US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  For too long, this has been the central weakness of the left—too often opting for short-term tactics born in a moment of fear and divorced from any clear sense of what got us here, much less where we want to go or how we’re going to get there.

  Thus, in order to combat Islamophobia, or racism more generally, it is going to take a great deal more than uniting in opposition to its most egregious manifestations (whether a single individual or a single political party). Far more important is dismantling the institutional and structural foundations upon which Islamophobia is built and which provide sustenance to both its liberal and conservative variants.

  In other words, it is going to require a radical approach, one that gets at the very root of the problem, and that means, at a minimum, putting an end to the war on terror, dismantling the national security state, and undoing the class power that underpins that apparatus. That, in turn, is going to require a politics in which the strengthening of mass social movements, the building up of class struggle, and the democratization of our political system is paramount.

  This may seem like a tall order, but if we set our sights on anything short of that, we would be underestimating the real threat that we and the rest of the world face at this moment and how best to fight it.

  FROM “DEPORTER-IN-CHIEF” TO XENOPHOBIA UNLEASHED

  Immigration Policy under Trump

  An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

  Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, writer, and educator in the San Diego–Tijuana border region. He is a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at San Diego City College. His previous work includes No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis). His forthcoming book, Radicals in the Barrio, uncovers the lost history and rich tradition of political radicalism behind some of the twentieth century’s most important social movements, documenting the ways that migrant workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and the shared experience forged in the flames of intense class struggle in Mexico as they crossed the border into the southwestern United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This interview appeared originally in International Socialist Review 105, published in spring 2017.

  Trump has made attacking immigrants, Muslims, and refugees central to his presidency. What impact is this having on immigrants?

  The Trump administration issued an executive order that explicitly restricts the entry of Muslim travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen to the United States, imposing a three-month ban on those seeking to apply for a visa. It also places a similar four-month comprehensive ban on refugees, by suspending the already woefully inadequate United States Refugee Admissions Program. The rationale for the targeted exclusions is, according the order, “each of these countries is a state sponsor of terrorism, has been significantly compromised by terrorist organizations, or contains active conflict zones.”

  Iraq was originally included but then removed, after it became apparent that significant Iraqi military and political personnel working alongside US military forces, the CIA, and private contractors as part of the continuing US occupation would not be able to travel to Washington for training and debriefing. What the order fails to mention is that the United States government has already been targeting these predominantly Muslim nations through aerial bombings, proxy wars, drone attacks, and a variety of other forms of clandestine warfare as part of the larger “War on Terror”—a generational effort to project its power and influence in the Arab and Muslim world. While claiming that this order is to “protect… citizens from terrorist attacks, including those committed by foreign nationals,” the administration ignores the fact that no citizens from these countries have committed any acts of terrorism on US soil. Rather, this is part of a long tradition in the United States of using immigration policy as another type of weapon in the empire’s arsenal.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Trump and his inner circle of advisors are patently racist Islamophobes. In practice, though, the administration’s mounting attack on Muslims is not a departure from, but rather an intensification of, the ideological war on people who have been the immediate subjects in the crosshairs of US imperialism over the last two decades. Characterizing Yemeni refugees as potential terrorists legitimizes the US government’s ongoing drone assassinations in that country and reinforces support for a bloody invasion and sustained bombing campaign against the Yemeni population by the US-allied and armed Saudi Arabian government.

  It should be noted that Trump’s attempted bans on people from countries such as Syria and Iraq reveal the depths of hypocrisy in US politics, as refugees from these countries are fleeing US-led wars in their countries. In 2015 and 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States dropped over forty-seven thousand bombs on Syria and Iraq alone, killing untold thousands. On March 17, 2017, for example, a US-led airstrike killed over two hundred people huddled in a bomb shelter in a residential district in Mosul, Iraq, after allegedly targeting ISIS positions. Claiming Syrian and Iraqi refugees are therefore a “threat to national security” is the ultimate irony, as millions of Syrians and Iraqis have been displaced as a result of US policies.

  A second front on this attack targets undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants within the United States. Again, the order falsely characterizes this population as a threat, claiming, “Aliens who illegally enter the United States without inspection or admission present a significant threat to national security and public safety…. Among those who illegally enter are those who seek to harm Americans through acts of terror or criminal conduct. Continued illegal immigration presents a clear and present danger to the interests of the United States.” Researchers have long dispelled the notion of the “criminal immigrant,” including researchers who collect crime data for police departments and the FBI, but that is not the point.

  The order rhetorically affirms the continuation of the trajectory of immigration politics and policy from Reagan to Clinton, and from Bush to Obama: increased militarization of border enforcement and further expansion of the already-existing six-hundred-mile wall, augmentation of enforcement personnel and their authority, police participation in immigration enforcement, and expansion of the detention and deportation capacities. While Congress must approve the funding for Trump’s increased expenditures for the Department of Homeland Security (already $65 billion in 2016), the proposals are based on existing policy statutes that enable such increases. The presidents of both parties have made use of these statutes to ratchet up enforcement over the last generation.

  The most immediate threatening act of the Trump Administration has been a series of rule changes (“guidance memos”) that are currently being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under executive authority. The memos give a broader mandate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest, detain, and deport undocumented people, as well as authorizing them to act on their own impulses and target people more generally in the course of conducting their “duties,” without restriction or checks.

  Under the new rules, if someone can’t prove that they have been living in the United States continuously for two years, they are eligible for “expedited removal,” that is, without the opportunity for legal consultation or a court hearing. Previously, this was limited in practice to those apprehended within one hundred miles of the border and who had arrived within the past two weeks. This rule is designed to allow the Border Patrol, ICE agents, and the bureaucrats of the DHS themselves to become the handmaidens of mass deportation. Deportations in the first year of the Trump presidency are already projected to surpass the annual average for the last two years of the Obama administration.

  Trump has also ominously stripped federal privacy protections for undocumented youth who registered with the federal government in order to qualify for the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This program has shi
elded over 750,000 people from deportation and allowed them to apply for work permits. By repealing the privacy provisions, the Trump administration is indicating that their names and information could be turned over to immigration agents if DACA is repealed.

  It should be noted that the union representing the Border Patrol officially endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump, showing the alignment of thinking with the twenty-thousand-member armed border force. The national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, also endorsed Trump. In other words, this order is designed to allow more impunity to the federal border police, a federal agency already accused of widespread human rights abuses, as well as police auxiliaries in cities that work with immigration agencies. In effect, the Trump administration is unleashing and encouraging the policing agencies to go on the offensive and unleash a more far-reaching reign of terror on undocumented immigrants, which will undoubtedly increase and intensify high rates of state violence and abuse.

  The Arizona-based human rights organization No More Deaths, for instance, produced a comprehensive report that documents thirty thousand incidents where human rights abuses occurred between fall 2008 and spring 2011. Since 2010, according to the Southern Border Communities Coalition, forty-six people have been killed on the border. Another study conducted by the Kino Border Initiative, a binational organization promoting humane immigration policies, found that about “40 percent of Mexican migrants deported from the United States said Border Patrol agents violated their human rights, and two-thirds said their families were returned to Mexico separately.” These daily abuses were committed during a period when the border police had at least minimal restrictions on their policing tactics.

  ICE agents operating within the interior are no different, although their patterns of arrest have been more selective and targeted. Even though their stated purpose is to catch and deport “criminals,” the initial results under Trump show a different reality. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an Arizona-based worker and mother of two, was detained and deported after an annually required “check-in” with ICE. She had previously, during a workplace raid in 2008, been arrested for using false documents to work and charged with “identity theft” under the regime of notoriously racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio; she spent one year in prison.

  In the era of Trump, such injustices have the potential to be even more political, as illustrated by the fact that another early detainee in the interior of the country was DREAM activist Daniela Vargas. A twenty-two-year-old DACA college student, Vargas was arrested moments after speaking publicly at an immigrant-rights rally in Jackson, Mississippi, and transferred to a detention center in Jena, Louisiana.

  Enrique Balcazar, Zully Palacios, and Alex Carillo-Sánchez, community and labor organizers with Migrant Justice, a workers’ rights organization in Vermont, were also arrested in late March. Since they had no deportation orders, criminal records, or any other factor that would have brought them to the attention of ICE, this shows that they were surveilled, arrested, and detained by regional agents for no other reason than for their immigrant-rights advocacy.

  Not only are the armed enforcers of Trump’s immigration orders animated by their new license to target immigrants, but the far right is also emboldened. For example, racists in the well-funded, right-wing information production industry are jubilant. The fake think tank “Center for Immigration Studies,” an overt anti-immigrant organization that produces bogus research to justify exclusion and receives access to practically every mainstream media outlet, rejoiced at the new rules. Director of the group, Mark Krikorian, claimed that “the message is: The immigration law is back in business.” After declining in the first few years of the Obama administration, when it was believed that immigration reform would pass through a Democratic “supermajority” in Congress, the number of anti-immigrant hate groups and membership is once again on the rise.

  The political attack on immigrants has also increased the confidence of racist hate groups and individuals to commit acts of violence and terrorism. Encouraged by the rhetoric of Trump and the ratcheting up of state repression, the far right has increased its activities. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented more than seven hundred incidents of hate crimes in the first week of the Trump administration alone, and further attacks have targeted a broad spectrum of people including immigrants, African Americans, Jewish people, South and Central Asians, and others. For instance, in late February, a racist gunman in Kansas walked into a bar near Kansas City and opened fire on two Indian men, killing Srinivas Kuchibhotla while yelling, “Get out of my country!” This is the violence of the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies at the center of US politics in its most unfiltered, toxic form.

  Much of this was under way before Trump, under Obama, so much so that Obama was termed the “deporter-in-chief.” What did Obama do and how did this pave the way for Trump? Given that Obama and the Democrats have been party to the war on immigrants, how should activists and the left relate to the Democratic Party in today’s struggle?

  Immigration reform was an issue Obama promised Latino groups he would take up within his first “hundred days” in office. That didn’t happen. The narrative of the Democratic Party attributes the failure to Republican opposition and congressional gridlock. But a closer examination shows that the Democratic Party leadership allowed the Republican Party to determine the narrative and to effectively kill the possibility for legalization. After this failure, the administration walked away from its promise for legalization and instead became the most aggressive enforcer of restrictions in modern presidential history.

  The Democratic Party strategy under Obama was doomed from the start. During the campaign, Obama outlined the emerging strategy that would unfold under his administration. According to a campaign email, he believed that immigration reform must include a “three-pronged response”: 1) strengthen border security; 2) establish a path to legalization that includes fines and adherence to the rule of law for immigrants and their families who may have entered the United States illegally but are now contributing and responsible members of society; and 3) create a “guest-worker” program, whereby American businesses can temporarily recruit foreign workers for jobs that American workers cannot or refuse to fill.

  The Democratic Party’s prescription for “reform” was hardly discernable from the mainstream of the Republican Party, although the right preferred to ditch even the extremely vicarious “path to legalization.” When the Obama administration introduced its policy guidelines, it bypassed the House and pushed the issue through the Senate first.

  According to Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, this was carried out ostensibly to protect “vulnerable Democrats” who might lose in more conservative districts if they tangled with such a thorny issue. In reality, it was an effort to preempt and sideline efforts by Congressman Luis Gutierrez and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to introduce a bill considered “too liberal” by Democratic leaders.

  The Democratic leadership’s vision for immigration policy followed a carefully worded script that would not allow for deviation. Like with the debacle over the passage of Obamacare, the Democrats squandered the opportunity to use their practical super-majority status in both houses of Congress to push for substantial reform, mobilize public support, and force the Republicans on the defensive. Instead, they conceded leadership to the minority-status Republicans in 2009, stating that any bill would have to pass through committee with “bipartisan” support.

  Their unilateral commitment to bipartisanship allowed the Republican minority to steer the negotiation. This was despite the fact that Republicans running on an anti-immigrant platform took heavy losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, as well as in the Republican presidential primaries of 2008. Given that context, the Democrats had a golden opportunity to carry out a legalization program, with or without Republican support.

  Given this opportunity to lead on the issue, the Republicans torpedoed any possibility for reform and the Democrats dutifully conced
ed. Through the negotiations, the proposal was loaded with repressive, enforcement-only measures. When the Republicans called for the legalization component to be postponed, in order to “secure the border first,” the effort collapsed.

  A similar effort again tanked after Obama’s reelection. Following the same path of “bipartisanship”—albeit after the Democrats lost their majority in the House and maintained only a slight majority in the Senate—the next attempt at immigration policy reform crashed even more abruptly. The Republicans learned that even as a defeated minority they could win, so why even bother with bipartisanship?

  In the meantime, the Obama administration enhanced the machinery of immigrant repression in the United States during Obama’s tenure. Between 2005 and 2012, a period spanning the second term of George W. Bush and the first completed term of Obama, the Customs and Border Protection budget was nearly doubled, from $6.3 billion to $11.7 billion. The ICE budget increased from $3.1 billion to $6.3 billion, and total enforcement personnel increased from 41,001 to over 61,354, including the vast expansion of ICE offices, field operations, and detention centers throughout the interior of the country.

  This helps explain why detentions and deportations accelerated under Obama, reaching a record of over three million over the course of his tenure, a majority of which were connected to no crime whatsoever. The ramping up of repression, even while the Obama administration claimed to be championing the rights of immigrants and striving for humane reform, only goaded the Republicans and conservative Democrats to take an even harder line against any relief for undocumented workers. Furthermore, this ninety-degree shift led liberal supporters to become muted, lower their expectations, or even drop the issue altogether as a policy priority.

  The failure of the Democrats to make more than a symbolic gesture at immigration reform greatly demoralized the prolegalization base of the Democratic Party who showed up at the polls in fewer numbers in the elections of 2010 and 2012. This failure energized the hard-right Tea Party, which mobilized bigoted, anti-immigrant sentiment to get to the polls in greater numbers in 2010 and 2012, helping to pave the way for the Republican Party and Trump to ascend on a reactionary and racist platform once again centered on attacking immigrants.