By IPS Correspondents
SEATTLE, Washington, Jan 25 2007 (IPS)

Blue-ribbon bipartisan commissions tasked with solving intractable problems are a Washington staple, but it’s been a tough winter for them so far.

In December, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by veteran Republican rainmaker James A. Baker III and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, delivered a set of consensus “realist” proposals expected to provide cover to President George W. Bush for changing course in Iraq.

But the president ignored the much-heralded recommendations of the elder statesmen and decided to send more troops.

In an equally contentious policy realm, though, another assembly of notables, the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future (ITFIAF), released a report earlier this month that may get a bit more respect from both the Bush administration and the newly Democratic Congress.

Once again, the venerable Hamilton was the name-brand Democrat fronting the group, while former senator and energy secretary Spencer Abraham was his Republican counterpart. Directing the deliberations was Doris Meissner, commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service in the Bill Clinton administration.

This group, however, also included three of the four lead drafters of the new immigration reform bill expected to be introduced early this year in Congress: Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and Republicans Senator John McCain and Representative Jeff Flake.

“Comprehensive” is the code word that differentiates proposals like those of the Task Force and last year’s Senate bill from the competing House bill and the Secure Fence Act, which finally became law in the fall. Where the latter two concentrated on beefing up enforcement along borders and internally, the former also included paths to legalisation for undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. and measures to increase the flow of legal temporary workers here.

The ITFIAF was convened by the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank that studies the movement of people worldwide, in partnership with the Manhattan Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. The Task Force’s recommendations reflect the bi-partisan nature of support for comprehensive immigration reform, an issue on which both parties are divided.

Steven Camarota of the Centre for Immigration Studies, a non-partisan research institution that advocates stronger restrictions on immigration, said that the Task Force recommendations were “put together by open-borders advocates: there’s no diversity of views there.”

But their ideas may well become law, he told IPS, because “there’s a very large share of the American elite who accept that position. They see the need for the immigrant labour, they don’t want to send the illegals home, they like a lot of legal immigration.” The commission, he believes, represented “a kind of broad consensus among opinion leaders in the United States, in and out of Congress.”

Outside the Washington Beltway, though, “most people think we’ve got way too much immigration,” Camarota believes. “There’s a fundamental divide in America, and it’s not a left-right divide, it’s not a Democrat-Republican divide. It’s an elite-common man divide, it’s an interest group-public opinion divide, and that’s what creates the political stalemate.”

By a 50 percent to 37 percent margin, however, likely voters across the country in a November poll by The Tarrance Group favoured comprehensive immigration reform in 2007 over letting border security and enforcement work, and 75 percent expected the new Congress to deal with this issue.

And in the November elections, several high-profile candidates who made a hard line on immigration their signature issue were roundly defeated.

The ITFIAF report, “Immigration and America’s Future: A New Chapter,” calls for a broad redesign of the legal, social and economic dimensions of the U.S. immigration system.

The new system would divide future immigration into three streams, temporary, provisional and permanent, which would simplify the current visa system and provide increased numbers of visas targeting the needs of the U.S. economy and other goals such as family reunification. A new category would be “strategic growth visas,” which would be made available to immigrants in strategically important disciplines.

“The whole debate has been focused on illegal immigration,” said Deborah Meyers of the Migration Policy Institute, one of the authors of the report. “But that’s just a symptom. Employers would rather hire legally, and expanding legal channels would also reduce pressures at the border.”

The Task Force recommends initially setting immigration levels at around 1.5 million yearly, roughly 300,000 less than the current number of legal and illegal immigrants that the U.S. labour market and population are currently absorbing.

These immigration flows and their impact on the economy and society would be monitored by a new, independent federal agency, the Standing Commission on Immigration and Labour Markets. Every two years, this body would make recommendations to Congress on adjustments to the numbers of visas in each category. The report likens the role of the Standing Commission in setting migration policy to that of the Federal Reserve Bank in setting monetary policy.

The Standing Commission, the report suggests, should be complemented by a new White House immigration coordinator and an interagency cabinet committee for immigration policy.

The report makes a distinction between the new temporary and provisional visas and previous guest-worker or “bracero” programmes, which have been criticised by labour and human rights groups for tying immigrant workers to one employer and dragging down labour standards for all workers. Temporary and provisional workers, the Task Force report says, should have “the right to change employers without jeopardising their immigration status and have worker protections that are comparable to those of similarly employed U.S. workers.”

The temporary channel would be for truly seasonal jobs of six months or less, Meyers said, and would provide “a mechanism for those who want to work and then go home.” Workers with provision status would have the possibility of “graduating” into the permanent immigration channel.

A poll released by the conservative Vernon K. Krieble Foundation in December found that, by 64 to 34 percent, voters say a more efficient system of visas for handling immigrant workers would do more to control the border than increased law enforcement, a significant increase over the 51 to 41 percent margin found last March.

The estimated 12 million immigrants who have already entered the U.S. illegally provide another major challenge, and the ITFIAF “supports the opportunity for legal status, including an eventual path to citizenship” for them. This provision, the report says, should be accompanied by a federal programme to aid states in mitigating the local impacts of large numbers of newly legalised immigrants.

On the enforcement side, the Task Force calls for increased efforts to punish employers who hire illegal immigrants, coupled with more sophisticated methods to enable employers to verify employees’ immigration status. These include secure, biometric Social Security cards for workers and upgrades of massive immigration databases, coupled with privacy and anti-discrimination safeguards.

Prospects for support for some of these measure from the Bush administration are good, Meyers told IPS. : “We’re working with some people within the administration who have a deep understanding of these issues,” the report co-author said. “Chertoff [the Secretary of Homeland Security] and the President get that it’s not just about the border.”

Excerpt: