Immigration reform is a hot topic around the United States.
To Juan Peralez, a Lynnwood business owner and son of migrant workers, the proposed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 being considered by Congress is good and bad.
“It’s absolutely necessary to pass something,” he said. At the same time, he said, “it separates families” and the fines and application fees “are pretty steep.”
The bill, which was being debated in the U.S. Senate as the Enterprise went to press, calls for sweeping reforms — the first in 21 years — to the nation’s immigration laws.
Among the changes, the proposed legislation would grant legal status to millions of unlawful immigrants, boost the number of legal immigrants allowed, create a temporary guest worker program, and change the way immigrants qualify for green cards.
The Congressional Budget Office released a report June 4 that estimated a net population increase by 2017 of 1.8 million; by 2027, the report said, the increase in population “would be negligible.”
The immigrant rights issue has reignited long standing national debates about illegal aliens. At the same time, the proposed legislation has angered a broad spectrum of the American electorate — from liberal to conservative.
Peralez, who grew up in Stanwood, harvested fruit as a boy working with his parents in the fields. Now he runs a real estate office located inside Las Americas Business Center, 19909 64th Ave. W.
Peralez’ wife, Rosario Reyes, is CEO of Las Americas, a company that provides a host of business services, mostly to Latino clients.
He says immigration reform is needed, especially because undocumented workers have “no rights” in the workplace. He also says immigration laws are not equally enforced.
“We have more undocumented Canadians here” than Mexicans, he said.
Opponents of the proposed legislation say it rewards unlawful immigrants by granting them permanent residency.
“This bill is a complete surrender of the sovereignty of the United States,” said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, a North Carolina-based lobbying group.
Jorge Quiroga, who immigrated to the United States as an Argentinean political refugee in 1979, said opponents of the immigration reform bill “use all the terminology to scare people about immigration.”
Quiroga, a Lynnwood resident since 1985, is president of Committee for Amnesty and Social Justice, the group that organized pro-immigration marches in Seattle in 2006 and 2007.
“Immigration is a phenomenon as old as mankind,” Quiroga said, adding that part of the “scare tactic” by opponents is to conflate immigration and homeland security.
He noted that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., were purportedly orchestrated mostly by Saudi Arabian men who’d obtained student visas — legally.
“The only person that came to attack the United States came through the Canadian border,” he said, referring to Ahmed Ressam, who was apprehended in Port Angeles and convicted of plotting to blow up a Los Angeles International Airport terminal.
Gheen said the real impetus behind the proposed federal legislation are “global corporations” that heavily influence the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“They want open borders,” he said. “They want cheap labor and to grow the economy through rapid population growth.”
Quiroga and Peralez say opponents of immigration reform miss the bigger picture, which has as much to do with United States foreign trade policy as it does with jobs at home.
Since the North American Fair Trade agreement went into affect in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, the average working class Mexican has fared worse than before the agreement took effect, Quiroga said.
Mexican corn growers can’t compete with American corn growers, Quiroga said, because of agricultural subsidies that have forced Mexican farmers to sell their products for less.
“They make more money coming and working here than producing on their own land in Mexico,” Quiroga said.
The estimated 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants also are in a bind now because of new security measures, he said. Until recently, Mexicans who arrived illegally could return to Mexico more easily. Today, he said, “this protection on the border makes it worse for the immigrant to go back.”
And, though about 400,000 workers are needed to fill low-paying jobs in the U.S., only 2,000 to 3,000 visas are available, he said.
Now, he added, fruit growers in central and eastern Washington are advertising because they don’t have enough labor.
“The growers will be watching what is happening in California the next two months,” Quiroga said. If those California farmers have trouble finding laborers, “you will start hearing from the growers here in Washington.”
As to the claim that illegal immigrants take Americans’ jobs and don’t pay their fair share of taxes, Quiroga says those critics confuse day workers with farm workers.
Growers deduct their farmworkers state and federal taxes.
“Which tax is the one they don’t pay?” he asked, rhetorically.
Peralez said illegal workers have little to no rights on the job. Gheen, spokesman for the opponents group, said legal residents have to “wake up.”
“The American public has to realize quickly that we are all becoming slaves, not just the illegal aliens, all the people.
“This issue goes to the very heart of America’s self-governance.”
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