What Pizzo misses is that a comprehensive immigration debate should include the effects of trade policies, reforming the World Bank, and providing debt relief to poorer countries.

The Rest of the Story: a Response to Stephen Pizzo
By Joshua Holland

Just about everyone agrees that our immigration system is a train wreck, but we’re divided over how to go about fixing it. One of the reasons it’s been so hard to agree on a policy is that the arguments surrounding the issue are often more emotional than grounded in fact, and the result is that it can be difficult to even agree to the terms of the debate.

Stephen Pizzo’s essay on immigration is a perfect example. The great irony of the piece — the punch line for anyone who followed the policy debates last year — is this: After devoting considerable column inches to the evils of “comprehensive” immigration reform, Pizzo offers up his preferred solution to the problem, which turns out to be … yes, comprehensive immigration reform.

For 25 paragraphs, Pizzo describes comprehensive reform as a neocon plot to destroy America’s working class, a brilliant scheme to sucker those overly empathetic Democrats onto a path that will ultimately separate them from the “very people they claim should vote Democrat [sic].” Then, taking a populist stance, he argues that all those morons in Washington are making things too complex, and he has a simple solution based on good old-fashioned horse sense: We could just have a guest worker program; a database that allows employers to check on potential workers’ legal status; some tougher laws for employers; stepped up enforcement of those laws and, grudgingly or not, an opportunity for undocumented immigrants who have put five years into the American workforce to get a Green Card and then “get in line” for permanent status “behind those who followed the rules in the first place.”

Those are, of course, the meat and bones of the various proposals for “comprehensive” immigration reform that bounced around in Congress last summer (which got quite a bit of bipartisan support in the Senate but couldn’t be reconciled with the bill passed by hard-liners in the House). I’ll concede that Pizzo’s version of comprehensive reform isn’t quite as comprehensive as the proposals cooked up in DC. He leaves out the most popular provisions — beefed up border security, tougher penalties for immigrants who commit serious crimes, federal money for health care and law enforcement in the states with the largest immigrant populations and provisions requiring immigrants to pay any back taxes they owe, pay a fine for having broken the law, study English and have an understanding of American civics before getting on the back of that line.

For the rest of the story click, here.