Whether or not the Bush administration’s stepped-up immigration raids are a political stunt to soothe angry Republican voters, they still carry a human price tag.

Placating the GOP base or protecting the workplace?
By Aimee Molloy

On the morning of March 6, 2007, swarms of armed federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, gathered in the blistering cold outside the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, Mass. At about 8 a.m., as a helicopter circled overhead and police kept watch in Coast Guard boats in the nearby harbor, the agents rushed the building military-style, blocked the exits, and ordered the employees to turn off their sewing machines, where most were busy stitching backpacks and vests for the U.S. military. By evening, 361 workers — mostly from Guatemala and El Salvador — had been taken into custody after they were unable to prove they had legal status to work in the United States The factory owner and three managers were also arrested and charged in connection with hiring illegal aliens.

Over the last several months, as immigration reform has been debated on Capitol Hill, massive arrest and deportation operations like this have become a key component in the enforcement of existing laws. In the first five months of 2007, 3,226 undocumented workers were arrested on the job, compared with just 485 in all of 2002. Recent raids have included an operation that netted 62 sanitation workers at an Illinois pork plant, 21 employees of a Mexican restaurant chain in Arkansas, and 31 workers at a Dallas factory that repairs Fossil watches.

Government officials says that these operations are designed to pursue employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers, and to “reverse the tolerance of illegal employment and illegal immigration to the United States.” But a growing number of critics on both sides of the immigration issue argue otherwise. They view the raids — which have proven especially costly in terms of taxpayer dollars and human suffering — as a political maneuver designed primarily to make the administration appear tough on enforcement, in hopes of mollifying Republicans opposed to Bush’s recent immigration reform plan.

The bipartisan legislation favored by Bush, which eventually collapsed in the Senate in late June, included a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States. This idea of granting what critics came to refer to as “amnesty” was opposed by many Republicans and was sharply, and unrelentingly, attacked by right-wing talk show radio hosts, who viewed it as a means of rewarding scofflaws. So many people opposed to the idea of amnesty sent e-mails to their representatives in Washington that the Senate’s server was twice shut down, and the phone system was flooded beyond capacity. Capturing the grass-roots GOP concern, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., declared, “Rewarding illegal immigrants with amnesty without taking adequate steps to secure our borders is the wrong way to address this problem.” It now appears doubtful that any comprehensive reform measure will be attempted prior to the 2008 elections.

It light of these sentiments, some critics argue, workplace raids became a convenient (and headline-capturing) means of appeasing critics within the Republican Party. “President Bush was at odds with his own people and had to appear as if he was doing something,” says Joe Garcia, director of the Hispanic Strategy Center of the New Democratic Network. But, he points out, it’s unrealistic to believe that such raids could ever begin to make a dent in fixing the problem. “What are they going to do? Bust into every workplace and eventually arrest 12 million people? [These raids] were, and are, pure and simple grandstanding and prove nothing except that this administration is a master of propaganda.”

“A lot of people on our side are saying the same thing,” says Roy Beck, director of NumbersUSA, an “immigrant reduction” organization opposed to granting citizenship to illegal immigrants, which processed more than 2 million faxes to Congress in opposition to the Senate bill. “We believe these very public and dramatic raids were designed to create a situation where we’d come to believe President Bush will carry out enforcement, so that we would support his amnesty plan. It obviously didn’t work.”

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