Tom Harkin

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin this morning said comprehensive reform with more border patrols and guest worker programs is the sensible and affordable approach to the nation’s illegal immigration issue.

In a conference call with Iowa Independent and other media Harkin, D-Iowa, said the immigration matter likely would move to the forefront in Congress in coming days.

“Obviously, people who came here illegally broke a law,” Harkin said. “I’m not trying to soft-pedal that at all.”

But the nation has to face reality and calls from conservatives in the U.S. House to round up illegals and deport them would require a major law enforcement sweep that the nation at large doesn’t want to fund, Harkin said.


“If you say, well, we’re going to catch all these people and deport them, from all the briefings I’ve had from the FBI, Homeland Security, that’s impossible, literally, unless we want to spend billions of dollars in doing this,” Harkin said.

State and local law enforcement officials are tied up with many criminal matters, and the U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq, Harkin said.
Harkin questions whether the immigration debate should be cast in law-enforcement terms.

“Most of these illegal immigrants, the vast majority, are not here breaking laws now,” Harkin said. “They broke the law to come in but they’re working and they’re doing things. They obviously have jobs and they’re sending money back home.”

Harkin added, “We have to confront that reality.”

In general terms, Harkin would support a plan encouraging illegals to come out of the shadows of an underground economy, to let them know they won’t be criminalized.

He suggests having otherwise law-abiding illegals pay a fine for breaking the  law with entry. They could then obtain a card that provides resident working status for four or five years.

“We need these people,” Harkin said.

At some point, the illegal immigrants should have to pass an English test, and then after 10 or 12 years of working and paying taxes and avoiding trouble with law enforcement, they could get “in the back of the line” for citizenship, Harkin said.

“I think if you do something like that you’ll get people coming forward,” Harkin said.

Harkin also said border patrols could be strengthened by getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. “Stop defending Iraq’s borders and start defending our own,” he said.

A third component is working with Mexico and Central American nations to improve economies south of the U.S. border.

According the Arizona Republic newspaper, the congressional agreement shaping up so far calls for securing the U.S.-Mexican border before putting millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, a process that could take 13 years. It would also require them to pay large fines and leave the country before gaining legal status, according to the newspaper.

Harkin noted that he supported a previous compromise bill that provided a tougher border control measures and a guest worker plan for the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

In an earlier interview Harkin said proposals to criminalize millions of immigrants, an approach supported by conservatives in the U.S. House like Steve King, R-Iowa, and Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a GOP presidential candidate, would not only be a logistical nightmare that raises the specter of an ugly mass deportation but fails to take into account the contributions of many long-time Latino residents in Iowa.

“If we were just to take the Tancredo-King approach our economy would come screeching to halt in Iowa,” Harkin said. “We would lose all of our meat production, our pork plants, packing plants. We’d lose all that and that’s value-added agriculture.”