The coalition pushing for change included the oddest of bedfellows — roping together business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce with the Service Employees International Union, the fastest-growing union in the country. It had an impeccable bipartisan pedigree, including President George W. Bush and Senator Jon Kyl, a staunchly conservative Republican, as well as the Democrats’ liberal lion, Senator Ted Kennedy.
The economy was growing. The unemployment rate was at its lowest level since the dot-com bubble burst six years before. And the flaws of our immigration laws — impotent to stop a river of unauthorized immigrants drawn across the border by job opportunities — were obvious to all.
Immigration reform, however, was not to be.
Immigrants’ rights groups balked at the hurdles put in immigrants’ path toward legalization. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. hated a provision creating temporary work visas, arguing that it was a license for businesses to bring in cheap foreign labor. Then, a Senate Democrat, Byron Dorgan, offered the coup de grâce with an amendment to phase out the worker visa program after five years. Though proposed at the behest of organized labor, the amendment got the support of some of the most anti-union Republicans in the Senate. And it killed the entire enterprise, stripping away corporate America’s main reason to support a deal.
Today, the economy is not growing much. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Yet President Obama thinks the stellar alignment may be better than six years ago. He is proposing a wholesale change to the same flawed immigration laws. He trusts that Republicans, who lost the Hispanic vote by an enormous margin in November, cannot afford to further alienate Hispanics by voting against their top priority.
Despite the strong case for an overhaul, however, changing our immigration laws may be tougher than the president appears to believe. While we may have overcome some of the obstacles of 2007, reform will probably face deep-seated opposition from many Americans — including most conservative Republicans — to what they will view as a potentially large expansion of welfare.
President Obama’s proposal is based on principles similar to those of the 2007 attempt: a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in the country, a legal channel for future immigrant workers and their families, and a plan to better enforce the nation’s borders and immigration laws.
Yet immigration reform today means something quite different than it did in 2007. Notably, the elements needed to stop the flow of illegal immigrants north are much less important to the enterprise. The Obama administration has already spent huge amounts of money on border enforcement. Today, border policing costs about $18 billion a year — nearly 50 percent more than it did in 2006. And deportations have soared. What’s more, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle, as Mexico has grown more robustly than the United States. The illegal immigrant population has even been shrinking in the last few years. And it may continue to do so as the Mexican population of prime migration-age people stops growing.
Also, many employers have already gotten some of what they wanted: the number of workers entering the United States on temporary visas for low-end jobs in agriculture and other industries has increased sharply.
“The discussion is in a different environment,” said Gordon H. Hanson, an expert on the economics of immigration at the University of California, San Diego. “The flow of new immigrants is not the story anymore.”
This might help the cause of reform in some ways. It could allow the discussion about work visas to focus on the highly educated workers coveted by technology companies and pre-empt the kind of argument between business and labor over visas for cheap immigrant workers that sank reform in 2007. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for instance, has heartily embraced President Obama’s plan.
But what supporters of an overhaul of immigration law seem to be overlooking is that these very changes could also make it more difficult to build a coalition across the political divide. If reform is mainly about granting citizenship to 11 million mostly poor illegal immigrants with relatively little education, it is going to land squarely in the cross hairs of our epic battle about taxes, entitlements and the role of government in society.
It’s hard to say with precision what impact offering citizenship would have on the budget, but the chances are good that it would cost the government money. Half to three-quarters of illegal immigrants pay taxes, according to studies reviewed in a 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office. And they are relatively inexpensive, compared with Americans of similar incomes. Their children can attend public schools at government expense — putting a burden on state and local budgets. But they are barred from receiving federal benefits like the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. Only their American-born children can get those.
Government revenue might not change much with legalization. Most illegal immigrants who don’t pay taxes probably work in the cash economy — as nannies or gardeners — where tax compliance among citizens is low. Costs, of course, would increase. Once they became citizens, immigrants would be entitled to the same array of government benefits as other Americans. For Social Security and Medicare alone, offering citizenship to illegal immigrants would mean losing a subsidy worth several billion dollars a year in payroll taxes from immigrants who can’t collect benefits in old age.
The White House and other backers of reform have made much of a 2007 Congressional Budget Office analysis concluding that the failed immigration overhaul would have increased government revenue by $48 billion over a decade while adding only $23 billion to direct spending on entitlements and other programs. But the report also said that including the costs of carrying out the new law would actually increase the budget deficit by $18 billion over the decade and several billion a year after that. What’s more, it noted that most of the expected new tax revenue came from new immigrant workers, not from the newly legalized population.
Our history suggests we could have much to gain by turning illegal immigrants into citizens and putting an end to unauthorized immigration. The last time we permitted illegal immigrants to legalize, in 1986, incomes jumped for those who took advantage of the opportunity. Their children became more proficient in English and completed more years of school — becoming more productive and paying more taxes over their lifetimes.
But the same history underscores how immigration sets off fears about further sharing of government resources. Ten years after the immigration reform of 1986, reeling from some public anger, Congress passed a law barring legal immigrants from means-tested government services. The same issue is likely again to be a major flash point. Professor Hanson pointed to “the older white man who sees his entitlements at risk because of the demands placed by legalization on our fiscal resources.”
Conservative Republicans set on cutting government spending share those concerns. And for all their reasons to reach out to Hispanics, they might not find making illegal immigrants legal politically advantageous. On Tuesday, Republicans in the House argued against granting citizenship to illegal immigrants at all.
Hispanics are more liberal than the general population on economic matters, polls suggest, and more supportive of Big Government initiatives. Granting them citizenship would give them the vote.
As Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, said, “They will see legalization as a voter-registration drive for Democrats.”
E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 5, 2013
An earlier version misspelled the first name of one of the two United States senators from Arizona. His name is Jon Kyl, not John.
