Bordered in rhetoric

Immigration is a subject that brings out the best and the worst in Americans.

As taught to my fourth-grade daughter this semester, the story of the peopling of America encourages us to celebrate our identity as the land of e pluribus unum. It reminds us of the tolerance required to coexist in a culture of many cultures. It honors the courage to uproot your life so your children can have a better one.

As it is practiced in our politics, the subject often dredges up darker feelings: tribalism, xenophobia, envy, a pull-up-the-ladder stinginess. This is not new. The English and Dutch colonists resented the immigrant waves of Irish and Germans, who resented the later waves of Italians and Poles and Jews. Polls show that Americans only halfheartedly support immigration, and less than halfheartedly in hard times.

Nowhere is our national ambivalence on this issue more grotesquely displayed than in the current Republican campaign. Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich each, in turn, tripped over the issue — Perry by letting illegal immigrants in Texas pay lower, in-state college tuition; Romney for failing to fire a lawn care service that employed undocumented workers; and Gingrich for saying that not every family lacking legal status should be put in a boxcar and shipped to Mexico.

To make rhetorical amends for these errors of compassion, each candidate has tapped his inner demagogue. Perry went barnstorming with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona bully famous for his primitive and crowd-pleasing immigrant roundups. Both Gingrich and Romney talk about fortifying the border as if we were under siege and use the word “amnesty” in the same tone of voice most people use for “al-Qaida.”

It’s a tricky act. The candidates are trying to compete for the votes of the electrified-fence crowd without completely alienating Latino voters or important business constituents — in construction, agriculture, meatpacking, hospitality — who hunger for cheap, dependable labor. Thus the campaign has generated more obfuscation than lucid argument. The classic example is Mitt Romney’s painfully evasive interview with Bret Baier of Fox News, in which Romney accused Gingrich of favoring “amnesty” but couldn’t explain where their positions really differed.

But wait. Why are we even talking about this? I hate to distract you with actual facts, but here are a few that have been overlooked in the din of alarm: Illegal immigration is falling, sharply, a result of tougher enforcement in the decade since the 9/11 attacks and an anemic American job market. Border policing is at an all-time high. Deportations are way up under President Barack Obama. The estimated population of illegal residents has fallen by about 1 million from its peak of 12 million in 2007.

More facts: The most scrupulous study I’ve seen of the economic impact of illegal immigration — by Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego — weighed the costs to society (schools, health care, etc.) against the benefits (tax revenues, labor productivity, etc.) and concluded that the difference was “close enough to zero to be essentially a wash.” The idea that illegal immigrants are dragging down the economy is just wrong.

Large impact on smaller areas

Now, what is true for the nation as a whole is not equally true of every community or every class. The impact of illegal labor on native employment may be marginal, but it hits hardest at the bottom, displacing those with a high school education or less, who are already the victims of recession and diminishing wages. This is a fearful and energized portion of the electorate. As Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, points out, “If it’s your job, a marginal effect is a big one.”

The impact is felt more intensely in states — Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Nevada, Iowa and others — where the arrival of Hispanic immigrants is relatively new. Rick Perry’s comparatively sympathetic view of illegal immigrants is the bipartisan norm in a state like Texas that has long absorbed Mexicans. But it does not play so well in Iowa, which has only recently seen classrooms filling with brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking children. These tend to be the states passing punitive laws to deputize traffic cops, E.R. nurses and utility workers as immigration enforcers. Wanting to enforce the law, or protect your job, does not make you a bigot. But these laws tend to be self-defeating. They drive illegal immigrants deeper underground, lock them into an underclass, pit states against Washington and each other, and sunder communities.

Therein lies the real crisis — not that the country is being overrun, but that the country is at war with itself.

Comprehensive immigration reform used to be a bipartisan issue that drew prominent Republicans — like George W. Bush and John McCain and Orrin Hatch — but in our toxic hyperpartisan political climate, Republicans have simply fled. “The left and right both politicized it,” said Tamar Jacoby, president of the small-business federation ImmigrationWorks USA, and a Republican. “Now the sense is that the Democrats own it, so no Republican can touch it.”

That is why it matters so much that Gingrich has staked a serious claim.

Gingrich’s stance

Rather than parse his debate sound bites, go to Newt.org and read his proposed solutions. You have to get past a certain amount of red-meat rhetoric and brush aside some half-baked notions that are typical Newt — more smart-alecky than smart. But you will find that on major points Gingrich is consistent with the best proposals compiled by serious students of this subject, who aim to build a reform based not on what makes you feel good but on what’s best for the country.

Here’s what Newt gets:

First, immigration is a rejuvenation of our economy, a source of invention and investment at the high end and of tax-paying, productive labor at the low end. So the foundation of a new policy should be the opening of more, and more-efficient, legal channels for the newcomers who will refresh our ingenuity and replenish our aging workforce — and, by the way, pay to keep the Social Security funds filled for boomers like me.

Second, you can’t sell reform unless it begins with enforcement. Restrictionists rightly point out that the last major reform bill in 1986 promised not only legalization but tougher employer sanctions and beefed-up border controls. In a booming, labor-hungry economy, those things did not come to pass. Critics of legalization are justified in saying we won’t be fooled again.

Employer accountability

Today the big hole in our enforcement is not the border; it’s the failure to hold employers accountable. The best enforcement tool available is not an alligator-filled moat. The best tool is a national identity card, including some biometric evidence, such as a fingerprint. Gingrich braves the wrath of libertarians and privacy campaigners to endorse it. In today’s living-online, GPS-tracked world, I think a national identity card would find wide acceptance.

Third, there is no easy solution to the 11 million already here. We are not going to legalize 11 million lawbreakers; that’s politically untenable. Neither are we going to uproot and expel the equivalent of the population of Ohio — severing families, spending billions and creating a shamefully cruel spectacle. So we set some rules. The recently arrived, the unattached and — obviously — the gangbangers and criminals go home. The deeply rooted, productive families pay a price to stay. The details — Who decides? What price? — are not easy, but, as my daughter learned on her field trip to Ellis Island, it’s never been simple inventing a new nation.

There are plenty of reasons the thought of President Newt Gingrich makes me shudder. But on this hard, defining American issue, he’s shown a combination of brains, heart and guts that puts the rest of his party to shame.