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The
Washington Post...
The ‘Utah Way’ toward
immigration reform
By Lee Hockstader
Friday, March 11, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY - Utah, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by better
than three to one in the state legislature, has passed the nation’s
most liberal - and most reality-based - policy on illegal immigration.
And the Republican governor is expected to sign it.
The legislation includes both a watered-down enforcement provision that
police say won’t make much difference and a guest-worker program that
would make all the difference in the world - if it survives
constitutional challenge - by granting legal status to undocumented
workers and allowing them to live normal lives. In a nutshell, it’s a
one-state version of the overarching immigration reform package that
Congress has repeatedly tried, and failed, to enact.
Conservative Republicans here - and Republicans don’t get much more
conservative than the statehouse variety in Salt Lake - say their bill
is a gauntlet thrown down to the feds for their inability to deal with
illegal immigration and the nation’s demand for unskilled labor.
That’s one way of looking at it. But the “Utah Way,” as some are
calling it, is also a fraternal attack on Republicans, in Washington
and elsewhere, whose only strategy is to demonize, criminalize and
deport 11 million illegal immigrants.
Karl Rove, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich are among the Republican grandees
who have distanced themselves from that approach and warned of the
peril it poses for the party. In the wake of Arizona’s legislation last
year, a wave of copycat bills would go a long way toward permanently
ridding the GOP of Hispanics, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing
minority.
But it’s in Utah that the Republican deportation caucus has been
treated to real abuse. What’s interesting is that it’s coming from
unimpeachable conservatives. If you want to see the most corrosive
long-term wedge issue facing the GOP, come to Salt Lake City.
Utah’s guest-worker bill doesn’t grant citizenship, of course, but in
every other way it’s exactly what national Republicans have derided as
“amnesty.” It would grant work permits to undocumented immigrants, and
their immediate families, who pay a fine, clear a criminal background
check and study English.
The bill’s chief sponsor, state Rep. Bill Wright, is a plain-spoken
dairy farmer who describes his politics as “extremely” conservative,
likes Sarah Palin and believes he may have once voted for a Democrat -
possibly 40 years ago for sheriff. He admires the work ethic of the
Hispanic farmhands he’s employed over the years and doesn’t care much
for anything the government does, least of all the idea that it might
deport millions of immigrant workers and their families.
“That’s not gonna happen,” Wright told me. “They’ve got cars, they’ve
got money borrowed, they own property, they are intertwined. Just be
real and face facts the way they are.”
A milestone in setting the stage for Wright’s legislation was the “Utah
Compact,” a pithy declaration of reform principles drafted last fall by
business leaders and conservative elites, who feared Utah would follow
in Arizona’s footsteps and risk losing tens of millions of dollars in
tourism and convention business, as Arizona did. The compact helped
swing public opinion in Utah away from the illegal-immigrant bashers
who admired Arizona’s law.
“They’ve had their 15 minutes in the media and now the adults are going
to start talking about how to handle matters,” said Paul Mero,
executive director of Utah’s most prominent conservative think tank,
the Sutherland Institute, who helped draft the compact. “We’ve been
able to break through that political barrier put up by the wing nuts
who see every brown person as a criminal.”
Advocates of the compact included the police, some key elected
officials and, critically, the Mormon church, whose members include
perhaps 90 percent of Utah’s state lawmakers. They understood that the
fast-growing Hispanic community, which counts for 13 percent of Utah’s
population and may include more than 100,000 undocumented workers, is
vital to the state’s tourism, agriculture and construction industries.
The advocates’ genius was to reframe the cause of immigration reform,
including the guest-worker program, as fundamentally a conservative
project. In the face of sound bites from reform opponents such as “What
part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” Utah conservatives shot back
with: What part of destroying the economy don’t you understand? And by
the way, what part of breaking up families don’t you understand?
The question is whether Utah will inspire similar movements in other
states or whether it will remain the exception. On that, the evidence
is mixed.
Discouragingly, neither Utah’s two U.S. senators nor its three
representatives have backed the Utah Compact or the just-passed state
legislation. Most mainstream Republicans remain stuck on enforcement,
which is code for deportation. And the Mormon church, which did much to
sway public opinion and to inoculate the guest-worker legislation from
conservative attack, has limited influence outside the state.
Encouragingly, though, several conservative states have rejected
Arizona-style bills this year. Reform advocates are at work on versions
of the Utah Compact in Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Washington,
Idaho and Oregon.
The lesson from the “Utah Way” is that pragmatists in search of
solutions can initiate a reform movement outside the legislature and
build a case and a coalition that appeal to conservatives. By offering
ideas that may provide a fix in the absence of federal action, they may
trump the tired slogans of opponents of reform.
The writer is a member of the editorial page staff.
Read it at the Washington Post
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