** THURSDAY UPDATE: The bill is dead. **
Heavyweight Latino leaders held a media conference call today with reporters to make a final push for the Senate to pass an immigration reform bill we can all at least live with. If the Senate does not, the leaders argued, the insane status quo will lumber on, meaning more bigotry and divisiveness, more suffering of broken families, more troubles for the economically struggling communities left behind, more people in the endless limbo of Kafa-esque detention centers, and more raids and mass deportations for businesses and industries that remain desperate foreign workers.
On the call were names known in L.A. as familiar power-brokers: John Trasviña, president and general counsel of MALDEF; Maria Elena Durazo, secretary-general of the L.A. County-Fed; Arturo Vargas, executive director of NALEO; Arturo Rodriguez, president of the UFW; and Supervisor Gloria Molina. Also on were Cecilia Muñoz, senior vice president of NCLR, and Eliseo Medina, international vice president of SEIU.
"All Americans send people to Washington to do the hard work," Trasviña said. "Our message to senators is, keep at it, don't give up." Said Muñoz: "While there are concerns about some of the content in the bill going foward, assuming that we can't make progress is a defeatist attitude that is unworthy of Latinos and the immigrants whose lives are at stake here."
If the Senate bill fails, they said, hope is all but lost. Summer is upon us, which means the likelihood of more deaths in the remote desert crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border. Plus, presidential election season is just around corner, and with it the temporary loss of relative reason.
Some immigrant advocates are putting their money on a less punitive bill to come out of the House if the Senate bill fails, despite House Republicans who say such a bill would be "dead on arrival" in their chamber. This is a scary gamble. Mainstream-ish Latino civil rights organizations -- such as Antonio Gonzalez's William C. Velasquez Institute, and LULAC -- are going so far as openly opposing the Senate bill. In response to this, the L.A. Mexican regional federation clubs, which theoretically more directly represent immigrant families, put out a release last week reiterating their support for the Senate bill as being better than nothing, and admonishing the mainline groups for posturing themselves as speaking on behalf of immigrants. (Gee, that attitude sounds so familiar.) "Who gave these organizations the authority to kill the hopes of millions of undocumented people?" read a statement distributed by Martha Ugarte.
Today's conference call seemed more aligned with the notion that despite the obvious flaws in the Senate bill, it remains the most plausible chance for some kind of reform this year, lest the status quo remains in place until, by at least one prediction I heard this week, the second-term of the next (presumably Democratic) president. That's after 2012. Not a pretty thought.
Republicans are battling their own internal debate over immigration reform. On one side, there are those see any kind of legalization process for undocumented workers as "amnesty" (even when it involves fees, "touch-backs," procedural hoops, but anyway) and those who might cynically see wanton anti-immigrant fervor as the only glue to rally a Republican base in future races. On the other side, there are nervous pragmatists who remember what happened in California after the passage of harshly anti-immigrant Proposition 187 -- a permanent Republican minority in Sacramento. Good luck with that, guys.
* Cartoon by Pat Bagley of The Salt Lake Tribune. See previous posts on immigration by clicking on the category link below.