D.I.Y. Immigration Reform
Political, business, labor and religious leaders in Utah were widely praised last year for signing the Utah Compact, agreeing to seek practical solutions to the problems of illegal immigration while avoiding the extremist oratory and harsh enforcement schemes that have given its neighbor Arizona such a toxic reputation.
The state has now adopted a series of laws to put those goals into practice. They amount to one state’s effort to enact its own comprehensive immigration reform, given Washington’s continuing failure to do so.
We understand the frustration, but going solo on immigration is not a good idea, even with good intentions.
On the enforcement side, Utah’s new laws have some aspects that are sensible in principle, including stricter procedures for verifying immigrants’ eligibility to work. We are concerned about the effort to draw local police agencies into federal immigration enforcement.
Arizona’s immigration law, which orders its police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being here illegally, is a wide-open invitation to racial profiling and an intrusion onto federal authority. The Obama administration sued to block it, and a federal judge has declared much of it unconstitutional.
Though Utah’s bill seeks to temper Arizona’s approach — it would, for example, require officers to check immigration status only when people are arrested for serious crimes — it is still too open to abuse.
Utah’s planned guest-worker program would issue permits to immigrants, even undocumented ones, allowing them to work in Utah after they pass a background check and pay a fine. This is magnanimous, practical and respectful of federal authority — it would go into effect only after Washington granted a waiver — but even so, it is troubling. Illegal immigrants cannot legally be hired, and it is hard to see how any state could carve out its own exception to that rule — or why the federal government would allow it. It should not.
Another new law allows the governor to enter into a pilot program with the Mexican state of Nuevo León to supply legal workers through existing federal guest-worker programs. Those programs are cumbersome and offer too few protections to workers. We certainly applaud efforts to streamline legal immigration. Utah will need to commit to defending the workers it recruits and to detect and root out employer abuse.
Utah’s legislators deserve credit for trying. But the country cannot have 50 separate immigration systems, 50 separate foreign policies, 50 states following, leading or stumbling around one another.
The states still have a major role to play. They can increase oversight and workplace protections for all low-wage workers, native-born and immigrant. They can push back at the Obama administration’s misguided efforts like Secure Communities, which muddies the line between local policing and federal enforcement — straining local resources and making it much less likely that immigrant communities will cooperate with the police.
They can work harder to integrate immigrants into their communities, increase support for citizenship and English language education, and issue driving privilege cards. And they can keep the pressure on Congress and the president to fix things the right way, in Washington.
Gov. Cuomo’s All-Cuts Budget
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rightly argued that painful spending cuts will be needed to close New York’s projected $10 billion deficit. The hard truth is that it is impossible to cut spending deeply without cutting the state’s huge outlays for education and health care. That means that New York’s most vulnerable citizens — schoolchildren, the elderly, the poor, the sick — will feel a disproportionate amount of the pain.
Governor Cuomo has vowed to make the tough decisions and not to be swayed by special-interest pleadings. But he is refusing to impose any new taxes or even continue a current surcharge on New York’s wealthiest and least vulnerable citizens.
That makes no fiscal sense. So we have to assume that for Mr. Cuomo, some special interests are more special than others. Just extending the surcharge on New York’s highest earners through 2012 would add an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue to the upcoming budget and $4 billion the following fiscal year.
Without that surcharge and other targeted tax increases, Mr. Cuomo’s proposed cuts in education and other vital services will inevitably be deeper and more painful than necessary, harming both individuals and the foundation for the state’s future economic growth.
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The governor has proposed his no-new-taxes budget and is now negotiating with state lawmakers. The Legislature is required to approve a final budget by April 1. That means there is only slightly more than a week to decide these critical issues.
The Republican-led State Senate, predictably, supports Mr. Cuomo’s tax stance. The Democratic-led Assembly has proposed a partial extension of the high-earner surcharge that would ease some of the cuts in Mr. Cuomo’s budget, but would still leave a swath of vulnerable New Yorkers exposed to avoidable hardship.
The high-earner surcharge, which is set to expire at the end of this calendar year, currently applies to individuals with taxable income above $200,000 or married couples above $300,000 — the top 2.8 percent of New York taxpayers. (Note that “taxable income” is total income minus exemptions, deductions and other tax breaks, so the gross pay of New Yorkers affected by the surcharge is much higher than the stated threshold.)
If it were extended, the burden would be tolerable. A couple with $350,000 in taxable income would simply continue to pay an extra $3,500; a couple with taxable income of $1.5 million would continue to pay $31,800 more. Those payments would be more than offset by the federal tax breaks those same taxpayers got with the recent renewal of the Bush-era tax cuts.
The surcharge revenue could be used to reduce many of the proposed cuts, or to avert the worst of them. For instance, Mr. Cuomo wants to withhold a $1.2 billion payment due to poor school districts under a 2006 court order. If the Legislature agrees, it will be the second year in a row that the ordered payment is not made. And it will further widen an already unconscionably wide gap between rich and poor school districts.
Extending the surcharge would allow the payment to be made. Even then, K-12 education would still face a crushing 7.3 percent cut from last year’s spending. If it is combined with Mr. Cuomo’s wrongheaded idea for a property tax cap, many schoolchildren will suffer educational setbacks from which they — and the New York economy — may never recover.
If it were not so serious, Mr. Cuomo’s antitax crusade would be silly. His claim that New York has “the worst business tax climate in the nation, period” is based on an index from the Tax Foundation, a research group, which rates South Dakota and Alaska as the best states. New York is clearly not at a competitive disadvantage to those states. And neither is at a disadvantage to its neighbors: what Mr. Cuomo does not say is that New Jersey is ranked 48th on that list and Connecticut 47th.
More important, taxes generally rank behind education, infrastructure and other criteria when businesses decide where to locate and invest. If Mr. Cuomo were really concerned about the needs of business, he would seek to reduce proposed cuts in areas that businesses care about most.
The surcharge is not the only place to look for needed revenues. A penny-per-ounce tax on sugary sodas could raise an estimated $465 million in the first fiscal year. A review of the state’s nearly $29 billion in annual corporate tax credits and other breaks could yield hundreds of millions of dollars in credits that have outlived their usefulness.
Calling for painful spending cuts, it turns out, is the easy part. Calling for relatively painless tax increases requires real political courage, which Mr. Cuomo and state lawmakers have yet to display.
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