Immigration--left to the states: with so many states seeing increases in immigrants, the issue of how to deal with them has fallen at the feet of state lawmakers.

• Author: Boulard, Garry

In Nebraska, where the percentage of foreign-born residents, mostly from Mexico, has more than tripled in the last decade, Senator Ray Aguilar thinks he may have a solution to the challenges that come with a growing immigrant population.

"It became apparent to me sometime ago that when there are new populations in your state and you do what you can to help them become productive members of the community," says Aguilar, "you also end up doing everyone else in the community a favor."

To that end Aguilar this year supported successful legislation allowing for the children of immigrants to attend Nebraska's universities at in-state tuition costs on the theory that "if you fail to make educational opportunities available to the ones who are coming up, you pretty much are relegating them to a lifetime of manual labor and greatly limiting their upward mobility, which would not only be bad for them, but bad for Nebraska."

Now Aguilar is proposing a bill calling for the creation of a driver's certificate that will legally permit recent as well as unauthorized workers to get behind the wheel.

"As long as I have been in the legislature I have heard from constituents who are complaining about the high rate of auto insurance and how immigrant workers in particular are driving those rates up for everyone else," says Aguilar, adding that only by making such drivers legal will they be able to get insurance for themselves and keep the overall rates low.

MORE IMMIGRANTS IN MORE STATES

Aguilar's southeastern Nebraska district is overwhelmingly white, rural and aging. That he should be concerned about immigration matters reflects a demographic reality that is being replicated in disparate regions across the country where foreign-born populations are on the rise.

In southeastern Nebraska, immigrants have come to work in the region's thriving turkey, beef and pork processing plants. In other places, the hospitality and construction industries are the main suppliers of jobs, sometimes paying wages in hard cash to workers from Mexico and a handful of Central American countries who say they would only receive a fraction of such pay back home.

"This is increasingly the story almost everywhere in the country today," says Randy Capps, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute, who studies immigrant trends and public policy.

"It used to be just a handful of states, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey, that absorbed the greatest number of immigrants," Capps says. "But now it is truly nationwide."

Capps says many different states "are seeing sometimes dramatic rates of increases in their immigrant populations." Helping them and their children "integrate into the larger society and economy has become an issue for the states in a way that it never has been before."

Immigration has become a state issue for another reason, says Arizona Senator Jake Flake, whose south central district is some 200 desert miles north of the Mexican border. "The federal government has abandoned its responsibility with regards to immigration policy, giving us at the state level no choice but to have to deal with the issue, even if we don't want to," he says.

And that feeling, says John Keely, the director of communications with the Center for Immigration Studies, is shared by state lawmakers everywhere, "because they know that Washington has essentially punted all immigration issues back to the states.

"It...