Don't divert the immigration debate

Writer V.S. Naipaul, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, once said, "Democracy is not about voting. It is about debate." Now that we are close to deciding who the debaters will be in the presidential election, what issues will they battle over?The economy and health care are perennials. Iraq was up for discussion during the last presidential cycle.Immigration was around, too. And, like the war in Iraq, the more one learns about it, the more comes out in the open about how we were misled about why we are in the situation we are.For instance, in mid-May immigration agents raided an agro-processors' slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, the nation's largest kosher meatpacking facility. This was the largest single immigration raid in U.S. history.Of the nearly 400 workers taken into custody, attention focused mainly on the 297 people who pleaded guilty. The admissions included using false Social Security numbers or cards, and unlawful entry into the United States.Some 60 workers taken into custody were later released for humanitarian reasons -- read sick people and mothers with children at home.Much about these stories is commodity reporting. Events like these appear in all parts of the country. Why does the sound of "Bad boy bad boy, whatcha gonna do?" ring in our ears? The familiarity of it all is a template for our expectations. It comforts us that our notions were right all along.But they are not.As Paul Harvey might say, here's the rest of the story.Before the raid, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency believed company supervisors were violating federal laws by harboring undocumented immigrants. According to the Associated Press, the Social Security Administration had sent the company five letters from 2000 to 2005 showing discrepancies in 500 numbers.The Iowa Department of Labor had issued 39 citations for workplace safety problems since October 2007. The federal occupational safety agency reported five amputations, dozens of broken bones, eye injuries and hearing loss between 2001 and 2006. And a plant supervisor was reported forcing workers to buy cars from him. Allegedly 200 cars were registered under falsified identities.Congressional concern has arisen about this and other recent raids and the role plant managers and owners play. An immigration agency spokesperson said building a case can take years. In fact, 4,000 administrative arrests around the country were made last year; 863 were charged with crimes but only 90 were persons in company supervisory positions.What is most disconcerting about the cross-border migrant labor issue is that all of us who are getting older are the bad boys. In 1950, there were 16 working adults for every retiree. By 2005, only three workers supported each retired person. In Fernando Romero's brilliant new book, "Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and Its Future," he points out that by 2050 the predicted worker-to-retiree ratio will be 1.3 to 1.Unless we figure out how to have more workers than retirees, we won't make it to 2050. Our current policies and attitudes won't allow it.But there is no debate about it, nor is it something to put off to the next election cycle. The subject also should not be diverted to a discussion of border security, important but not the issue. When we talk about our immigration situation, the real question is whether, like Iraq, we have been sold a way of thinking that is fundamentally flawed, a policy corruptly run, for a purpose of dubious worth.V.S. Naipual made his comment about democracy and debate after writing that one of the characters in his book "never did any critical thinking about people." Maybe it's time we did. Only this time, we are the characters in the book.(Josi de la Isla, author of "The Rise of Hispanic Political Power" (Archer Books, 2003) writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)