If You Aren’t Going to Do Anything Reasonable About Immigration, Then Don’t Do Anything At All
Friday, February 3rd, 2012Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law
*The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blogger herself; she is not speaking on behalf of Law Students for Reproductive Justice.*
Many of my law school colleagues and I have dipped our toes in the immigration law pond. In my experience, when people ask me what type of law I am most interested in, and I say, “immigration law,” it invites a conversation that I don’t want to have. I’m hesitant to speak about immigration because I never know if the person on the other side will be an individual who has no idea that our immigration system is broken and will use language that is derogatory to me and the clients I’ve worked with.
With the start of Utah’s legislative session this week, I am not only feeling this hesitancy but anger. Representative Herrod, who has announced that he will join the U.S. Senate race to upseat Senator Hatch, has decided to sponsor legislation that would gut the Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act passed last year. The Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act would create a guest worker program for those who are undocumented in Utah but would like to legally work and live in the state. In order to get a permit, individuals would have to get a background check, take English and civic classes, and their tax contributions would be tracked. Aside from the constitutional issues at hand and the likely possibility that the federal government will not give a waiver so that the state can implement this legislation, many immigration advocates were excited because the bill was solution-oriented. Herrod’s legislation would convert the Accountability and Enforcement Act to the Utah Illegal Alien Family Transition Pilot Program. Don’t you love the name? His legislation would only allow individuals who have either (1) overstayed their visas or (2) let their visas expire and have children of a certain age and that were born in specific countries apply. Individuals who came into the country without inspection or through non-legal means could not apply. The bill would allow local enforcement agencies to detain individuals who they suspect of being in the country without any legal status and punish law enforcement agencies that do not comply with enforcement laws by withholding state funds from them. Before any of this happens, the bill states that our congressional delegates must lobby for amending federal immigration statutes so that Utah may implement this program. Herrod said this about his bill, “The forgotten person in all of this has been the legal immigrant. We’ve passed laws that are aiding those who come here illegally. That is wrong; we need to work on laws that aid the legal immigrant.”
What Herrod has forgotten or does not want to acknowledge is that in some places in the world there is no functioning way to legally migrate to the U.S. If I have to wait at least ten years to migrate from Mexico through a family based visa or if my only other option is to be sponsored through an employer, that is not a functioning immigration system. I am all for state legislation that pushes the federal government to reform our broken immigration system, but legislation that guts another bill that may be unconstitutional is a waste of time and only foments a heated debate.
Reproductive justice isn’t just about abortion and contraceptives, but about improving the lived realities that impact people’s ability to decide when, how, and if they want to parent. Because many immigrant women have no legal status, they are more subject to intimate partner violence, lack insurance coverage, and are vilified through the media as mindless, breeding machines whose sole purposes are to birth “anchor babies” and “terrorists.” Immigrant women are clearly part of this struggle. In Utah alone, immigrant women already have been targets of gender-specific threats. In 2010, Concerned Citizens of the United States compiled a list of 1300 individuals who they thought were in Utah without legal status, asking them to be deported, and sent the list to media outlets. The list included names, social security numbers, and even pregnant women and their expected due dates. Herrod’s bill isn’t going to help most immigrant women and it definitely isn’t adding anything new to our country’s immigration debate.