Too little, too late

“Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law?”

With that powerful question, US President Barack Obama announced recently what many quarters describe as the most wide-ranging reforms to US immigration policy in decades. The executive action is significant because it bypasses the US Congress, which is controlled by the Republican Party that has consistently and rabidly opposed every Obama initiative from healthcare and green energy to gay rights and immigration reform. Republican jingoistic fear-mongering about illegal immigrants entering the United States and mooching off its economy, taking away jobs from hard-up Americans and messing up that countryís social fabric has gone a long way toward fouling the discourse on this topic, and generally making it hard for any politician concerned about his or her political survival to champion the rights of poor, undocumented workers in the country.

But in the face of such poisonous rhetoric, Obama’s announced policy comes down in favor of giving some 5 million undocumented immigrants scrounging around on the margins of the US economy a form of institutional protection and reprieve by allowing them the chance to right their status. In particular, undocumented foreign-born persons who are parents of children born in the United States and thus considered American citizens, and who have lived there for at least five years and who pass a criminal background check may now be able to apply for a work permit and be spared deportation. With work permits in hand, such workers will be able to pay taxes and live lives free of the constant anxiety that they are illegal, undesirable people in a land that otherwise benefits from the collective sweat of their efforts in farms and factories and offices where their services are needed. Or as Obama put it: “For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It’s kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities.”

Obama’s immigration action is estimated to also benefit some 300,000 undocumented Filipinos in the United States. According to data by the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, America remains the top destination of Filipinos going abroad; it hosts more than three million permanent Filipino migrants and 126,000 temporary workers.

If the new immigration policy gets implemented right, it will be a welcome reprieve, indeed, to such individuals. But let’s also be clear: The policy does not go far enough to fulfill Obama’s original campaign promise of comprehensive immigration legislation that would not only address the residency status of millions of undocumented workers on a temporary basis, but would also attempt the bigger task of reforming the long-dysfunctional, labyrinthine process of legally applying for citizenship in America. The move to grant temporary permits to and ban the deportation of workers is but a stopgap measure, compassionate but rather grudging. It makes no mention of the arduous, sometimes decades-long, process that individuals have to hurdle to bring loved ones to America; it does not streamline the equally knotty process of applying for permanent residency status, or getting a work permit, or, as a New York Times article pointed out, obtaining visas for highly skilled foreign technology workers, many of whom are forced to rely on “Kafkaesque” laws to be able to reside in and lend their special skills to a country whose technological advancements largely derive from such cutting-edge contributions.

Another group will not be benefiting from the temporary leeway offered by Obama’s administrative order: Filipino World War II veterans. While Obama has done more than any other US president before him to recognize and compensate the sacrifices of Filipino soldiers who fought under the American flag in WWII—he authorized the release of a $198-million fund in 2009 to be distributed as one-time lump-sum payments of $15,000 each to Filipino vets who are US citizens or residents—the US government’s actions have been too little, and too late. Its neglect through the decades has spawned a most heartbreaking sight—that of old Filipino vets shivering in the cold in American cities, lonely and bereft of the company of family members who must wait long years before their immigration papers are even looked at.