'Amnesty' losing emotional punch in immigration debate

Dan Nowicki | The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX -- For years, critics of comprehensive immigration reform have hurled the A-word — "amnesty" — like a political slur.

It was deployed to help torpedo reform efforts in 2006 and 2007 and figures prominently in the vocabulary of opponents of the proposed pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants that was included in sweeping legislation passed by the Senate on June 27.

Although "amnesty" remains ubiquitous in the Twitter feeds, websites and Facebook pages of anti-illegal-immigration activists — and is coming up even more frequently now that the debate has moved to the House of Representatives — some veterans of the drive toward reform say the word no longer packs the emotional punch it did six or seven years ago.

They see that as one reason foes this year have shifted to other lines of attack, such as the call for more robust border-security measures.

The bipartisan "Gang of Eight" who negotiated the bill, including Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, argue that the 13-year pathway to citizenship is difficult to legitimately characterize as amnesty, which dictionaries generally define as a pardon or an act of forgiveness for past offenses or crimes.

Under the bill, undocumented immigrants would wait 10 years to earn a green card or become a legal permanent resident. They would face fines of up to $2,000, plus assessed taxes and application-processing fees. And they would be required to submit themselves to background checks and take other steps.

"If that's 'amnesty,' that's a very, very tough interpretation of it," McCain told The Arizona Republic.

Amnesty or not, a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Thursday indicated that, by 55 percent to 41 percent, Americans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have settled in the United States. Other national polls have pointed to similar support.

An opportunity to earn citizenship is considered crucial to the immigration-reform compromise and a deal-breaker for Senate Democrats, who last month agreed to massive border upgrades, including the completion of a border fence and a dramatic increase in U.S. Border Patrol agents, in hopes of increasing GOP support for the package.

The cost of the bill's border-security components total $46.3 billion.

" 'Amnesty' doesn't have much power with voters, so the new A-word is 'not enough border security,' " said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that supports comprehensive immigration reform.

That hasn't stopped opponents from throwing the word around, often in combination with border-security demands.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who led the Senate fight against the bill, said the Gang of Eight proposal would guarantee "immediate amnesty before security."

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a "tea party"-style conservative, is hosting an online petition on his campaign website that opposes the "fundamentally flawed" immigration bill. "Stop amnesty and demand border security!" the website says.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose tough policies toward undocumented immigrants have made him a polarizing figure in the national debate, also said the Senate-passed bill would provide amnesty.

"I don't know what else you'd call it when you have all these people who came into our country illegally, violated the law, and then you say, 'OK, don't worry about it, here's your free pass,' " Arpaio told The Republic. "I don't know what else you'd call it — it is amnesty."

Amnesty becomes a dirty word

Amnesty became a dirty word in American politics as a result of a 1986 immigration-reform act that granted it to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants who could prove that they had lived continuously in the country since Jan. 1, 1982.

That law, signed by then-President Ronald Reagan, has been criticized for failing to adequately secure the U.S.-Mexican border and to provide a mechanism to legally accommodate future foreign labor needs. Employer sanctions in the legislation were never enforced. Many Americans concluded that amnesty did not resolve the problem and may have even made it worse.

"Everybody on both sides understood in 1986 that they had a problem and it was just impractical to do anything other than legitimize the status of people who were already here but not here legally," said Kareem Crayton, a political scientist and associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"The reason that it has become such a dirty word now is that, for a lot of people who are already skeptical about immigration, they look back at 1986 as an example of what did not work," Crayton said. "The deal in 1986, by all accounts, was we are going to do this just this one time and then we're going to be serious about enforcing immigration laws. Obviously, that didn't work out so well."

Flake agreed that the 1986 law "was amnesty," but he said lawmakers learned from the past mistakes, such as allowing the affected immigrants to effectively cut in line in front of those waiting to enter the country through the legal process. He said the Senate bill's pathway to citizenship, with its assorted requirements, waiting periods, stipulations, fines and penalties, cannot be called an unconditional pardon for a breach of law, which is the definition of "amnesty" that he goes by.

"Some people will say, 'But you're allowing them to stay here while they're going through the process, and that is an amnesty,' " Flake said.

"I don't think that fits the definition because there are fines and penalties attached. You decide what those are by law. Somebody might say you're too lenient, the fine ought to be higher, the time period ought to be longer, but they can't say that it's amnesty, because it's just not."

Crayton also said amnesty is not a fair description of the bill's pathway to citizenship.

"It has a lot of rhetorical power, and I think it mischaracterizes what is, I think, a very significant compromise on the question of how to bring people, as the Democrats have said, out of the shadows," he said.

'More than amnesty — it's amnesty-plus'

McCain, a longtime backer of immigration reform, often was dogged by shouts of "amnesty" as he campaigned for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination in key early nominating states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

McCain, who became his party's candidate for the White House, was a major champion of the version of immigration reform that blew up in the Senate in 2007, during the run-up to the GOP caucuses and primaries. On the campaign trail, McCain frequently found himself sparring over the word at his trademark town-hall-style appearances.

The 2007 bill died amid a national anti-amnesty outcry that has yet to reach the same volume this year.

Amnesty doesn't seem to resonate with the public the way it once did, at least in part because the legislation's pathway to citizenship makes it harder for opponents to dismiss with a one-word sound bite, he said.

"I don't think a rational person would call that amnesty," McCain said of the Senate bill's pathway provisions.

"I think that's one reason why the opponents shifted their attention to border security as their primary reason for disagreement."

But to some critics, the Gang of Eight's defense of the bill against the amnesty charge comes across as semantic hair-splitting.

The bottom line, they say, is that undocumented immigrants who either crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas would get to stay here, and that's not right.

"In an immigration context, what we're talking about is actually more than amnesty — it's amnesty-plus — because they get to keep what they steal, which is residency in the United States," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which backs more enforcement and overall reductions in immigration.

"In the narrowest sense, an amnesty in immigration would mean that the illegal immigrants would go home but don't suffer any additional consequences or penalties for having been here illegally," he added.

However, Crayton, the political scientist and associate professor of law, suggested that comparing citizenship to "money in the vault" is probably not a precise analogy.

"Your citizenship does not become any less meaningful when we grant citizenship to new people who show up intending to improve the country," he said.