for immigration enforcement. This
is not a coincidence. Bush and his campaign are trying to protect
themselves against attacks from the right on immigration, from Donald
Trump and basically every other candidate in the race,
over his support for legal status for unauthorized immigrants currently
in the US.
But
simply opposing "amnesty" doesn't automatically secure the border. Bush
knows how border security actually works better than the Donald Trumps
of the world — he literally
wrote a book on it — and this proposal, for the most part, is a more
sober, realistic plan for preventing unauthorized migration than his
opponents are likely to make.
Instead
of making promises that the government can't keep, Bush is focusing on
interior enforcement — where the US really could be doing more — instead
of border enforcement,
where there isn't much more it can do. The takeaway: If you cared more
about preventing unauthorized migration than about looking tough, here's
what you would do.
Bush believes that comprehensive immigration reform is the best way to prevent unauthorized migration
"Comprehensive
immigration reform" is a catchphrase for a three-part policy: increased
immigration enforcement both at the border and in the interior of the
US, to prevent
future unauthorized migration; a way for unauthorized immigrants who
are already in the US to stay (usually via a path to legal status and
ultimately the ability to apply for citizenship); and reforms to legal
immigration. The theory behind the policy is that
it's the best way to "secure the border" and end unauthorized
migration: it's a lot easier to prevent unauthorized migration than it
is to root out 11 million people who've been here for years.
That
seems to be what Bush is proposing here, too. The end of his campaign's
fact sheet says (emphasis added), "These six proposals, when combined
with a rigorous path
to earned legal status, would realistically and honestly address the
status of the 11 million people here illegally today and protect against
future illegal immigration." It's not a full-throated endorsement of
the comprehensive immigration bill the Senate
passed in 2013, but it's an important note: These proposals aren't
supposed to work in a vacuum.
Bush knows that improving immigration enforcement is really about the interior — not the border
A
lot of border security proposals, especially from Republicans, are
about requiring the Border Patrol to meet quantitative goals — in other
words, using metrics to define
what a "secure border" looks like. That's not a bad idea, if you can
design the right metric. But using the metrics that exist right now
would be a disaster. They'd be more likely to lead to Border Patrol
cooking the books than to actually improve border security.
Bush
and his team are avoiding promises about making the border "100 percent
secure" because they know that's not something any president can do
right now. And just as
importantly, they're avoiding extravagant promises about doubling the
Border Patrol or giving it billions more dollars — things that the
government could actually do, but that wouldn't actually improve Border
Patrol effectiveness that much.
Most
of Bush's proposals are in line with what Border Patrol is asking
Congress for right now: expanding the use of "forward operating bases"
(a tactic Border Patrol's
already using to keep agents stationed in remote areas), expanding
surveillance technology, building more roads. The one exception: Bush,
like pretty much every Republican, wants to deregulate federal park land
on the border to make it easier for Border Patrol
to maneuver there, but Border Patrol maintains the Department of the
Interior already gives it the access it needs.
Politically
speaking, the point of talking about things like "forward operating
bases" is to remind Republican voters that Jeb Bush actually knows
things about immigration
policy, unlike some people who might currently be leading in the polls.
But as a matter of policy, Bush simply isn't interested in massive
border buildups as a show of force, because the US border already has
been built up over the last several years, and
unauthorized border crossings are very low. Where Bush's more
aggressive proposals are is in interior enforcement — something where
there is a lot more that could be done.
The part of the plan that would matter: employment and visa enforcement
As
the Bush proposal points out (and as Republicans have started
acknowledging pretty regularly), at least 40 percent of currently
unauthorized immigrants entered the
country legally and then overstayed their visas. To catch visa
overstays, you don't need more border security. What the Bush plan (like
the 2013 Senate bill and other comprehensive immigration reform plans)
proposes is that you need a way to track who's left
the country on time and who hasn't, and a way to prevent any
unauthorized immigrant who does manage to stay in the US from getting a
job.
Bush
wants a "biometric exit system" — using fingerprints and iris scans to
verify which visa-holders are leaving the US. Biometric exit is one of
those ideas that sounds
great, and because the Obama administration hasn't fulfilled a
congressional mandate to implement it yet, it's a good way to bash
Obama. But the reason it hasn't been implemented is because, barring a
big breakthrough in tech, it would be massively expensive
and result in much longer lines at Customs for flights leaving the
country.
Furthermore,
Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute told Vox, the current
tracking system (which uses passports) already tells us who's left the
country about
as effectively as a biometric system would. The problem is finding and
apprehending the people who haven't left. The meaningful part of Bush's
visa enforcement proposal is to spend more resources on tracking down
and deporting people who overstay their visas
— which isn't currently a federal enforcement priority.
Bush
also wants mandatory E-Verify, which would require employers to check
the immigration status of everyone they hire against a federal database.
And (almost certainly
in response to the killing of Kathryn Steinle in July and the outcry
against "sanctuary cities" in Congress) he wants to expand local/federal
cooperation on immigration enforcement.
Both
of these are enforcement programs, but they're also routinely proposed
as part of comprehensive immigration reform proposals. And how they
would work depends largely
on something Bush is leaving out of this fact sheet: whether current
unauthorized immigrants would be able to apply for "earned legal status"
while all of these enforcement measures were being implemented, or
whether the enforcement would happen first.
If
internal enforcement measures are put in place before the 11 million
unauthorized immigrants in the US can apply for legal status, it's not
at all clear that the enforcement
measures would be as effective — it would be a lot harder to know where
the government should be directing its enforcement resources, and, as
Bush admits, they can't deport everyone. Meanwhile, all those
enforcement measures will make life a lot harder for
the people Bush wants to get legal status down the road.
Can Bush persuade the GOP that improving security is more important than opposing "amnesty"?
Of
course, there's no reason for Bush to go into detail about how
legalization fits into his immigration plan right now. The Bush
campaign's goal is to remind Republican
voters and elites that while Bush might disagree with them on legal
status for unauthorized immigrants, he's more serious about securing the
border than Donald Trump is.
But
Bush's campaign might be in denial about the real political problem the
candidate faces. The Republican voters who are most concerned about
immigration care about
preventing "amnesty" — and they tend to define amnesty as anything that
lets unauthorized immigrants stay in the US, whether that's a path to citizenship or a path to legal status. So as long as Bush takes a
"pro-amnesty" position, his other arguments may
fall on deaf ears.
Bush's
campaign probably knows he has no hope of appealing to hardcore amnesty
hawks, especially now that they have a candidate (in Donald Trump) who
gives voice to their
deepest anxieties about immigrants. But for anyone who really does care
most about preventing unauthorized migration, Jeb Bush would like you
to know that he's your guy.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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