The San Diego Union Tribune
NAVARRETTE COLUMN
Remember when state and local officials couldn’t wait to get their 15 minutes of fame by cracking down on illegal immigration?
Well, thank goodness, that trend might be coming to an end – in part because of the economic crisis.
According to a recent article in USA TODAY, some of these saber rattlers have lost their appetite, moved on to other issues, or simply confronted the economic reality that local enforcement measures cost money – something that is suddenly in short supply.
Others figured out that one consequence of tackling the immigration issue locally is that you foster divisions and wind up – in the words of one local official quoted in the article – “pitting neighbor against neighbor.”
Still others are concerned about negative publicity or the cost of fighting legal challenges – especially at a time when, as another local official put it, “we don’t know whether illegal immigration is a financial plus or minus.”
If such a trend is developing, it would be quite a departure from what occurred during the great immigration scare of the last few years.
You’ll recall how many state legislators, mayors and city council members, county supervisors and sheriffs – just about anyone who stood for re-election and wanted to distract voters from other issues – used the presence of illegal immigrants as a way to establish their toughness bona fides.
Meanwhile, the local crackdowns the politicians proposed must have been terribly confusing to the illegal immigrants, given that, in their view, these places invited them in by offering them jobs. Then they want them out?
And, when some leave – either to neighboring states or back to their own countries – employers want them back?
In Arizona and Colorado, where lawmakers tried to make their states inhospitable to illegal immigrants, they’re now devising plans for their own labor agreements with Mexico.
Many of the efforts were so clumsy and imprecise that they seemed aimed at all foreigners in general. As such, they appeared to be motivated less by a desire to enforce the law than a desperation to turn back the clock and return communities to what they were before the latest immigrants arrived.
A prime example is any law or ordinance that declares English the official language of a city or state.
That has nothing to do with securing the border or running off illegal immigrants. It’s about making English-speakers feel comfortable amid changing demographics.
In Iowa, lawmakers declared English the state’s official language and required that most government documents be printed solely in English. Democratic state Rep. Bruce Hunter now wants to repeal the law because he thinks it sends “the wrong message about the state of Iowa.”
There was similar concern in the small town of Oak Point, Texas, about 35 miles north of Dallas. The town adopted an English-only resolution in 2007 – only to rescind the measure a year later amid worries about negative publicity.
In both Utah and Alabama, officials have tried to tone down or delay implementing laws that crack down on those who hire illegal immigrants.
At a time when states are hurting financially and desperate to keep businesses from relocating elsewhere, anything that might scare off companies risks being tossed overboard.
Something similar happened in Arizona, where voters recently passed a ballot initiative to soften one of the toughest employer-sanction laws in the country. Whereas employers previously could lose their business license for repeatedly hiring illegal immigrants, now that only happens if they “knowingly” do so.
And so, in what has to be seen as a positive development, more and more local officials seem eager to put the illegal immigration issue back where it belongs – in the hands of federal authorities.
That’s the point. Just because you don’t think that English-only laws should be mixed up with immigration reform doesn’t mean you support an open border.
We should be tough on illegal immigration. We should speed up deportations, continue workplace raids, stiffen penalties for smugglers, crack down on employers, create a tamper-proof ID card for employees, and give the Border Patrol agents on the front lines the tools they need to do their jobs.
We should do all that and more – as long as we do it at the federal level.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com
RUBEN NAVARRETTE
The San Diego Union Tribune