My new Kentucky home: the cutting edge of illegal immigration used to be Los Angeles. Now It's Owensboro

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Peter Laufer

Coffey argues that this increasing permanence is a good thing, economically; a quiet town like Bowling Green would cease to function without its Latino workforce. But not everyone in the town agrees. Whether you agree or disagree, it probably makes sense to help the ones who are in Bowling Green assimilate. But despite the growing Latino presence in Kentucky, little government support is available to help Latinos learn to become part of their communities. That's due, in part, to the fact that they barely show up on official US. Census data. Catholic Charities estimates that the Kentucky Latino population is seven times the number cited by the Census; Coffey figures that's much too low, and he estimates it's twenty times the official count. Since most Latinos in the state are undocumented, Census figures are a joke compared with the real population. "The Census says Bowling Green has 250. We probably have 5,000 or so." Another example he offers is the crossroads town of Albany, where the Census lists only five Latino residents.

"You can see 35 on the square," says Coffey.

Earned citizenship

On Jan. 8, 2004, President Bush assembled members of his cabinet, and a carefully selected group of Hispanics, in the Fast Room to announce his plan to deal with undocumented immigration. During his short speech he tried to placate those frustrated by the inequities of U.S. immigration policy, identifying the crisis honestly and correctly.

"As a nation that values immigration and depends on immigration, we should have immigration laws that work and make us proud," Bush said, looking ahead to the November 2004 elections and the huge blocks of Hispanic and other immigrant voters. "Yet today," the president acknowledged, "we do not. Instead, we see many employers turning to the illegal labor market. We see millions of hardworking men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive undocumented economy. Illegal entry across our borders makes more difficult the urgent task of securing the homeland. The system is not working."

The president succinctly assessed the problem. But his proposed solution was vague and filled with traps for immigrants working in the United States, for their employers, and for the rest of us. The Bush plan is not another amnesty, like the one Congress and the Reagan administration agreed to in 1986, for workers who have been contributing for years to the American economy and culture. It is not a plan to give those immigrants already living here without documentation a chance at "earned citizenship," which is what the Democrats have suggested. Nor it is a plan for the free flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico frontier. The Bush plan is a guest worker proposal that will, in the president's own words, "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs."

But this solution, by failing to comprehend the nature of the situation, merely extends the system's present flaws. As the employers I met with in Bowling Green and countless other areas of the country attested, illegal immigrants are now a permanent, needed part of the economy. The president is fight to argue that they do a class of work that natives won't. But his plan is fit to handle a group of temporary workers making up a marginal part of the American workforce. It does nothing to lift the burden on employers to prove that no Americans will take a job they want to offer to a Mexican legally--a restriction so stringent that it encourages employers to hire illegal immigrants. Nor does it lift the strict demand that an employee stick with one employer, a regulation that discourages Mexicans from taking the visas and instead leads them to come here illegally. And it does nothing to encourage those Mexicans who have no deal with an American employer from jumping the border. No solution can ameliorate all the cultural, political and economic strains caused by the increasing influx on undocumented immigrants into America. But to be effective at all, any response must begin with the recognition that no government in history has managed to stop eager employers and willing workers from getting together. That truth is now playing out in places like Kentucky. Washington can either fight this reality and force both employers and immigrants into the shadows of illegality, or accept it and find a way that most if not all sides can live with.