Crossing the Line
Congress wants to beef up the border, but will the restrictions go too far?

Monday, March 20, 2006 12:01 A.M. EST

Paul Gigot: This week on "The Journal Editorial Report," immigration reform. A heated election year debate is raging within the Republican Party on how to secure the nation's borders while dealing with the 11 million people already here illegally. We'll look at the policies currently under consideration, from a guest-worker program to a fence along the Rio Grande. Plus, what a hard line on immigration means for this year's midterm elections. Our panel tackles those topics and our weekly "Hits and Misses." It all begins after the news.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens joins me now from Denver. Hello, Governor. Welcome.

Owens: Good to be with you, Paul.

Gigot: Quick factual question. What percentage of your state's population is illegal do you think?

Owens: It's hard to say. But Colorado has about 4.5 million people and we believe there's probably 250,000 people here illegally. The problem isn't just that number, though. It's a number that is starting to exponentially grow, and that's why it's more important than ever to solve this problem.

Gigot: What would happen to the state's economy, Colorado economy, if suddenly you stopped getting those willing workers, because that is I assume why they're coming? Would the economy suffer?

Owens: Well, I think it would, but I also think, to be fair to the other side, that there are some significant costs because of some of these folks who are moving here illegally. And so what I would like to see is a way to handle our worker needs legally and above the table and have them pay taxes, rather then have them underground with some of the problems that we're seeing through that illegality that sometimes they are forced into.

Gigot: I want to talk about the guest-worker idea that you have. But first, one of your fellow Republicans from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, is stressing border enforcement: more police, a wall along the border, maybe even deportation. Will that alone, do you think, solve this problem of illegal immigration?

Owens: No. That alone wouldn't. Though parts of that is a component of any successful attempt to reform this system. I do think we need to do a better job of reforming, protecting that border, because any legal system we set up, if people can avoid it by simply walking across the border, they will do so. But I don't believe that that by itself is going to solve the problem. We do need to have a guest-worker program that allows us to have people here legally to do the jobs that we simply don't have Americans able to undertake.

Gigot: Does that mean that you would favor actually building a wall along the 2,000-mile Mexican border? And Congressman Tancredo says, let's do Canada as well. Do you agree with that?

Owens: No, I wouldn't favor a wall along all 2,000 miles of that border. I think there are other ways to protect that border: electronic surveillance, sensors. There may be a need along certain parts of it for a wall. We've already seen, small, in terms of miles, some walls put up. More to protect the Mexicans in terms of not allowing them as easily to get into situations where they're going to put themselves in danger.

We need to defend the border, Paul, because any plan with that porous border isn't going to work. Then the second step, I believe, is to set up a legal to bring in people that are willing to work here under our laws and then finally keep all of that discussion separate from the question of citizenship, which has really bogged the debate down in so many different ways.

Gigot: Well, you've been working with the Krieble Foundation on an idea to bring in the private sector to help track workers here and make sure that we know who's here and who isn't. How would that work?

Owens: Paul, we're all very concerned that any program would get tied down in federal bureaucracy. None of us are very optimistic that the federal government's really going to be able to set up a system to establish guest workers. So what the Krieble Foundation, based here in Colorado, has proposed--something that I strongly support as well as many others around the country--is contract with the private sector to help us manage this guest-worker program. We do this in other areas, where the federal bureaucracy may set the rules, but we outsource it, we contract it with the private sector. I think that is something we should do here. Once we set up a guest-worker program, once we start to defend that border, I think we can have a system that works well for the United States and helps our economy and helps protect us also in a time of significant homeland security challenge.

Gigot: Well governor, a lot of critics of the guest worker program say that it's really a disguised form of amnesty, which is their word, because you are rewarding people who have behaved illegally, who are here illegally, and you're rewarding them with permanent residence. What is your response to that charge?

Owens: Well, my response is I think that confuses with what we're actually trying to do with the guest-worker program. First of all, I would require them to go through a background check. I would require them at some point during the guest-worker program to return to their country of origin so that they could come back legally. And I would also not give them any place in line in terms of being a citizen. We need to separate guest worker as one track and one need for our country from citizenship, which we can define as with--in terms of however we want to define it. By keeping the two separate I think we can actually move to solve the problem.

Gigot: Very quickly, would you recommend that President Bush veto any immigration reform bill that didn't contain some guest-worker program?

Owens: It depends on if we thought we could get guest-worker later. I do believe we need a guest-worker program complete with background check and with all of the transparency we can have in a guest-worker program. I also think we need to defend that border better. I would prefer to see both done at the same time, and I'm sure the president has that preference as well.

Gigot: OK. Thank you, Gov. Bill Owens.

Owens: Thanks, Paul.

Gigot: When we come back, from guest workers to the great wall. Our panel would dissect the policies at the heart of the immigration debate.

Gigot: Welcome back. That was President Bush late last year reviving his proposal for a guest-worker program that critics say is a form of amnesty. Joining the panel this week, National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru as well as Steve Moore and Jason Riley, both Wall Street Journal editorial board members. Ramesh, welcome.

Ponnuru: Thank you.

Gigot: It seems to me, at least, that over the last 20 years or so Congress has passed bill after bill stressing enforcement on immigration control. Why should we think that a new one is going to work when we still have an immigration problem?

Ponnuru: Well, Congress has in fact passed a lot of enforcement. And enforcement really comes in two types. There's enforcement at the border, which has really, especially the last few years, been implemented and--but as a lot of people point out, including you, that's not enough. But we haven't had enforcement in the interior when people are hiring illegal immigrants, and that, because of business pressure, has largely not been enforced. The question with these new bills is, are they are going to be enforced?

Gigot: But are you saying that you would endorse more sanctions against employers, more prosecution of employers who might hire illegal immigrants without really knowing that they're illegal?

Ponnuru: Well, even if you take a step less than that, if you were to do something like--a few years ago the Social Security Administration called a bunch of employers in Nebraska and pointed out that a lot of the people working there had fake Social Security numbers, and people started leaving. Business groups called their senators, called the governor of Nebraska. They forced Social Security to stop that enforcement. Even things like that we're not doing. We're not even talking about throwing businessmen in jail.

Gigot: Steve, is that going to work?

Moore: Well, one of the problems with that is that it's very difficult for employers to know whether a worker is legal or illegal. And I do think, Ramesh, that any kind of card that you come up with, even if it has a biometric identifier, it's going to be very easily counterfeited and the illegals are going to find ways around it. So I do think you do have to have enforcement but you also have to have ways for the employers to hire the workers they need. And that's what's missing.

Riley: And all the enforcement in the world isn't going to solve the problem of the people already here illegally. You've got an estimated 11 million people in the country.

Gigot: That's right.

Riley; And the problem isn't that they are here. I mean, our unemployment rate is below 5%, so they're obviously working. They're filling jobs; they're not stealing jobs. But the problem is they're here illegally and we want to know who is in the country. And so the problem is dealing with those 11 million people. The security thing--I really think an agreement could be reached on new security in the future. The real debate going on right now is what to do about the people here already illegally.

Gigot: You don't think it's practical to deport them? Or do you? What Tom Tancredo and some Republicans say we should do.

Ponnuru: I think part of the question is what constitutes solving this problem. If the problem is that you have a large illegal population, the only way to solve that overnight, I think, is something like making them legal. It is absolutely true that you're not going to deport 11 million people.

On the other hand, if you stepped up enforcement and if you did increase deportation--not deporting 11 million people, but deporting more than 50,000 people a year while bringing the number that comes in to be less than 700,000 a year, maybe you can shrink that illegal population over time. You can have a strategy of attrition.

Moore: What has people really concerned, I think, is this idea that the border is, quote, out of control. That is why I like the guest-worker program idea. You let the migrant workers who come in and work in agriculture come in legally and then you can actually have the Border Patrol people deal with terrorists and deal with criminals who come across the border. So it makes sense from a border control standpoint.

Riley: And it's worked in the past. We had a Bracero program back in the '40s and '50s cut down dramatically on the illegal population. Farm workers from Mexico who come into the country seasonally and go back home, and the INS arrests went down at the border dramatically, from something like 1.1 million to 100,000.

Gigot: Well, Ramesh, let's take a break. To be continued. Next, the politics of immigration reform. Many members of Congress are talking tough this election year. But do they risk alienating Hispanic voters and business leaders? Our panel weighs in after this short break.

Gigot: That was Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, an outspoken advocate of constructing a wall along the 2,000-mile Mexican border. An unpopular plan with certain key constituencies, including business groups. Jason, Congressman Tancredo says tough border enforcement is good politics. The Republican base demands it. Is he right?

Riley: Well, let's look at how restrictionist Republican candidates have fared in recent history. In the midterm elections in '04, out in Utah and Arizona, places where immigration is a very big deal, you had restrictionist candidates running against incumbents and they lost. Last year in California, in Orange County, two hours from the Mexico border, another big immigration district, a restrictionist candidate ran for an open seat and lost against a Republican candidate who ran on traditional Republican issues: small government, low taxes and so forth. Back East in Virginia you had a governor, Republican gubernatorial candidate, who turned restrictionist, thinking he would rile up the base at the end of the campaign. He lost, too. Tancredo and others insist that this is good issue for Republicans, but the votes just never seem to materialize.

Gigot: Ramesh?

Ponnuru: Well, if you look at some of those campaigns that Jason is talking about, it's true, for instance, that the challenger to the incumbent in the Utah race didn't actually beat the incumbent. Beating an incumbent in the primary is very difficult. If not for the immigration issue, that guy wouldn't have gotten 42% of the vote, he would have gotten 0% of the vote, and I think you can make a very similar case about what happened in California. I think what all of the races that Jason has pointed to demonstrate is that a narrowly based candidacy that is entirely about being fired up about illegal immigration is not enough to get you over the finish line. But I do think that there is real popular discontent and opposition to illegal immigration could be part of a winning platform.

Moore: Well, Ramesh is right about that, but I worry a little bit about just the image of the Republican Party that they are portraying here. I mean, let's not forget that Ronald Reagan talked about America being a shining city on the hill. And Newt Gingrich, when the Republicans took over Congress, talked about a conservative opportunity society, which is what we want America to be. And I think if the only image of the Republicans is build a wall, then I think we're conflicting with those traditional ideas of the Republicans.

Riley: And it goes back even further. In the '20s and '30s the Irish and Italian immigrants were alienated by the Republican Party. Asian immigrants in Hawaii after World War II were alienated. Hispanics in California in the '90s after Prop. 187 were alienated. I don't see it as smart politics for the Republican Party to be alienating the fastest-growing ethnic group in America.

Ponnuru: You're right about that. There is a real danger that a Tancredo-style politics, that is focused on immigration, will have those effects. I would only point out that there are dangers for the other kinds of approaches to immigration, too. For example, a lot of Republicans who aren't in the Tancredo camp and who are not as exercised about immigration as he is want to let in all of these temporary workers but want to make it very hard for them to get citizenship. I think something like that could also be read as anti-immigrant and could have some of the same political effects.

Moore: Well, it would be good if Republicans were to promote as well as being pro-immigrant, which I had hoped they would be, to be pro-assimilation. Because I think that's one of the problems here. Is that Americans feel like the immigrants aren't assimilating and we need to restore and build up our traditional institutions of assimilation.

One other thing that we were talking about, an identification card for workers. What about welfare? I think a lot of Americans could say, look, we want the immigrants who want to come here and work, it's the ones who want to go on welfare are the ones we don't want to. So let's make it harder for the immigrants to get welfare and not harder for them to get work.

Gigot: Ramesh, let me ask you very quickly; we don't have a lot of time. What do you think the prospects for actually the Republicans passing immigration reform, or is this thing going to blow up?

Ponnuru: I think it's going to blow up. I think it's very hard to get this Congress to pass anything that the president wants, and this is too politically sensitive, I think.

Gigot: I agree with you. But that may not be a bad thing. Wait until after the election. Thanks, Ramesh. We have to take one more break. When we come back, our "Hits and Misses" of the week.

Moore: Well, just in time for tax season we find out that H&R Block, the company that does the taxes for millions of Americans, goofed on their tax bill, and they underpaid their taxes by $30 million each year. Now I would submit to you, Paul, that if the one company in United States that is supposed to understand the tax code can't figure it out, maybe, finally, it's time for a flat tax in America.

Gigot: Amen, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. Thanks, Steve.

Next, fewer people are smoking but for South Carolina that may be a bad thing, Jason?

Riley: Well, chalk this up to unintended consequences, but South Carolina is facing a budget shortfall because fewer people are smoking, and the reason is this deal that the states made with the tobacco companies back in 1998 to end lawsuits over health-care costs due to smoking. Now, some of this time this was a bad deal for the states to make because it effectively made them partners with the tobacco industry in selling cigarettes. And sure enough, the states have become addicted to this money. Tobacco companies make annual payments to the states based on prior-year sales. So when those sales are down, state revenues are down, and states are in awkward position of wishing more people smoked.

Gigot: Uncle Sam the Marlboro Man. Jason, thanks.

And this week, I have a hit of my own, this one to the Bush administration for finally agreeing to release the millions of documents, audio tapes and computer disks it has captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we discussed last week on this program, the intelligence bureaucracy wanted to keep the material under wraps, despite pressure from Congress and apparently even from President Bush himself to get it all out in the open where it can be inspected and interpreted.

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte finally gave in this week. So congratulations in particular to Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Sen. Rick Santorum, who pushed this cause on Capitol Hill. Thanks to their efforts, we'll all learn more about the enemy that we're fighting in the war on terror.

That's it for this week's edition of "The Journal Editorial Report." Thanks to Steve Moore, Jason Riley and Ramesh Ponnuru. I'm Paul Gigot. Thank you all for watching. We hope to see you next week.