Immigrants' rights still threatened

The stagnation of anti-immigrant legislation in the Statehouse has proven that blatant racism is less capable of gaining political support than its proponents first believed.

In an effort to see some version of an Arizona-style immigration bill passed, Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, has watered down his proposal’s most harmful provisions.

The new version of the proposed bill would be far less damaging.

Rather than allowing state police to arbitrarily demand proof of a person’s legal residence if they had “reasonable suspicion” that the person was here illegally, the new bill would require “probable cause” that the person had committed some other crime.

This would appear to diminish the racial profiling measures that were implicit in the first version of the bill.

But even this substantial improvement does not make Delph’s legislation worthwhile or benign. It remains a direct threat to immigrants, and it will likely fuel xenophobia and racism in the state.

A new law that purports to deal with immigration constructs illegal immigration as a serious problem. It continues the misperception that undocumented workers can and should be dealt with by deportation.

To the extent that it does so, it obstructs national progress toward the only real solution: an amnesty.

Less importantly, the legislation has actually reintroduced some of the original legislation’s idiotic measures that may not be a threat to immigrants but are simply not sound public policy.

Namely, if Delph’s bill were to pass, it would again require state officials to estimate Indiana’s total expenditures on services for undocumented workers and send the bill to the U.S. Congress.

There is good reason to be skeptical that Indiana would ever be able to produce a reliable estimate of how much it has spent on residents who lack paperwork.

If it did, it would be unlikely that the cost of these services surpasses immigrants’ economic contributions to the state’s economy. We would not be surprised if the cost of producing such figures would be higher than any actual reimbursement.

It is beyond time that this country act on the growing need for a comprehensive, amnesty-based immigration reform.

Delph’s legislation, no matter how much less vile it may be in its present form, leads Indiana down the wrong path.

The fact that the new bill can only be celebrated for being less bold than the last demonstrates the extent to which Delph’s legislation is no solution at all.