Comprehensive Immigration Reform—Dead?

By Joe Guzzardi
September 5, 2013

Summer is over. And comprehensive immigration reform may have died with it. The House, never enthusiastic, has quietly sent out the word that its fall agenda which includes Syria, the budget crisis and Obamacare, will not have time to include immigration. Many representatives are letting out a sigh of relief that they won’t have to deal with Capitol Hill’s contentious issue.

But comprehensive immigration reform allies pledge to carry on with their ineffective strategy to march and to protest into the fall months. Their latest game plan is to put together a series of coordinated demonstrations and rallies in major cities on October 5, in anticipation of a Washington march on October 8. U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez predicts that 15,000 people will attend. But 15,000 won’t show up because the marches, and Gutiérrez, are old news. Dating back to 2003 when the Immigrant Workers Freedom Rider bus tour departed Los Angeles up to and including this summer’s political theater, they’ve failed.  

Gutierrez’s bombast reflects the typical optimism that advocates expressed during the August congressional recess. They claim, correctly, that they’ve generated more headlines and greater television coverage than opposition pro-enforcement groups. That’s been the case for more than a decade. What’s also been true for a decade is that there’s no relationship between the number of street protests and congressional action.

The questions advocates must answer today are not when the House will vote on immigration reform but what went wrong with their strategy and how long will they have to wait before reform might resurface in any meaningful way. 

First, the Senate bill didn't play back home. The fanfare and hoopla in Washington and among the lobbyists didn’t fool voters. For one thing, their friends and family either don’t have jobs, are working in low paying jobs or are praying to high heaven that they’ll keep their jobs. More than 20 million Americans including blacks, Hispanics, whites, returning veterans, disabled and senior citizens are unemployed or underemployed and have U-6 unemployment rates above 10 percent. Giving legal work authorization to 11 million illegal and therefore unemployable immigrants is impossible for them to swallow, no matter how deceptively the concept is framed. 

Second, proponents will stammer about how “we’re going to get this done” and point to 2014 as their next target date. That’s not likely to happen. The last thing Congress wants to do in an election year is discuss immigration, the nation’s most toxic subject. Depending on what happens in 2014, reform could be dead until 2017. If Republicans win the Senate and keep the House, the former a strong possibility and the latter a certainty, immigration could be pushed back four more years.

Although the Republican-controlled House will be vilified for its inaction, the true culprit is the Gang of Eight which wrote and then passed a Senate bill unacceptable to the lower chamber. To this day, the Senate hasn’t formally sent the flawed S. 744 to the House. Senator Chuck Schumer, allegedly a brilliant legislator, should have known in advance that the House would reject his bill.

During the upcoming months and continuing into next year, pointless rallies, angry marches and inanities from Schumer, Gutiérrez and lobbyists will continue. They won’t be enough to revive comprehensive immigration reform but they’ll keep the media mindlessly engaged.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1986. Contact him at [email protected]