The AFL-CIO supported employer sanctions in 1986. But as Jeff Stansbury wrote a few years later, “The IRCA is not a border-control law,” rather, it is “a worker-control law.” In the words of Asian Law Caucus staff attorney Bill Tamayo, “The new law has codified the existence of a cheap and highly exploitable class of labor, largely non-white and non-English-speaking, with little rights, if any.” And employers lost no time in using the law as a weapon against workers who tried to organize unions.22 In 2000, the AFL-CIO reversed its stance and called for a repeal of employer sanctions.23 AFL-CIO executive vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson explained, “Employers often knowingly hire workers who are undocumented, and then when workers seek to improve working conditions employers use the law to fire or intimidate workers.”24
Proponents of employer sanctions argued that by making it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to find work, the law would discourage them from migrating to begin with. For Mexicans contemplating migration, though, employer sanctions did not appear to loom very large. In one important study of Mexican sending communities in 1990, “Interviewees made it clear that having a job in the United States is far more important to them than any law the US Congress might pass: If they have a solid job prospect, they will migrate, with or without papers. Our field studies suggest that the robust growth in employment opportunities in the United States in the second half of the 1980s has been at least as important in fueling the current wave of emigration as the effects of Mexico’s lingering economic crisis.”25
THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT 1990S
In the 1990s, explicitly anti-undocumented or anti-illegal mobilization took off, especially in California, where Proposition 13 in 1978 had decimated state finances. Under Governor Pete Wilson, “illegal” immigrants became a convenient scapegoat.26 Proposition 187 in 1994 was the first of many state- and nationwide efforts to impose austerity on the backs of the most vulnerable. Nicknamed “Save Our State,” it sought primarily to bar the undocumented from receiving public services. The text of the proposed law began by stating: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.”27 Wilson “made undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his 1994 re-election campaign.”28 Proposition 187’s language and rationale became widespread in the anti-undocumented movement in subsequent years.
Many of Proposition 187’s provisions were never enacted, being tied up or rejected in the courts. However, as California goes, so goes the nation. After the Democrat Bill Clinton became president in 1993, Wilson connected anti-immigrant with anti-Washington bombast, claiming that the federal government had failed to protect the country’s borders. Wilson’s attacks helped to push Clinton to the right on border enforcement, as Clinton sought to woo California’s apparently increasingly anti-immigrant electorate.29
Anti-“illegal” rhetoric mirrored and intertwined with a growing anti-black, anti–civil rights backlash in multiple ways. It replaced explicitly racialized language with a two-pronged attack against people of color. First, starting with the 1980 election, conservatives “repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a context between hardworking blue-collar whites and poor blacks who refused to work.”30 Second was rhetoric about law and order.31 “The shift to a general attitude of ‘toughness’ toward problems associated with communities of color began in the 1960s. . . . By the late 1980s, however, not only conservatives played leading roles in the get-tough movement, spouting the rhetoric once associated only with segregationists. Democratic politicians and policy makers were now attempting to wrest control of the crime and drug issues from Republicans by advocating stricter anti-crime and anti-drug laws—all in an effort to win back the so-called ‘swing voters’ who were defecting to the Republican Party.”32
By the end of 1993, “politicians began tripping over one another to take a tough stance on boundary enforcement and unauthorized migration.”33 In 1994, President Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to bring the border “under control” and undercut Pete Wilson’s protagonism by taking the lead on border enforcement as the elections approached.34 In 1996, Clinton pressed for punitive Welfare Reform and Immigration Reform laws that enacted federally much of what California had tried to do at the state level. With these laws, Clinton made both welfare reform and law and order centerpieces of the Democratic Party program, and linked the anti-black and the anti-immigrant aspects of these policies. In the panic following the 9/11 attacks, the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the subsequent creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 strengthened both institutional controls against potential and current immigrants, as well as the ideological climate of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Joseph Nevins argues that the government’s increasing attention to border enforcement in the 1990s actually served to create the supposed immigration crisis. Through its sensationalist rhetoric and justifications, as well as its ostentatious enforcement policies, the state helped to convince the population that such a crisis indeed existed.35
Republicans were torn between their traditional allies in the business community—who had little incentive to join the anti-“illegal” hysteria—and the new right-wing populism. Texas went the opposite direction from California in the 1990s. “In Texas, the economy was booming; the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio were exploding; and thousands of illegal immigrants sat astride two-by-fours, nail guns in hand, building those neighborhoods. So, then-governor Bush and his man Karl Rove crafted a different strategy from their California colleagues: Hispanic-friendly. The result? In 1998, George W. Bush crushed his Democratic opponent, getting nearly half the Hispanic vote—a triumph that placed him on the path to the presidency one year later.”36 In 2001, Texas Republican governor Rick Perry’s decision to sign the nation’s first in-state tuition law in 2001 represented the crest of the pro-immigrant wave.
A decade later Texas Republicans had gone the way of their California colleagues. Texas Republicans promoted a redistricting plan and voter identification law that federal courts struck down as discriminatory. As late as 2010, Perry declared that a law like Arizona’s S.B. 1070 “would not be the right direction for Texas.”37 By 2012, however, he was defending Arizona. “No state should be held hostage to a federal government that refuses to enforce the laws of the land. . . . The people of Arizona took action consistent with federal law and in direct response to the failure of this administration to secure our nation’s borders. The absence of federal action on immigration enforcement directly spoils the integrity of our nation’s laws.”38 Moreover, Perry was pushing for a Texas version of this legislation, banning sanctuary cities that would prevent local law enforcement agencies from enforcing federal immigration law.39
“COMPREHENSIVE” VERSUS “ENFORCEMENT ONLY”
IN THE NEW CENTURY
In January 2004, president and candidate George W. Bush had lauded the country’s immigrant history in a speech whose audience included representatives of LULAC and other Hispanic organizations. Bush acknowledged the country’s need for migrant workers and expressed great sympathy for the undocumented:
Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics: Some of the jobs being generated in America’s growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling. Yet these jobs represent a tremendous opportunity for workers from abroad who want to work and to fulfill their duties as a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter. Their search for a better life is one of the most basic desires of human beings. Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile, through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Some have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings or entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of hea
rtless human smugglers. Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in the shadows of American life, fearful, often abused and exploited. When they’re victimized by crimes they’re afraid to call the police or seek recourse in the legal system. They are cut off from their families far away, fearing if they leave our country to visit relatives back home they might never be able to return to their jobs.
Thus, Bush proposed offering temporary legal status to all undocumented workers in the country. Although he emphasized that the status would be temporary—initially for three years, but renewable—he also emphasized that those who wanted to apply for citizenship should also be allowed to do so.40
Several congressional proposals for so-called comprehensive immigration reform were launched in the first decade of the new century: John McCain and Ted Kennedy’s Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (S. 1033) in 2005; John Cornyn and Jon Kyl’s Comprehensive Enforcement and Immigration Reform Act (S. 1438), also in 2005; Arlen Specter’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (S. 2611), which passed the Senate in 2006; and finally the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act or Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1348), which drew on the earlier three and was promoted by Senators McCain, Kennedy, and Kyl, as well as then-president Bush. The right-wing reaction against the concept they termed amnesty gained political traction and contributed to the failure of these measures, even though all of them incorporated strong anti-immigrant measures euphemistically called enforcement components. Rarely was it pointed out that the combination of legalization and enforcement pioneered in 1986 had been followed by a huge increase in the size of the undocumented population. The proposals were generally critiqued from the right rather than from the left. Comprehensive reform, willy-nilly, had become the rallying cry of political liberals and supporters of immigrant rights.
While these comprehensive approaches stalled, the House passed an extraordinarily punitive piece of legislation that epitomized what came to be called the enforcement-only approach, H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. This vote became a catalyst for a new level of immigrant rights mobilization, the huge demonstrations in the spring and especially on May 1, 2006.
NEW PROTESTS IN THE NEW CENTURY
The major academic study of the 2006 demonstrations points out that they dwarfed even the largest protest movements in the country’s history, which only occasionally reached a half-million protesters. “In a short span of twelve weeks between mid-February and early May 2006, an estimated 3.7 million to 5 million people took to the streets in over 160 cities across the United States to rally for immigrant rights.”41 The protests were also unique in being carried out within the political system but primarily by people legally excluded from the polity—the undocumented.
Local activist organizations, hometown associations, and unions as well as Spanish media and the Catholic Church played important roles in disseminating publicity and motivating participants. “Radio show hosts and DJs on popular Spanish-language radio stations across the country endorsed the marches and encouraged listeners to attend. In addition, the two main Spanish-language networks, Univisión and Telemundo, promoted it through public service announcements broadcast during popular evening newscasts, regular reporting on the preparations for the marches and interviews with march organizers during newscasts, and frequent informal banter during talk-show and variety show formats, even incorporating the subject into the plotlines of their telenovelas, or soap operas.”42 National-level organizations took a backseat as different coalitions mobilized in different cities.43 The culmination of these many protests was on May 1, when a coordinated day-without-an-immigrant protest brought walkouts and business closings throughout the country to illustrate the importance of immigrants to the economy and their role in citizens’ daily lives.
Another thing the immigrant and undocumented communities had in their favor were the reformers in the labor movement who pushed for more pro-immigrant, and pro-undocumented positions. In the fall of 2003, the AFL-CIO, UNITE-HERE, and the SEIU sponsored the first Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. Undocumented immigrant workers took off from 101 cities around the United States, headed for Washington, DC, where they lobbied and demanded legislative change, and to New York, where they held public rallies.44 One study suggests that the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride three years earlier helped bring groups together and lay the groundwork for the 2006 mobilizations.45
To the extent that the protests aimed to prevent H.R. 4437 from becoming law, they succeeded: the Senate declined to consider the proposal and, in fact, passed its own, comprehensive reform bill later in May 2006 (which was then rejected by the House).
Some analysts believe that it was Bush’s immigration agenda and the battles over comprehensive immigration reform that led to the Republican losses in Congress in 2006. After Obama’s victory in 2008, backlash came in the form of the Tea Party movement, outflanking the Republicans to the libertarian and anti-immigrant right. The Republicans are currently torn between appealing to the fast-growing population of Hispanic voters—who have traditionally voted Democratic—and playing to the far right anti-immigrant sentiment fanned by talk radio and the Tea Party. Thirty-five percent of Hispanics voted for Bush in 2000, and over 40 percent did so in 2004, when Hispanic Republican support peaked.46 In 2008, with Barack Obama running against John McCain and Sarah Palin, the Hispanic Republican vote sank to 31 percent. In 2012, as candidate Mitt Romney took an outspokenly anti-immigrant position, this went still lower to 27 percent. Meanwhile, the Hispanic vote rose to 10 percent of the total, up from 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004.47
CONSULTING FIRMS AND THE CULTURAL BATTLE
Rinku Sen argues that despite the successes of 2006, a cultural battle for the rights of the undocumented was lost in the rise of xenophobia after 9/11. Fox News, talk radio, reality TV, and other media and entertainment sources offer the public epic battles between “criminal aliens” and beleaguered law enforcement in what Sen calls a “racialized cultural fight over the nation’s identity.”48 Sen especially critiques the immigrants’ rights organizations that have sought and followed the advice of consultants and “mainstreamed” their messages so as to tacitly accept, rather than challenge, common anti-immigrant sentiments. Many large organizations have relied on consulting firms like Westen Strategies that use surveys and focus groups to determine what messages will resonate with different sectors of the American public.
The firm’s founder, psychologist Drew Westen, urged advocates to concede to the public’s antipathy for immigrants considered illegal, rather than to challenge that stance. Advocates should aim for the center, he argued, by avoiding talk of immigrants’ rights and instead relying on some key phrases that would resonate with those less sympathetic. His surveys found that the phrases “comprehensive immigration reform” and “fixing a broken immigration system” went over especially well with these centrist voters. An effective message, Westen discovered, begins with “taking tough measures to secure our borders,” continues with “cracking down on illegal employers,” and finally ends with “requiring those who came here without our permission to get in line, work hard, obey our laws, and learn our language.”49 His firm works with and has been commissioned by major immigrants’ rights organizations like the Migration Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and Reform Immigration for America. Indeed, Westen’s key phrases began to enter every politician’s immigration proposals.
The Democratic Party also constructed its twenty-first-century agenda based on survey and focus group research about what messages would resonate with the American public. A study the party commissioned by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research as the 2008 election approached argued that immigration is “especially important in Congressional battleground districts and states where views on illegal immigration are more negative. Failing to show real determination to get this problem under control costs incumbent Democ
rats votes.”
Like Westen, the authors recommended “acknowledgment of the problem, pragmatic and tough ideas to stem the flow of illegal immigration with a path to citizenship laden with the kinds of requirements that anyone should meet if they are to attain the honor of being an American citizen.” Their bullet points included the following:
Attack [then-president] Bush for losing control of the problem; enforcement at both the border and with employers [sic]; opposition to non-essential benefits; and responsibility and a path to citizenship.
A large majority of voters support a path to citizenship if we are serious about having to qualify for citizenship: expelling anyone who has committed a crime, others pay a fine and taxes, learn English, and get in the back of the queue. But if voters hear only the part about a path to citizenship without the responsibilities, they do not support this—and punish incumbent Democrats. But if Democrats “get it” and are very serious about getting the problem under control, including benefits, their leaders can get support for solving this problem.50
As a candidate, Obama echoed this position when he outlined what he believed comprehensive immigration reform should look like and vowed to press for its passage. “I can guarantee . . . that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting. And I want to move that forward as quickly as possible,” he stated in May 2008.51 “We need immigration reform that will secure our borders, and punish employers who exploit immigrant labor; reform that finally brings the 12 million people who are here illegally out of the shadows by requiring them to take steps to become legal citizens,” he told the National Association of Latino Elected Officials in June.52 A large coalition of immigrant rights organizations favored this idea of a comprehensive reform, despite its punitive aspects, and supported the Obama candidacy and presidency.
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