January 14, 2004, 10:05 a.m.
Bush’s Gorbachevism
Bid farewell to the U.S. labor market.

Some years ago Owen Harries, the founding editor of The National Interest magazine, coined a term, "Gorbachevism," to describe a new sort of politics. Gorbachevism was a politics that "substituted daring for thought" and that accordingly consisted of "a series of leaps into the unknown." Mikhail Gorbachev was, of course, the first Gorbachevite. His bold attempts to reform the Soviet Union brought about its total collapse — a standard of achievement that is hard to match. But George W. Bush is bidding to match it with his proposed reforms of immigration law.

These reforms — an open-ended "guest-worker" program, an amnesty for illegal aliens, and an increase in the number of "green card" slots for alien permanent residents — are far more bold, radical, and ambitious than even his critics like me had forecast. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Bush is proposing to abolish the U.S. labor market by integrating it with the world labor market — including the third-world labor market.

That is the plain meaning of a guest-worker program that, in the president's own words, will "match willing worker with willing employer." Under this prescription hundreds of millions of workers from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East would have the legal right to emigrate to the U.S. as "temporary" workers if American employers wished to hire them.

Not all of these millions would come, to be sure. Already, however, 14 percent of the U.S. workforce is foreign-born; between eight and eleven million workers are here illegally; and some estimates suggest that as many as 20 million new arrivals might enter the U.S. over the next decade. Even a marginal increase in such immigration, however, would exert a steady downward pressure on wages and drive low-paid Americans out of jobs.

Downplaying such forecasts, the Bush people argue that immigrants, including illegals currently here, will be allowed to take only those jobs that Americans have already turned down. But how will this prohibition be enforced? Very simply: It is not going to be enforced — at least for the illegals already here. The "senior administration official" who briefed the press on the Bush proposals stated clearly that the mere fact that an illegal immigrant was employed would be sufficient proof that no American had wanted the job.

Hard to believe? Here is the money quote: "If you're asking the question as to whether the person [the employer] needs to say, okay, well, here's Mary, and she's in this spot, do we need to hold on Mary and look for some American to fill that position, the answer is, no. We assume that by virtue of Mary's employment, that marketplace test, if you will, has been met." Several other statements to the same effect — and the senior administration official advanced no clear idea of how the government would ensure that the prohibition would be enforced for new arrivals.

The administration's next line of defense is to argue that the immigrants will be temporary guest workers who will return home after three years. Yet almost all experience with such programs in several continents across several decades demonstrates that guest workers become permanent residents in due course — very often as a result of the kind of "amnesty" that the administration is again proposing here.

But we need not rely on past experience to forecast their permanence. Guest workers will be here indefinitely because (a) under the Bush rules there is no limit to the number of times their three-year work program can be extended; (b) they can bring in their families and, if they have a child while here, they become the parents of a U.S. citizen and thus undeportable; (c) they will have greater opportunities to marry U.S. citizens; and (d) if all else fails, they can blend back into the underworld of illegal work and documentation that more than eight million of them already inhabit.

In response to this last point, Bush-administration officials assure us that, on the contrary, they will deport those guest workers who fail to leave the U.S. voluntarily when their work program is finished. But this assurance is in flat contradiction to their main rationale for the entire reform program — namely, that the alternative policy of deporting the eight million illegals here now is unthinkable.

If it is unthinkable to deport eight million illegals today, why will it be easier to deport two or three times that number in a decade or so when even more businesses will be alleged to be reliant on them and even more pressure groups will be pressing their case? Not even the Bush officials believe that either many illegals or many guest workers will go home‹that is one reason why they are increasing the number of "green cards" for permanent residents.

In addition to everything else, this is a plan for increasing already high levels of legal immigration.

Some defenders of the reforms justify them as a way of replacing illegal workers with legal ones and consequently cleaning up the vast sweatshop underground of illegal employment, habitation, transport and documentation. (For a vivid and realistic picture of this unknown America, read Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full in which one of the main characters on the run after breaking out of prison travels across America on this immigrants' underground railway — useful, of course, also to criminals and terrorists.)

What will really happen, as anyone interested in immigration policy knows, is that the vast immigrant ghettoes will grow even vaster as a result of the guest-worker and amnesty programs. Some entering them will be guest workers whose time has expired but who can find jobs in a growing "black economy" fuelled by cheap labor of all kinds. Others will be workers who could not find an American employer legally from abroad and crossed the border to seek work illegally in the U.S. informal sector. Still more will be immigrants attracted mainly by a free education for their children that will cost the U.S. taxpayer $8,000 annually but that is priceless to them. And this sweatshop underground will also provide its useful services to criminals and terrorists — no questions asked.

Once in the U.S., these various new illegals will pass unnoticed in the cultural enclaves where Spanish, Arabic, or Cantonese is spoken and where millions of additional legal workers will provide camouflage for their presence. Excellent fake documentation, plus the frequent comings-and-goings of millions of people across the border, minus any political will in both major parties to enforce the law, will make immigration regulation even more meaningless than it is today. And the remorseless spread of this sweatshop underground within America will not only undercut the wages of low-paid Americans, but also strain public service budgets, intensify pressures on the environment, dilute the meaning of U.S. citizenship, fragment America's common culture, and extend the national security swamp in which terrorist fish swim with happy impunity.

In short this is Gorbachevism — a leap into the unknown because Mr. Bush has substituted daring for thought. Not a good bargain. As A. E. Houseman once remarked: "A moment's thought would have saved us from these follies. But thought is a painful process, and a moment is a long time."

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