The Audacity of Hope

overseas. To address this problem, I succeeded in including language requiring that any
job first be offered to U.S. workers, and that employers not undercut American wages
by paying guest workers less than they would pay U.S. workers. The idea was to ensure
that businesses turned to temporary foreign workers only when there was a labor
shortage.
It was plainly an amendment designed to help American workers, which is why all the
unions vigorously supported it. But no sooner had the provision been included in the bill
than some conservatives, both inside and outside of the Senate, began attacking me for
supposedly “requiring that foreign workers get paid more than U.S. workers.”
On the floor of the Senate one day, I caught up with one of my Republican colleagues
who had leveled this charge at me. I explained that the bill would actually protect U.S.
workers, since employers would have no incentive to hire guest workers if they had to
pay the same wages they paid U.S. workers. The Republican colleague, who had been
quite vocal in his opposition to any bill that would legalize the status of undocumented
immigrants, shook his head.
“My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants,” he said. “All your
amendment does is make them pay more for their help.”
“But why would they hire immigrants over U.S. workers if they cost the same?” I asked
him.
He smiled. “’Cause let’s face it, Barack. These Mexicans are just willing to work harder
than Americans do.”
That the opponents of the immigration bill could make such statements privately, while
publicly pretending to stand up for American workers, indicates the degree of cynicism
and hypocrisy that permeates the immigration debate. But with the public in a sour
mood, their fears and anxieties fed daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the
country, I can’t say I’m surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled in the House
ever since it passed out of the Senate.
And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such
nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations,
I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to
communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.
Once, as the immigration debate began to heat up in the Capitol, a group of activists
visited my office, asking that I sponsor a private relief bill that would legalize the status
of thirty Mexican nationals who had been deported, leaving behind spouses or children
with legal resident status. One of my staffers, Danny Sepulveda, a young man of
Chilean descent, took the meeting, and explained to the group that although I was
sympathetic to their plight and was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate immigration
bill, I didn’t feel comfortable, as a matter of principle, sponsoring legislation that would
select thirty people out of the millions in similar situations for a special dispensation.
Some in the group became agitated; they suggested that I didn’t care about immigrant
families and immigrant children, that I cared more about borders than about justice. One