United States:Campaigner Frank Sharry talks to Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent, about the abortive immigration Bill
A decade may pass before a broad immigration reform package becomes politically viable again in the United States, one of the leading campaigners for the abortive McCain-Kennedy Bill has said.
Frank Sharry, who is executive director of the National Immigration Forum, one of the major migration policy groups in the US, said that what he understood to have been a legislative debate to regularise the 12 million undocumented migrants in the US turned out to be a politicised "culture war" that both major parties would be reluctant to resume.
"We thought we were debating whether it was an amnesty or not and how many visas we needed, and I think we've realised that it's a more racialised, more polarised debate," said Sharry.
"There's always been a very vocal anti-immigrant set of groups, fairly narrow in their influence but highly visible. What has changed is that one of the two major parties in the country has embraced them. And so now there's going to be probably two or three election cycles in which this issue gets played out in the electoral arena."
Sharry, whose organisation has a membership of more than 250 groups across the US, was in Dublin this week in his capacity as consultant to the Forum on Migration and Communications at Dublin Institute of Technology.
With most Republican presidential candidates having declared themselves against comprehensive reform, Sharry is also despondent about the chances of a president Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama broaching such a "radioactive" issue early in their term.
"So we could be in for a . . . three, five, 10-year hiatus while this issue gets battled out in the way that it will, before it becomes viable to have it back at the table," he said.
Despite the support of (an albeit diminished) President George Bush and prominent politicians on both sides, the "grand bargain" collapsed earlier this year after it was rejected by the US Senate.
Sharry believes that despite the tough measures contained in the Bill (undocumented migrants would have had to pay thousands of dollars in fines and would not have been eligible for permanent residence for eight years, for example), Republican opponents succeeded in portraying the proposal as an amnesty that would reward law-breakers.
Democrats, themselves unsure about its feasibility, were half-hearted advocates. "So the combination meant the grand bargain that was negotiated in the backroom, when it went public, was something of an orphan."
But was the argument that it rewarded law-breakers not valid? "The big debate of recent years in America has been between those who maintain the law is good and the people are bad, and our analysis, [ which] has always been that most of the people coming were good and they were breaking bad law," said Sharry.
"And if you want to restore the rule of law, which is a worthy goal, you have to have laws that are realistic and that respect reality. The fact is that while we had posted a 'keep out' sign at the border, we had a 'help wanted' sign about 100 yards in."
While Sharry is supportive of the Government's efforts to secure a bilateral agreement that would regularise the status of the undocumented Irish, he is not convinced it will succeed.
"I would be supportive of it, but I don't see its viability, because people on the right will label it an amnesty and people on left will say, 'how come these white immigrants are going to get status rather than many others?'"