Still our issue?
Gideon Aronoff hadn’t served a full week as president and chief executive officer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society when the Senate took up the debate on immigration, perhaps the nation’s hottest domestic issue of the moment.
The question: Was Aronoff exactly on time, or perhaps a decade or more too late?
Immigration is one of those Jewish issues that inspires cliches. Jewish pundits can’t write about it without mentioning somewhere in the first paragraph that their parents or grandparents entered America under the glow of Lady Liberty’s torch. A certain kind of Jewish liberal will close down all debate on the issue by invoking Leviticus: “The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as the natives among you.”
And Jewish conservatives will shake their heads at the naivete of a community that refuses to see how an “open borders” policy threatens its security and that of the nation as a whole.
HIAS attracts its own share of cliches, including the suspicion that, 14 years after the height of the Soviet Jewish exodus, America’s most eminent immigration agency is no longer relevant. Immigration is now a Hispanic issue, and the most the Jewish community can add is the wisdom of its experience — if anybody’s listening.
Aronoff has worked hard to dispel this notion, having himself worked for nearly a dozen years in the Soviet Jewry movement and, before taking the top job, as HIAS’ vice president for governmental relations and public policy in its Washington, DC, office.
In an interview this past Friday, conducted even as Senate negotiations on a comprehensive immigration reform bill were breaking down, Aronoff spoke at length on why he thinks HIAS remains relevant and why immigration demands the American-Jewish community’s attention.
Aronoff was disappointed that the Senate could not reach bipartisan support for a piece of legislation that HIAS considered a “solid opportunity.” HIAS objected to previous House legislation that would have criminalized undocumented immigrants. The current Senate bill, by contrast, “recognizes that undocumented immigrants are part of our society and must be treated based on humanitarian values seen in American traditions.”
Jewish traditions, too. HIAS could not resist the Leviticus reference in its statement on the bill. For Aronoff, however, this is not mere religious window-dressing. A policy of “generous and controlled immigration,” as he put it, “is consistent with the broad values I was talking about.”
He puts those values as the first of five reasons that he thinks the Jewish community must remain engaged in the immigration debate. “The Jewish ethical tradition clearly directs us to address the trials and tribulations of newcomers,” he said.
Second is historical experience and the Jewish community’s understanding of the role the United States must play as a refuge for people feeling religious and political persecution.
As he moved down the list, however, it became clear (although Aronoff did not describe them this way) that the reasons may be less altruistic and more in the Jewish community’s self-interest. So reason three is that the Jewish community is itself diverse and that it still has a stake in welcoming Jewish refugees, relatives, students, academics, businesspeople. And the fourth reason: The Jewish community needs a strong voice in the immigration issue in order to build coalitions with non-Jews.
Number five on Aronoff’s list is security — of the Jewish people and of the country as a whole. It is an issue that might not have made the top five before 2001. But since then, every immigration group, whatever its stance, has had to grapple with the policy implications of homeland security.
The issue has blown wind into the sails of groups that seek tight curbs on immigration. And it has put groups like HIAS, which tout the economic, humanitarian, and cultural benefits of immigration, on the defensive.
Aronoff, however, insists that security and a liberal immigration policy are completely reconcilable. “Smart immigration reform can have a positive impact on [U.S.] security and the security of the Jewish community,” he said. “It is for the very fact that the immigration system is broken that our government has not been able to get control of our borders. It has meant that we don’t know who is here.”
It’s not a good security policy, he said, to have law enforcement “chasing after people whose only crime is to want to come to America, cut our grass, take care of our babies, and make our beds in hotels. It’s not in our security interest to chase them,” when those resources would be better spent on focusing on those who wish to do us harm.
Aronoff would like to see legislation that would offer the estimated 11 million or more undocumented workers in this country a path to citizenship — while shutting down illegal immigration and “allowing our immigration enforcement to focus on people who circumvent a fair reform program.” Aronoff said he feels that the compromise approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee March 27 achieved this balance by easing citizenship for longtime residents and putting the brakes — with room for redress — on those who arrived more recently.
That’s realism, not idealism, he insisted. “The Jewish values of helping the immigrant and Jewish security interests are consistent.”
Aronoff is particularly insistent on this point. “Jewish tradition has never seen Jewish values as a suicide pact. There is no sense that we have to say, ‘Anyone is allowed to come in; you can’t question them or have any requirements.’ The Jewish community has never been an open-borders community.”
It is a community, however, that believes that “sensible and generous immigration policies serve essential American interests, including economic and social development, family reunification, and humanitarian values,” as a HIAS-initiated “Jewish Vision” on immigration put it on Independence Day last year. Aronoff is proud that 16 top national Jewish agencies and scores of local organizations signed off on the document — at a time when some predicted that a Jewish consensus on immigration could not hold.
Aronoff said he believes that consensus was forged during the great waves of immigration of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was Jews who sought refuge and economic opportunity by coming to these shores. It is a vision that created America and the Jewish community as we now know it. “The Jewish community understood that our role in America would benefit if we saw the country as a pluralistic culture as opposed to a monoculture. We can be fully American and fully Jewish. And that has given us the ability to really thrive in this country.”
That is an opportunity he is not prepared to deny other people. “The Jewish community’s treatment of the stranger is much more universalistic than people who are trying to get our community to back away from the immigration issue admit,” said Aronoff. “How can we turn our backs on the stranger from Mexico?”
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