Obama continued to reiterate this refrain once in office. “The way to fix our broken immigration system is through common-sense, comprehensive immigration reform,” he declared at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in 2010, seeming to take his cue directly from Westen. “That means responsibility from government to secure our borders, something we have done and will continue to do. It means responsibility from businesses that break the law by undermining American workers and exploiting undocumented workers—they’ve got to be held accountable. It means responsibility from people who are living here illegally. They’ve got to admit that they broke the law and pay taxes and pay a penalty, and learn English, and get right before the law—and then get in line and earn their citizenship.’”53
He continued to sound the same themes after winning the 2012 election:
When I say comprehensive immigration reform . . . I think it should include a continuation of the strong border security measures that we’ve taken, because we have to secure our borders. I think it should contain serious penalties for companies that are purposely hiring undocumented workers and taking advantage of them. And I do think that there should be a pathway for legal status for those who are living in this country, are not engaged in criminal activity, are here simply to work. It’s important for them to pay back taxes, it’s important for them to learn English, it’s important for them to potentially pay a fine, but to give them the avenue whereby they can resolve their legal status here in this country, I think is very important.”54
A core of mainstream immigrant rights organizations linked to the Democratic Party continues to push for this kind of a comprehensive reform. Organizations like the New Democrat Network, the National Council of La Raza, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, We Are America Alliance, Mi Familia Vota Educational Fund, and Democracia USA are sometimes identified as the inside-the-beltway organizations. They emphasize the potential of the growing Latino vote, the need to incorporate new voters into the Democratic Party, and the need of the party to reach out to its new constituency through the project of comprehensive reform.
A few advocates and organizations opposed the focus-group approach. Oscar Chacón, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, or NALAAC, rejected the “comprehensive” consensus arguing that “this is oppressive language—punitive and restrictive.” The 2008 Democracy Corps report was “nothing but an effort by D.C. groups to justify their views with a public opinion survey.” The Democrats were “accept[ing] more and more of the premises of the anti-immigrant lobby.” “We should be trying to change the way people think about the situation . . . instead of finding a way to make anti-immigrant sentiments tolerable,” Chacón urged.55
Once Obama took office, the idea of a comprehensive reform died a quiet death. The Obama administration moved instead on the enforcement side, promoting and imposing the Secure Communities and E-Verify programs. Secure Communities, a Bush-era program that empowered local police forces to share data on arrests with ICE, grew from a small, voluntary pilot program to one Obama insisted would be imposed nationwide by 2013. E-Verify likewise grew from a small-scale, voluntary program to one required for companies holding government contracts—about 170,000 of them, employing some 4 million workers—and encouraged for all.56
The immigrant rights organizations that had worked for Obama were disappointed when the first years of his presidency seemed to pander to the anti-immigrant right rather than pay them back for their support of his candidacy. Finally, in 2010, a crumb was thrown to immigrant rights supporters: prosecutorial discretion.
Memoranda by Immigration Commissioner John Morton, in 2010 and 2011 (described in chapter 7), instructed agents of ICE to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” with regard to immigration violations. The term refers to law enforcement agencies’ right to choose which cases to pursue and when to allow violators relief from prosecution. Acknowledging that ICE could not possibly deport all of the millions of people in the United States without authorization, Morton instructed ICE to prioritize national security, border security, and public safety in selecting its targets. Immigrants who had committed no crimes beyond immigration violations, had US citizens who were dependent upon them, and posed no risk to national security or public should, in general, be eligible for such discretion.57
One complicating factor in this new set of priorities was that while entry without inspection is a civil immigration violation, “re-entry after removal” is defined as a felony. The new rules defined entry without inspection as a low-priority violation, but a second attempt to enter without inspection made a person a felon and thus a high priority for removal. In fact, of 391,953 aliens removed by ICE in 2011, over half (203,571) had no criminal violations. Of the 188,382 who did have a criminal conviction, about 60 percent were guilty of either minor drug offenses, driving offenses, or immigration offenses.58 For fiscal year 2012, ICE proudly announced that it had hit a new record with 409,849 removals. Slightly over half of those removed (225,000) had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, though the vast majority of these, as usual, were for immigration or traffic offenses. Only about 7,000 were guilty of violent crimes.59
Toward the end of 2011, ICE began a case-by-case review of over three hundred thousand pending removal cases in order to determine which ones merited dismissal under the new guidelines. As 2012 progressed, however, immigrant advocates became concerned at the small and diminishing numbers of cases that were determined to be eligible for dismissal. By the middle of 2012, only a few thousand of the tens of thousands of cases reviewed had been approved for dismissal.60 Prosecutorial discretion seemed to be delivering much less than it had promised.
With the 2012 campaign in full swing, Obama finally offered his signature DACA program. DACA opened some important doors, as discussed in chapter 7, and may have contributed to the return of comprehensive immigration reform to the 2013 Congressional agenda. The reforms being debated in 2013, though, continued to follow the consulting firms’ emphasis on enforcement followed by a punitive path to citizenship or perhaps even something less than citizenship.
CAN WE ABANDON “ENFORCEMENT”?
The more that US authorities have tried to control or stop Mexican border crossing over the course of the twentieth century, the more people have come. Absolute numbers have increased despite the illegalizing of many border crossings. Despite increasingly harsh measures aimed at reducing or eliminating illegal crossings, these too have increased and sometimes decreased, as with those by Mexicans in recent years, due to factors unrelated to measures aimed explicitly at border control.
The past few decades have demonstrated that the more the United States tries to militarily control the border, the more out of control it gets. The huge growth in organized crime, drug smuggling, drug and smuggling cartels, kidnappings, and violent and unnecessary death at the border is the result of misguided policies attempting to impose control.
Supporters of the idea of border control often argue that without draconian measures to deter migrants, floods of Mexicans and other Latin Americans would overwhelm the border and the country. They forget, perhaps, that during the many decades in which the border was relatively open, there were no floods. The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States began its precipitous rise after the country began to try to seal the border, in large part because instead of leaving after a season of work, migrants felt compelled to stay, since they realized that returning would be difficult.
Recent trends demonstrate the extent to which structural factors still govern migrant flows. The slowing and even reversal of migration from Mexico and the concomitant rise in numbers migrating from Central America, particularly from Honduras, suggest that factors other than border policies are the ones that really affect migrant streams. Border policies can shape where people try to cross, how much it will cost, and how many will die in the process, but they seem to have little effect on the numbers of people crossing.
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DEEPER QUESTIONS
If the United States can’t close the border, and if comprehensive immigration reform is such a flawed approach, what can we do?
By now, we have become accustomed to the notion that controlling the border is a basic prerequisite for security, safety, and sovereignty. So accustomed, that we rarely question this idea.
The drive for so-called enforcement—through militarizing the border, criminalizing the undocumented, detention, deportation, and a punitive path to citizenship based on paying society back for some supposed wrong inflicted—grows from some of the beliefs outlined in the first chapter of this book. The entire immigration apparatus is based on the presumption that we know where people belong and we need to legislate their mobility.
It’s also based on some unquestioned assumptions about countries. It is not OK for a public park, a town, a county, or a state to discriminate regarding who is allowed to enter its space. But it’s OK for a country to do that. It’s not OK to treat people differently based on their religion, race, gender, or many other characteristics. But it’s OK to treat people differently based on where they were born or their nationality (which is generally determined by where a person is born). US immigration laws do just that: discriminate, on the basis of nationality, regarding who is allowed to be where.
If we really want to address the problem of undocumentedness, or so-called “illegal” immigration, we need to look more in depth at why the United States made some immigration illegal to begin with. I hope that I have shown that the drive to illegalize immigration was wrongheaded from the start. It’s just the latest stage in a centuries-long process of legislated inequality, a process both global and domestic.
Rather than what currently passes for comprehensive reform, some organizations are pushing for what they call a “cultural strategy” that challenges the nationalist—and racist—underpinnings of popular views of immigrants. The new generation of undocumented youth—the DREAMers discussed in chapter 7—has taken this approach. Rinku Sen emphasizes that their goal goes beyond gaining their own access to citizenship: the bigger aim is to challenge the anti-immigrant culture. “Young, savvy with social media, and artistically inclined, DREAMers have compensated for their lack of political power by telling their stories in many forms and venues.” With their stories, they sought to reframe the entire debate.61
The Applied Research Center launched its Drop-the-I-Word (i.e., illegal) campaign in 2010 in another attempt to challenge the terms of the mainstream debate about immigration that directly contradicted Westen’s advice. Arguing that the very term “illegal” (or “illegal immigrant”) “opens the door to racial profiling and violence and prevents truthful, respectful debate on immigration,” and that “no human being is illegal,” supporters challenged politicians, the media, and others to stop using it.62 By 2013, numerous mainstream news outlets had shifted their usage. “Illegal immigrant isn’t always accurate because it implies that somebody illegally immigrated when it fact a lot of people who are here illegally are here because their documentation expired after they came,” the Associated Press explained when its new style guide recommended against using the term.63 The New York Times and Los Angeles Times soon followed suit.64
In December 2012, Mexican American columnist Ruben Navarrette penned a controversial column in which he chastised DREAMers—and implicitly, others who are explicitly challenging the official terms of the debate—for acting “like spoiled brats.” “They don’t ask, they demand,” Navarrette complained. “These kids want it all . . . what some seem to really want is the golden ticket: US citizenship.” They are “drunk on entitlement,” he wrote, and will “alienate supporters.”65
At my own university, Salem State, in Massachusetts, a group supporting undocumented students engaged in a similar debate a few years ago. Should the university openly admit and support students who were undocumented? Or should it quietly open some back doors? One local high school guidance counselor cautioned us that the anti-immigrant climate at her school was so virulent that she preferred to counsel students individually and would not recommend that we hold a public event at her school. A faculty member worried that if we raised the issue publicly, it would imperil our undocumented students. Another retorted: “Do you know of any historical example where social change has come about by people keeping quiet?”
That question has stayed with me over the years and seems to surface again and again, as in Navarrette’s column. There are those who truly believe that the best way to help the undocumented is through backroom deals that may bring some benefits for some people without addressing the larger structural issues of unequal international relations, an economy based on the use of labor kept cheap through legal marginalization, restrictive immigration policies, discrimination, and inequality before the law. History shows, though, that whether we are trying to change foreign policy, domestic and global economic structures, or laws that discriminate, Frederick Douglass was closer to the truth when he argued that change “must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”66
Although the cultural strategy is a very important way to raise awareness and open a real debate about immigration policy, we also need to address the root global and economic factors that have contributed to today’s problems. In the most immediate terms, we as a society created illegal immigration by making immigration illegal. In larger terms, we created illegal immigration by fostering a global system that bases the prosperity for the few on the exploitation of the many and enforcing it, in the modern era, through borders and exclusive citizenship. It’s up to us to change it.
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed their ideas and feedback, and offered me spaces to present and discuss the material in this book. The idea was born at a café in Philadelphia, where Sandi Aritza helped me think through the outline. Gayatri Patnaik at Beacon Press supported the project enthusiastically. Andy Klatt at Tufts University, Gus Cochran and Juan Allende at Agnes Scott College, María Cruz-Saco at Connecticut College, Rob Young at the University of Oregon, and Victor Silverman at Pomona College gave me the opportunity to present and get feedback on my work in progress. Gustavo Remedi at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo and Victor Silverman at Pomona College in California each offered me the immense privilege of teaching a course related to the topic of the book while I was working on it. My students in both institutions moved and inspired me with their responses and with their own stories about migrations. Pomona proved to be the ideal place to finish writing this book. I am especially grateful to Carolyn Angius, Daniella Barraza, David Baxter, Felipe Cárdenas, Monica Dreitcer, Ahtziri Fonseca, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, Morgan Mayer-Jochimsen, Diana Ortiz, Alejandra Rishton, Jeremiah Rishton, Cristina Saldana, and Nidia Tapia for their careful reading of the manuscript and helpful comments.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (March 2012): 6–7, http://wws.princeton.edu/coverstories/Massey_LatinAmericaImmigrationSurge/Unintended-Consequences.pdf.
2. See Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005); reissued as The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Picador, 2007).
3. This concept has been suggested by a number of authors and organizations; see, for example, Joseph Nevins, Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008).
4. Evan Pellegrino, “Factory Justice? An Effort to Prosecute Illegal Immigrants Is Expensive and Time-Consuming—but Proponents Say It’s Worthwhile,” Tucson Weekly, February 11, 2010.
5. The differential was sometimes enforced by paying Mexicans in silver and “white men” in more valuable gold currency. See Rachel St. John, Line
in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 72.
6. Charles C. Teague, “A Statement on Mexican Immigration,” Saturday Evening Post (March 10, 1928), reproduced in Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 26.
7. Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences,” 18.
8. See Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (New York: Verso, 2012), chap. 24, “The Wet Line.”
9. “California’s 1971 Employer Sanctions Law,” Rural Migration News 1, no. 3 (July 1995), http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=62_0_4_0.
10. Peter Brownell, “The Declining Enforcement of Employer Sanctions,” Migration Information Source, September 2005, http://www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=332.
11. Elizabeth Llorente, “Immigration Summit: Are Undocumented Workers Really Taking ‘American’ Jobs?” Fox News Latino, June 12, 2012, http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/06/12/immigration-summit-are-undoc-workers-really-taking-american-jobs/.
12. United States Sentencing Commission, “Overview of Federal Criminal Cases: Fiscal Year 2011,” September 2012, 4, http://www.ussc.gov/Research/Research_Publications/2012/FY11_Overview_Federal_Criminal_Cases.pdf. The federal government and most other official sources use the term Hispanic to categorize peoples of Latin American or Spanish descent. Many Latin Americans find the term awkward or offensive, since it erases the indigenous and African populations of Latin America and creates a meaningless sociological category that lumps Spanish-speaking Latin Americans with European Spaniards. Many Latino activists prefer the term Latino as more inclusive of Latin Americans of all ethnicities. In this book, I use the term “Hispanic” when referring to government or other sources that use that term; otherwise, I use “Latino.”
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