By the time I returned from law school, though, tensions between blacks and Latinos in Chicago had started to surface. Between 1990 and 2000, the Spanish-speaking population in Chicago rose by 38 percent, and with this surge in population the Latino community was no longer content to serve as junior partner in any black-brown coalition. After Harold Washington died, a new cohort of Latino elected officials, affiliated with Richard M. Daley and remnants of the old Chicago political machine, came onto the scene, men and women less interested in high-minded principles and rainbow coalitions than in translating growing political power into contracts and jobs. As black businesses and commercial strips struggled, Latino businesses thrived, helped in part by financial ties to home countries and by a customer base held captive by language barriers. Everywhere, it seemed, Mexican and Central American workers came to dominate low-wage work that had once gone to blacks — as waiters and busboys, as hotel maids and as bellmen — and made inroads in the construction trades that had long excluded black labor. Blacks began to grumble and feel threatened; they wondered if once again they were about to be passed over by those who’d just arrived.
I shouldn’t exaggerate the schism. Because both communities share a host of challenges, from soaring high school dropout rates to inadequate health insurance, blacks and Latinos continue to find common cause in their politics. As frustrated as blacks may get whenever they pass a construction site in a black neighborhood and see nothing but Mexican workers, I rarely hear them blame the workers themselves; usually they reserve their wrath for the contractors who hire them. When pressed, many blacks will express a grudging admiration for Latino immigrants — for their strong work ethic and commitment to family, their willingness to start at the bottom and make the most of what little they have.
Still, there’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before. Not all these fears are irrational. The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole — especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan — it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net. Other fears of native-born Americans are disturbingly familiar, echoing the xenophobia once directed at Italians, Irish, and Slavs fresh off the boat — fears that Latinos are inherently too different, in culture and in temperament, to assimilate fully into the American way of life; fears that, with the demographic changes now taking place, Latinos will wrest control away from those accustomed to wielding political power.
For most Americans, though, concerns over illegal immigration go deeper than worries about economic displacement and are more subtle than simple racism. In the past, immigration occurred on America’s terms; the welcome mat could be extended selectively, on the basis of the immigrant’s skills or color or the needs of industry. The laborer, whether Chinese or Russian or Greek, found himself a stranger in a strange land, severed from his home country, subject to often harsh constraints, forced to adapt to rules not of his own making.
Today it seems those terms no longer apply. Immigrants are entering as a result of a porous border rather than any systematic government policy; Mexico’s proximity, as well as the desperate poverty of so many of its people, suggests the possibility that border crossing cannot even be slowed, much less stopped. Satellites, calling cards, and wire transfers, as well as the sheer size of the burgeoning Latino market, make it easier for today’s immigrant to maintain linguistic and cultural ties to the land of his or her birth (the Spanish-language Univision now boasts the highest-rated newscast in Chicago). Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt. In this way, the immigration debate comes to signify not a loss of jobs but a loss of sovereignty, just one more example — like September 11, avian flu, computer viruses, and factories moving to China — that America seems unable to control its own destiny.
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 in the House ever since it passed out of the Senate.