US Senate adopts immigration reform

WASHINGTON: Over ten million illegal immigrants to the United States, including Indians and other Asians, may get a chance to become citizens doing the jobs most native Americans would not do, thanks to a new law on the anvil.

Passed by the Senate on Thursday, the comprehensive immigration reform bill would not only grant them citizenship rights, but would also let them collect social security benefits for the work they did while unlawfully employed as farm hands, motel workers, taxi drivers or in other low paid jobs.

The bill also grants complete amnesty to employers who have provided jobs to illegal immigrants.

In addition about two million new foreigners will be admitted to the country annually, more than doubling the current flow of legal immigration. It continues an apparent incentive to employ illegal immigrants as they can be paid less than the migrant workers who are in the US legally under the H-2A temporary worker programme for agriculture.

The Senate also accepted a last minute amendment seeking consultation with the government of Mexico, from where three- fourths of the illegal immigrants come, for erecting a 590 km of “triple-wire fencing” along the border.
Under the bill, illegal immigrants who have been in America for more than two years could apply for citizenship. About 4.8 million others who have gate-crashed in the last two years face deportation.

However, President George Bush has acknowledged that such a large-scale deportation programme is unworkable saying, “It’s neither wise nor realistic to round up millions of people and send them across the (Mexican) border.”

But the legislation is unlikely to reach the president’s desk soon as it has to be now reconciled with the bill approved last year in the House of Representatives providing for only tougher enforcement of immigration laws.

The immigration debate has caused a storm in the US with the critics suggesting that “despite rhetoric coming from the White House, the Senate has done all it can to reduce the kind if tough enforcement measures needed to stem the tide of illegal immigration,” as The Washington Times put it editorially.

Still others dubbed the legislation as a sellout to corporate America as the illegal immigrants provide cheap labour to do the jobs Americans won’t do.

And “Americans won’t do these jobs because for, so long, the welfare state gave them perverse incentives not to work: and it still does to  some degree,” as Max Borders, managing editor of TCSDaily.com put it.