Portes: Immigration Reform Should Be About Labor Management, Not Criminalization

Feb 26, 2008 by Eric Ray

(KCPW News) The best path to immigration reform in the United States is to make it a process of labor management, rather than criminalization. That's according to Alejandro Portes, Director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University.

"Otherwise what you have on this side is entire families struggling with poverty and children growing up in situations of disdained disadvantage. On on the sending side, like Mexico, decreasing populations, ghost towns to which no one can invest because all the able bodied people have left," says Portes.

Portes says the issue of immigration reform is best left to the Federal Government because states will pass a range of laws, from receptive to hostile, that will be unsustainable.

Demographer estimates say Utah's population will be 30 percent Hispanic and Latino in as little as 20 years. Portes says the political integration of those new residents will be seamless if it's allowed to happen without interruption.

"To the extent that the process of integration is allowed to play itself out, political authorities continue to be receptive, and the mobilization that we hear today against nativism do not progress, the process of integration of this population will proceed gradually and seamlessly as it has happened in the past," says Portes.

Portes will be delivering the keynote address at the Migration, Rights and Identities Conference at the University of Utah's Orson Spencer Hall on Friday at noon. A longer conversation with Portes can be heard here.

Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2008 KCPW