It was clouded by a storm of rhetoric from both sides that fudged the facts and confused the issues

June 29, 2007

PHOENIX, June 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. debate over reforming immigration law, pushed by President George W. Bush but blocked in Congress on Thursday, was clouded by a storm of rhetoric from both sides that fudged the facts and confused the issues.

Do undocumented immigrants steal jobs from native born workers or do they simply fill the jobs that Americans can't or won't do?

Is their presence a drain on the health and social security system, or do they contribute more to the economy in taxes than they take back out?

These sound like simple enough questions to settle, but the shrill national and local debate -- fueled sometimes by presidential campaign politics and sometimes by deep-seated prejudice -- made it hard to pin down the facts.

"This country absolutely needs a robust debate on immigration (but) public debate has become rancid on this topic," said Mark Potok, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project.

"It has become degraded to slinging a bunch of false accusations back and forth," he said in a telephone interview.

In Washington, supporters in the Senate failed to garner enough support to close off debate and move forward with the plan to legalize 12 million undocumented immigrants and beef up enforcement measures.

In recent months, Americans had been bombarded with often contradictory and highly charged arguments purporting to prove undocumented immigrants are either a boon or a bane for the economy and society.

Analysts say public understanding of the issues was clouded by reports put together by partisan think-tanks and lobbyists, as well as by accounts from "advocacy" journalists and talk show hosts and in the free-wheeling exchanges of blogs.

JOBS AT RISK?

Many opponents claimed that illegal immigrants take jobs from U.S. born workers, while employers from Arizona to Texas shot back that thousands of farm, construction and restaurant jobs were going begging through lack of takers.

U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, asserted that "criminal aliens" accounted for more than a quarter of the jail population, although government figures show that immigrants make up two percent of prisoners.

CNN's Lou Dobbs, a persistent advocate of immigration controls, said that "illegal aliens" had brought in 7,000 mew cases of leprosy over a three-year period. Government figures, however, showed there were 200-250 new cases a year.

"The reason that (politicians) can make these claims with a straight face is they have virtually a buffet of options (drawn from) opinions masquerading as studies," said Demetrios Papademetriou, the president of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

"They can pick and choose from whatever is out there, but the truth, or serious analysis is taking a beating," he said.

"It has become a very emotional issue, and emotion can cloud judgment," said Tamar Jacoby, senior research fellow at the Manhattan Institute think-tank.

In the future, Papademetriou said he would like to see the creation of a permanent government commission to study labor and immigration markets systematically, so as to inject rigor back into the over-heated debate.

"Lets ask them to do evaluation studies from the get-go (to make) a judgment on the basis of what the evidence is."

(Additional reporting by David Schwartz in Phoenix)

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