All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  McCain released a campaign ad of himself walking along the Nogales border with the county sheriff. “Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder,” McCain mused. “Complete the danged fence.” “It’ll work this time,” the sheriff responded, instantiating the amnesia that pervades border control politics. “Senator, you’re one of us.”139 The “us” was telling. Right-wing nationalism drew a bright line around a national “us” that excluded not only immigrants but also any American who didn’t share their views. The sentiment had reached its lyrical apex in 2008 when McCain running mate Sarah Palin praised small towns for being the “real America … you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”140

  Fox News and the website Breitbart News warned that unauthorized immigrants might bring Ebola. Or, said right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham, they might spread drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis.141 YouTube provided a platform for everyday people to launch viral conspiracy theories, including at least one positing that Mexico was hatching a long-term plan to subjugate the United States to a new Mesoamerican empire.142 Under Obama, right-wing concerns about the loss of sovereignty were personified by a black president middle-named Hussein born to an immigrant father, and with an aunt, Zeituni Onyango, discovered to be living in Boston public housing while fighting deportation. “Obama’s Aunt: An Illegal Alien, Getting Government Benefits, Who Donated to Barry’s Campaign,” the right-wing blog Ace of Spades wrote in 2008. “Sort of sums up his entire candidacy, doesn’t it?”143

  As president, Obama rarely invoked being the son of an immigrant father while discussing immigration. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis had all highlighted their white ethnic immigrant roots to prove their Americanness. Tellingly, Obama decided that this wouldn’t work in the case of an African father.

  Glenn Beck, whose stream-of-consciousness conspiratorial ramblings transplanted the talk radio format to cable television, condemned government for failing to secure the border and business for hiring the migrants who crossed it. “We just think we’re like everybody else,” Beck said. “But we’re not. We’re not citizens of the world. We’re citizens of the United States. At least—at least right now we still are.”144

  Alfonso Aguilar, the director of US Citizenship Office under George W. Bush, joined a group of reform supporters on the right to “unmask” Tanton-network groups like FAIR, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) as “radical environmentalists”145 who were “anything but conservative.”146 Aguilar was right about the movement’s origins but in denial about what it had become: the core of a Republican right obsessed with demographic change. The wrong people were having too many babies, and the right kind too few. “Mass immigration is social engineering,” said CIS director Mark Krikorian. “It is Congress second-guessing American moms and dads, saying they’re not having enough children.”147 It was, nativist rhetoric suggested, white genocide.

  Yes, you can

  Republican extremism had since the mid-2000s begun to break apart the popular support for the bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants”: while Republican hostility became yet more vitriolic, a Democratic electorate increasingly composed of liberals and non-white people pushed back, adopting more favorable views toward immigration.148 Arizona’s and Obama’s enforcement crackdowns accelerated the split.

  In the lead-up to the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama continued to deport people in far higher numbers than Bush ever had.149 Immigrant rights activists were infuriated. But the Republican right was too, making it clear that Obama’s deportation campaign would be met only with derision and calls for escalation. Representative Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, accused Obama of practicing “selective amnesty.”150 That November, Republicans riding the Tea Party wave won control of the House and gained ground in the Senate in a campaign suffused with nativist rhetoric.

  “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” Obama complained in a 2011 El Paso speech. “All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time … They said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Or now they’re going to say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol. Or they’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied.”151

  Obama didn’t seem to realize that his analysis amounted to an astute indictment of his own approach, and that of the rest of the establishment reformers. Nativists were indeed shifting the goal posts time and again, but Obama didn’t grasp that it was mainstream, immigration moderates like him who had helped them do so. In March 2010, the establishment Reform Immigration for America coalition organized a mass march on Washington—with rather than against Obama, whose speech was transmitted via jumbotron.152 Organizers passed out American flags and told those waving flags from Latin American countries to conceal them.153 That December, the DREAM Act failed to clear the Senate.154 It would have provided a way to grant legal status to DREAMers, the undocumented immigrants who came to the country as kids, portrayed as the sympathetic poster children for reform.

  In June 2011, with an eye on his reelection fight, Obama finally began to shift gears when ICE released a memo directing the agency to deprioritize the deportation of immigrants such as longtime residents, DREAMers, and veterans.155 And yet in fiscal year 2012, DHS deported 418,000, breaking his previous record.156 In July, activists interrupted Obama’s address at the NCLR conference with chants of “Yes, you can!,” demanding that he bypass obstructionist Republicans and take executive action to stop the deportations.157

  In June 2012, Obama shifted further, announcing the new DACA program to protect hundreds of thousands of DREAMers from deportation. While establishment groups were focused on CIR, it was militant youth activists on the Trail of Dreams cross-country march and groups like DreamActivist and Dream Team Los Angeles who won the fight for DACA.158 The month before, the Justice Department filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Arpaio alleging widespread discrimination against Latinos.159 Democrats needed the Latino vote, and grassroots immigrant groups were increasingly organized.

  Obama, however, emphasized DREAMers’ noble exceptionalism, claiming that ICE was “focusing on criminals who endanger our communities rather than students who are earning their education.”160 Deportation protections for a minority would function as a smokescreen to obscure a crackdown on the majority. Just after DACA was announced, lawyers and advocates gathered at the White House to strategize over the coming Supreme Court decision on SB 1070. Napolitano said that “DACA was essentially an extension of the Secure Communities policy,” NDLON legal director Chris Newman recalls, and that felons get deported so DREAMers can stay.161

  Last gasp

  Obama’s greatest asset among Latino voters in 2012 was his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, who declared that “the answer is self-deportation.” Romney had won the Republican primary by refashioning himself as an immigration hard-liner and all-around “severely conservative” guy to make his way through a clown-car field packed with bizarre extremists.

  He accused Newt Gingrich of supporting “a form of amnesty” and attacked Governor Rick Perry for defending a Texas law that allowed undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition, calling it a “magnet [that] draws people into this country to get that education.” Perry was booed by the primary debate crowd when he meekly replied, “We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society.”162 Perry in turn hit Romney for having hired a lawn care company that employed undocumented workers. Meanwhile, Bachmann called for a fence along “every mile, every foot, every inch” of the border.163 Herman Cain, an avid defender of legal immigration during his time as a pizza magnate, said he might “put troops with real guns and real bullet
s” on the border and that the fence should be electrified, with a (bilingual) sign declaring, “It will kill you—Warning.”164

  Romney’s cynical adoption of hard-core nativism made it easy for Obama to present himself as a friend to immigrants. “You know, there are some things where Governor Romney is different from George Bush,” Obama said in a debate. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform. He didn’t call for self-deportation.” Obama did not, however, explain why “self-deportation” was any worse than his mass government deportations.*

  Obama bragged that he had “put more border patrol” agents on the border than at “any time in history.” But the contrast between him and Romney was apparently clear enough.165 Obama won with nearly three-quarters of the Latino vote.166 An autopsy report produced for the Republican National Committee, at the time received as a very important document, was unsparing: “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.”167

  Both parties’ positions were untenable. Republicans were caught between the hard right and a general electorate put off by extremism. For Obama, the political downside of enforcement had risen, costing him credibility with Latinos, while the upside, in the form of Republican cooperation, remained illusory. In December 2012, DHS announced that 287(g) task force agreements, which deputized local police as enforcement agents, would be phased out. But they left the agreements authorizing inspections in local jails in place.168 And Secure Communities continued, remaining more efficient at accomplishing much the same thing nationwide.

  In June 2013, a new CIR bill passed the Senate with sixty-eight votes after a last-minute amendment adding spectacular border enforcement measures.169 It was crafted by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” with support from the US Chamber of Commerce and a united labor movement (a deal was struck over the guest worker program), anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, and the coalition of establishment immigrant reform organizations like NCLR, CAP, and the National Immigration Forum.170

  The legislation included a “path to citizenship,” a mandatory employment verification system, $44.5 billion to roughly double the number of Border Patrol agents to at least 38,405, and the construction of more border fencing.171 It “practically militarizes the border” to the fullest extent, “short of shooting everybody that comes across,” Republican senator Lindsey Graham exclaimed.172 The bill created a new guest worker visa for industries like construction and hospitality.173 Also, in response to a massive campaign led by Facebook and other tech companies, the bill would dramatically increase skilled worker visas, and eliminate diversity visas and visas for some family-based immigration categories. It would become a “merit-based” system that aimed to supply business with workers.174

  Establishment immigrant rights groups nonetheless supported the Senate effort, with NCLR saying that it wasn’t “perfect” but “delivered a real solution to our broken immigration system.”175 The goal was to make it so spectacularly punitive that it would win over House Republicans.176 “The glee over 68 votes was sickening,” Avendaño told me. “People treated the bill as if it were a candidate, not a piece of public policy.”177 “Republicans have finally stumbled upon Democrats’ dirty secret on immigration,” MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin reported. “As long as the GOP is willing to concede a path to citizenship for immigrants residing here illegally, Democrats will meet any demand on border security—no matter how arbitrary and misguided.”178

  By contrast, a number of grassroots organizations condemned the bill as doing “more harm than good to the cause of fair and humane immigration reform.” The bill, they wrote, would “increase discrimination and racial profiling of people of color through nationwide mandatory E-verify” and “create a virtual police-state and create environmental disasters in the 27 border counties by militarizing the US-Mexico border.”179

  The nativist Center for Immigration Studies, however, saw the measure as mere theater to distract the right from “amnesty.” “They just pulled that 20,000 number [of additional Border Patrol agents] out of a hat,” said CIS executive director Mark Krikorian. “They should have just said we’re going to add a million border patrol agents and arm them with photon torpedoes.”180 For the nativist right, escalations in enforcement were also a means to another end: pushing undocumented people out and sharply restricting legal immigration.

  For the right as a whole, “amnesty” was unacceptable no matter how much enforcement it was paired with. “The anger is more intense now than it was in 2010,” said Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips. “They are more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”181 And why should they have traded legalization for enforcement when establishment politicians had consistently escalated enforcement as a stand-alone policy? In November 2013, comprehensive reform issued its last gasp in the House as Speaker John Boehner capitulated to right-wing opposition and announced that there would be no negotiations with the Senate over a major overhaul.182

  That year, Obama marked a milestone, deporting more than 438,000, up from 359,795 in 2008 and 165,168 in 2001.183 Some would quibble with this figure, noting that many of the people counted as “removed,” meaning formally deported, were the sort of recent border crossers who would have previously been “returned,” meaning allowed to “voluntarily” leave the country. A widely circulated Los Angeles Times story, for example, cast doubt on the “deporter in chief” moniker, stating: “The portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose.” Deportation numbers appeared to go up, according to the story, “primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”184

  This was a distortion: between fiscal year 2010 and 2015, the portion of apprehensions that resulted in a “voluntary” return, typically of someone detained soon after crossing the border, plummeted from 59 percent to just 4 percent as CBP intensified a “Consequence Delivery System” designed to deter repeated border crossing attempts. The Los Angeles Times reporter was wrong to suggest that this was the result of a terminological shift, or a change in the way that data was categorized: being “removed” rather than “returned” is a legal distinction with a big difference—which is precisely why the Obama administration emphasized removals. A removal is a formal deportation, which typically bars a deportee from entering the United States for a number of years, and if they do so anyway without authorization, they face prosecution for the federal felony of illegal reentry. Indeed, prosecutions for that and other immigration crimes surged, packing federal prisons with immigrants convicted of nothing but crossing the border illegally.185 Deportations from the interior did fall beginning in 2012, thanks to activist pressure. But the border deportations were real deportations, too.

  By Obama’s second term, it had become abundantly clear that intransigent Republicans would not be moved and that Obama was presiding over deportations that were tearing families and communities apart. And so the president became the subject of increasing protest. In August 2013, nine undocumented youth were released from custody after boldly entering the country from Mexico after departing the United States.186 Three, including National Immigrant Youth Alliance organizer Lizbeth Mateo, had intentionally left the United States to reenter in protest.187 “I waited 15 years to see my grandfather again, and to meet the rest of my family. My family is also one of the 1.7 million that have been separated by Obama’s deportation ‘monster,’” wrote Mateo.188 The undocumented youth movement had been radicalizing since 2010, when members of the Immigrant Youth Justice League came out to declare that they were “undocumented and unafraid.”189 They weren’t bluffing.

  Deporter in chief

  In November 2013, undocumented graduate student activist Ju Hong disrupted an Obama speech on immigration, telling the president: “You have a power to stop deportations for all.”190
Obama insisted, “Actually, I don’t, and that’s why we’re here,” saying they had to take “the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal that you want to achieve, but it won’t be as easy as just shouting.” Remarkably, he went so far as to suggest that taking unilateral action to stop deportations would “violate the law.”191

  Within the immigrant rights movement, the fissure widened between well-funded inside-the-Beltway organizations and grassroots groups frustrated at those groups’ closeness to the White House.192 Cecilia Muñoz, a onetime NCLR official, was promoted to run Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, and one of Obama’s central domestic policies was Secure Communities. “Her promotion is good for the White House and good for advocates of immigration reform,” said Frank Sharry, once executive director of the National Immigration Forum and now head of America’s Voice. “The White House senior staff will benefit from a ‘wise Latina’ who understands a community most of them clearly don’t. And her understanding of immigration reform and her career as a lifelong advocate for it will surely elevate this issue within the White House.”193

  Activists on the grassroots left, however, weren’t impressed by Muñoz’s work in the White House. “Being Latina does not give you a license to advocate for, and spin around, policies that devastate Latinas,” said Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org. “Muñoz is out there talking about immigrants like she’s a Republican white man. The messenger has changed, but the message is the same.”194