by John McCain
Anyone can become an American if they embrace our values. Anyone. You don’t even have to speak the language. As a practical matter, you’ll have an easier time of it here if you learn English. But even a common language isn’t essential to assimilation. Not in this country. Spanish has been spoken in Arizona centuries longer than English has. Plenty of Italian, Polish, Serbian, Russian, German, and every other kind of non-English-speaking immigrants came to this country and struggled to learn the language. They relied mostly or exclusively on their native tongue to talk with family and friends, and yet managed to communicate with English-speaking Americans, while their children grew up bilingual.
There are valid arguments for and against high levels of immigration. You can argue that immigrants are depressing wages and taking jobs from native-born Americans, or taking more jobs than they’re creating. You can argue they’re a drain on public resources, straining school systems and human services, while not contributing enough to public treasuries or local economic growth to compensate. I think those arguments are mistaken, and the facts support my view. But they’re not outlandish. Nor are they racist or expressions of the narrow-minded nationalism of Steve King and Steve Bannon, and those parts of the America First crowd that misunderstand American culture and exceptionalism. Demographics aren’t destiny. Our culture isn’t the work of one race or religion. To suggest otherwise is to contradict our ideals and to doubt their power.
What is behind that point of view? Often it’s little more than a reaction to different behavior and tastes that are perceived as an attack on the culture, on the American way, especially in previously homogenous small towns and rural communities. Hearing a foreign language spoken where only English was ever heard. Seeing new restaurants and shops cater mostly to immigrants. Finding your kid’s school pageant includes music from another country performed in another language. Driving by a familiar neighborhood and being taken aback by the colors the houses are painted or the way the yards are kept. In some communities, these sudden departures from the familiar can make folks worry America is being appropriated by a foreign culture. It’s not. America is absorbing, as it always does, the latest contributions to our tastes and look and sound. It’s new. It’s foreign. But it isn’t an assault on our culture. In Arizona, no one, Anglo or Hispanic, native-born or immigrant, would think twice about hearing Spanish spoken anywhere or the prevalence of Mexican restaurants or the prominence of Hispanic heritage in the local humanities.
To be sure, there is anger over illegal immigration in Arizona, too, at times more than there is in parts of the country that have only recent experience with a wave of immigrants locating there. Arizona is a border state and bears the brunt of the economic, environmental, and criminal impact illegal immigration has on communities. Ranches and towns along the border can be dangerous places for the unauthorized immigrant and the native-born. But for centuries Hispanic influences have played a prominent part in shaping the culture of the American Southwest. We identify with them. That’s not to say there aren’t Arizonans who view immigration as a threat to civilization or share resentments and fears harbored by people in other states. There are. And there are also people here, as there are in every other place in this country, whose views about immigrants, at least non-European immigrants, are just racist. They can be cruel. But their influence in the immigration debate is marginal, limited usually to making themselves and sometimes nonracist immigration restrictionists look bad.
Unlawful immigration is a serious legal, economic, commercial, and security problem. It is not our biggest or most dangerous problem, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it is a serious problem, especially for border states. A comprehensive policy to address the problem should have been signed into law more than a decade ago. It’s not that complicated. Its provisions are obvious, practical, and humane. That a compromise immigration reform policy is no closer to being enacted today than it was when we first attempted it is mostly attributable to the misinformation and downright lies that enflame opponents, which have only gotten more pervasive and inflammatory over the last decade. Here’s a little straight talk:
First, there are eleven to twelve million immigrants, give or take, residing in this country without permission. Most of them are never going to leave, and they’re really isn’t much we can do about it or that we should want to do about it. About seven million are from Mexico and Central America. The other four to five million came from all over, from China to Ireland. Two-thirds of adult unauthorized immigrants have been here for at least a decade. They’re integrated into the fabric of our communities. In a word, but for their illegal status, they are assimilated, and most of them aren’t going anywhere. The physical and legal infrastructure and the nationwide hard-heartedness required to round up and deport eleven to twelve million mostly decent, hardworking, well-liked people will never exist. To attempt anything like it would produce an economic, social, and humanitarian catastrophe. It would hurt communities all over the country, shrink revenue bases, necessitate tax increases and cuts in services. Businesses large and small would be damaged or destroyed by sudden losses of employees and customers. Friendships would be lost, students hauled from schools, valued members of community organizations treated as criminals, families separated as teenaged children born here to immigrant parents are U.S. citizens, and many will stay to make their way on their own in their native land. It would destroy the spirit of communities and our reputation as a compassionate and practical people.
Second, the great majority of unauthorized immigrants came here to find work and raise their families, like most immigrants have throughout our history. They are not the rapists, killers, and drug dealers of fevered imaginations on the Right. They’re not the cause of the opioid epidemic. They’re decent people working hard to make better lives. Only a small fraction ever commit violent crimes, a much lower percentage than native-born violent criminals. Only 3 percent have committed a felony of any kind. About a third own their own homes. A third have children born here. They pay taxes, obey the laws, contribute positively to our economy and society, serve in our armed services, are killed and wounded in overseas conflicts, and live in fear they’ll be discovered and expelled from the land of their dreams.
Third, since 2007 most immigrants who come here without permission simply outstay their visas. They don’t cross the border illegally. And since the Great Recession, net illegal immigration has been flat or negative as more immigrants voluntarily returned to their native countries as jobs were scarce. A wall along the southern border isn’t going to solve the problem. It might make it worse. Spending tens of billions of dollars on a dubious barrier to illegal immigration takes resources away from more effective border security and enforcement. There are long stretches of the southern border where the topography makes a wall impractical. Where a physical barrier is feasible, fences are better than walls for an obvious reason, they’re transparent. You can see what people on the other side are doing. Where barriers aren’t feasible, drones, sensors, and cameras can provide better security. No matter what you build, a wall or a fence, no matter how high and forbidding it is, it can be scaled or tunneled under or breached in some way. Build a thirty-foot wall, and someone will get rich selling thirty-foot ladders. And walls and fences cannot apprehend anyone. You need people to do that, and there will never be enough Border Patrol agents to monitor twenty-four hours a day every stretch of a two-thousand-mile border, especially if you’re spending $20 billion on a wall. We can make it harder to cross the border illegally. We can reduce the numbers of people walking over, wading across, digging under, climbing over the border. We can build a series of hugely expensive walls and fences that look impregnable. We can hire thousands of new Border Patrol agents. We can crack down on employers of unauthorized immigrants. We can do most of the things the opponents of comprehensive immigration reform demand, and they might significantly reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants entering the country. But people are still going to cross th
at border illegally every day. We can restrain illegal immigration. We cannot stop it altogether. There is one way to curtail illegal immigration that’s more effective than all others. An economic downturn and lack of job opportunities here will do it as we saw during the last recession. Again, that’s because virtually all adults entering our country illegally aren’t doing it to commit crimes or live on welfare. They’re seeking work they don’t have in their home countries.
Fourth, unauthorized immigrants aren’t depriving millions of native-born Americans of employment. Most jobs taken by immigrants are low-paying, and have the hardest conditions. Their employers have trouble filling payrolls. Many jobs are seasonal or otherwise irregular employment. Unauthorized immigrants are not sucking up all the blue-collar jobs in the country as their most hyperbolic antagonists insist. They make up approximately 5 percent of the workforce. Even in communities where immigrants have taken jobs that might otherwise have been taken by native residents, their economic activity, their spending on local goods and services creates new job opportunities for locals.
There are politicians today who would have Americans believe that illegal immigration is one of the worst scourges afflicting the country. Some who espouse that nonsense believe it to be true. Their opinions were formed in restricted information loops as they communicate mostly or exclusively with people who believe the same. Many more know it isn’t so, and are cynically claiming otherwise for one of a couple reasons. I expect most are identifying a scapegoat people can blame for their dissatisfaction because it suggests there is an easy fix for difficult problems, an easy fix that’s easy to campaign on. Others are doing it for more sinister reasons they’re reluctant to acknowledge publicly, including racial prejudice. Whatever their reasons, the cynical and the ignorant promotion of false information and unnecessary fear have the same outcome. Decent, hardworking people who mean no harm are blamed for crime, unemployment, failing schools, and various other ills, and become in the eyes of many the objects of hate and fear.
The other consequence is that Americans who are having a hard time of it, people with fewer job opportunities than previous generations had, people with children in underperforming schools, families who have been victimized by crime or lost a loved one to drugs are deluded into believing there’s a simple remedy for all of it—round up all the “illegals” and deport them. The cynic knows that isn’t going to happen and even were such a “roundup” possible it wouldn’t appreciably improve any of the problems they blamed on immigrants. Of course, they wouldn’t ever admit their prescription was bullshit. They would just perpetuate the delusion, keep blaming “the Swamp” for not doing enough to rid the country of the scourge. Some politicians will always see an advantage in it, and some folks will always fall for it. But America’s demographics are changing inexorably and with it public opinion as well. Soon scapegoating immigrants is going to help the Republican Party lose more elections than it helps win.
Nearly 57 million people living in the United States are Hispanic, about 18 percent of the population, a percentage that has been steadily growing for years. In one year, of the two and a half million people who were added to the population, almost half were Hispanic. In forty years, the number of Hispanic Americans is projected to reach 119 million, nearly 30 percent of the population. As a matter of survival, the Republican Party has to be competitive for the fastest-growing segment of the population. States such as Arizona and Texas, vote-rich, reliable red states, will become competitive for Democrats. Arizona will get there first. Trump only won it by 4 percent, less than half the margin Governor Romney won with in 2012. And when Texas goes, there is no conceivable way Republicans can win a presidential election given the Democrats’ lock on New York and California (also related partly to Hispanic alienation from Republicans).
Let’s use my state as an example. The Hispanic segment of Arizona’s population is approaching one-third. More Hispanics are enrolled in Arizona schools than any other ethnic group. Forty-four percent of students are Hispanic. Two hundred ninety-one thousand Arizona Hispanics voted in the 2008 presidential election. Eight years later, the number had almost doubled to 550,000. As a border state, Arizona confronts some of the worst problems associated with streams of unauthorized immigrants regularly entering the state, and that made for some distress and hard feelings, which resulted in legislation and referenda that seemed harsh and discriminatory, which in turn led to hard feelings and distrust among Arizona Hispanics. Exit polling in 2016 suggested that President Trump won more than 30 percent of Hispanics in Arizona. Analysis based on comprehensive and precise polling indicates his share of their vote could have been as low as 12 percent, which would partly explain why he won the state so narrowly. That isn’t terribly surprising given his insulting references to unauthorized immigrants and the hard positions the state adopted in recent years to punish and apprehend them, exacerbated by the offensive statements and policies of Maricopa County’s notorious former sheriff, convicted felon Joe Arpaio.
Yet for all that trouble, Arizona life is a blend of Hispanic and Anglo influences. We know each other. We’re used to each other, having not merely coexisted for centuries, but having built together from a desert wilderness this thriving state. In other places in the country, disruptions caused by the sudden arrival of an immigrant community can include the shock of the new and different. Obviously, that’s not the case here. And things have settled down in Arizona in recent years. Most Arizonans have a pretty practical take on the problem of illegal immigration. We know illegal immigration will never be stopped entirely. We know most people are coming because there’s work here, because they’re needed. We want the border made more secure. We want the rule of law respected. We want to save people from dying in the desert where they were left by unscrupulous “coyotes.” We want to prevent the environmental and private property damage caused by illegal crossings. We want to interdict drugs flowing across the border and into the veins of kids. We want responsible officials to tackle these problems with sensible policies. And we want people treated with respect for their dignity.
Our own experiences inform our views of immigrants. A recent Arizona poll found that more than two-thirds of Arizonans don’t want all unauthorized immigrants deported. Two-thirds don’t think a border wall makes sense. Two-thirds don’t believe immigrants increase crime rates. Three-quarters allowed that immigrants don’t take jobs from citizens. Over 80 percent believe they’re good for the economy and improve American society. It’s not that Arizonans don’t care about border security, of course we do. We deal every day with problems caused by unsecured borders. I campaigned on improving security, and every immigration bill I’ve sponsored has proposed measures to strengthen the border and provided the resources to do it. In a campaign ad, I called, notoriously my critics would say, for finishing “the dang fence.” I probably wouldn’t have emphasized the measure if it weren’t very popular with my constituents. But I meant it. We need effective barriers on the border. Arizonans know from experience that fences are more practical in many places than a wall would be, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want improvements made. And familiarity has bred appreciation here for the character and culture of immigrants that I’m sure will be the case in time in other parts of the country, when people are no longer perceived as aliens but as neighbors.
Right now, Republicans are on the wrong side of that progress, and if we want to retain our competitiveness in the fastest-growing communities in the country we’ll stop letting the zealots drive the debate, and fix the problem that gives them their soapbox. We can begin by permanently legalizing the status of unauthorized immigrants who were brought here as children, the so-called Dreamers. America is the only country they know. It would be a surpassingly cruel act to deport them, and it would earn Republicans the enmity of not only Hispanic Americans, but the enmity of their neighbors and friends as well. Most Arizona high school seniors are Hispanic. Do you think most of them would consider voting for the party that
pulled their friends out of school, took them away from their teams and clubs and neighborhoods, and put them on buses to Mexico?
We face much more difficult and complicated problems in this century than illegal immigration. If we have the political will, the solution isn’t hard to envision, if for no other reason than because variations of the solution have been proposed three times in the last twelve years. But having the political will requires doing something Republican leadership isn’t comfortable doing: acting over the objections of a minority of Americans, which on this issue is mostly comprised of Republicans.
Most of the provisions of an effective comprehensive immigration reform were included in the first immigration bill Ted Kennedy and I worked on in 2005 and 2006. The late Arlen Specter was the primary sponsor of the bill the Senate debated in 2006. He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, which had jurisdiction over the issue and sent the bill to the full Senate. But it was an amended version of the bill Ted and I and our staffs had written and introduced in 2005, working with colleagues Chuck Hagel, Mel Martinez, Lindsey Graham, and prominent conservative Sam Brownback.
The House had passed a very different immigration bill near the end of 2005. Republicans had majorities in both the House and Senate. And while President George W. Bush wanted comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of our bill, many House Republicans’ views on immigration reform were restricted to authorizing more money for border security and tougher enforcement of existing law, which is practically all the House bill included. The President’s political standing at the time had been weakened by the Iraq War’s unpopularity, and though there remained considerable affection for him among conservatives, bucking him wasn’t politically risky. On this issue, with certain constituencies, it was advantageous. The issue was starting to heat up on the Far Right. Bashing illegal immigrants proved popular with conservative talk radio audiences, and if any industry enjoys beating dead horses, it’s conservative talk radio. Honestly, having to dream up more hyperbole on the same damn subject day after day would bore the hell out of me. A few backbench Republicans were acquiring notoriety by taking a hard stance against any practical solution to the eleven or so million people living in the country without authorization. “No amnesty!” was their battle cry.