Introduction: The Tough Question

Introduction: The Tough Question “In recent years, federal policy toward immigrants has become hostile, yet Americans have a surprisingly thin understanding of just how that came to be. This book traces the struggle of politicians, interest groups, courts, activists, and communities to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the historic Hart-Celler Act of 1965. A key piece of legislation in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Hart-Celler ended the national quota system of the 1920s and launched a new era in immigration, remaking the nation’s demographic profile over the next four decades, reshaping American society and culture, and launching deep debates over the place of the immigrant in American life. In particular, political battles erupted over immigrants’ access to education, labor, welfare, and civil liberties. Sometimes these battles grew so acrimonious that they dominated American politics.” (2) “While initially seen as a triumph for liberal immigration policy, the Hart- Celler Act proved to be both progressive and deeply conservative at the same time. Scholars have shown how the replacement of the national origins system with equal quotas actually created new obstacles for potential immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as it ignored the particularly compelling reasons resi- dents of some nations had for seeking to emigrate to the United States.3 But this duality of the Hart-Celler Act becomes even more striking, as this book shows, when we consider how the act that fostered an increase in the numbers and diversity of immigrants also inspired a reactionary movement that has sought to marginalize those same immigrants inside the United States.” (2) “Racism and nativism had become less reputable in American society, while the United States had embraced and expanded a welfare state with a variety of new benefits. As a result of these changes, the new restrictionists rejected overtly racist argu- ments and instead charged that immigrants unduly burdened the state and its citizens.5 In this new rendering, immigrants took government benefits and jobs away from working- and middle-class Americans in an era when the new service-oriented, low-wage economy left many citizens economically inse- cure.6 Working- and middle-classand White Black citizens sometimes viewed the massive growth of Latino and unauthorized populations (all too often seen as one and the same group of people) as the causes of the inequality and dis- placement associated with the new economy.” “These diverse anti-immigrant groups pursued a multifaceted strategy to restrict immigrants’ rights, engaging the courts, Congress, state legislatures, ballot initiatives, and other forums to press for political change. Their movement created new cleavages in the electorate and facilitated a re- distribution of power within both political parties. The Democrats were di- vided by a desire to accommodate both antiimmigrant labor unions and members of an emerging centrist faction, Third Way New Democrats, while still appealing to the party’s proponents of an expansive and inclusive New Deal welfare state. The party was also split between its pluralist and humanitar- ian wing that favored opening borders and absorbing immigrants into the mainstream of American society as quickly as possible and those who worried that increases in the labor supply would be so large that the wages of all working-class Americans would suffer.” (3) “The anti-immigrant movement of the 1970s originated in a rejection of state toleration unauthorized for immigrants, but by the 1990s, the increasingly polarized debate, with an emboldened restrictionist movement, had begun to question rightsall forimmigrants, including authorized immigrants and green card holders. The 1990s proved to be a pivotal decade. Citizenship status became the litmus test for basic rights. Anti-immigrant activists successfully limited the access of both authorized and unauthorized immigrants to key welfare programs, including federal welfare benefits, Medicaid, and food stamps. At the same time, they built on the conservative shift in policymaking from the federal to the state level to empower state and local law enforcement officers as the front-line enforcers of immigration policy.” (4) “This book reveals the centrality of debates about the rights of immigrants to the politics of immigration policy in the United States. The focus on borderand admissions policy after 1965 has obscured fights over the rights of im- migrants already in the United States. While placing alienage rights in the nation’s interior at its core, this project never loses sight of the importance of the external border.8 The intersection between border enforcement and domestic rights is always dynamic because, as legal scholar Linda Bosniak writes, noncitizens are “deportable by definition.” Regardless of whatever civil, social, or economic rights they enjoy in society, their status as deport- able “will always circumscribe their lives, making absolute sphere separa- tion . . . a practical impossibility. While potential expulsion is always present in noncitizen immigrants’ lives, this work focuses on the increasing role that alienage rights played in immigration control and policy at the end of the twentieth century.” (5) To understand late-twentieth-century immigration history is to gain a more refined understanding of the end of the twentieth century in the United States. The political debates over immigrants’ rights intertwined with debates over large-scale structural changes in the new economy, including those generating unemployment and underemployment, stagnating wages, and dein- dustrialization. Those who sought to restrict immigration increasingly sought to roll back the expanded notion of social and economic citizenship that had been forged through the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Immigration history is central to the history of the American state. (6) “By focusing on the persistence of liberalism even during the supposed tri- umphant moment of conservatism and the passage of immigration restriction under a Democratic administration, this book is able to join a larger move “Beyond the Red-Blue Divide.”16 Rejecting a narrow focus on partisan politics and election cycles that seem to make the red-blue divide real, the approach to immigration history taken here examines the intersection of political cul- ture, electoral politics, and political economy in ways that allow us to see clearly the divisions that endured within parties and the alliances that formed across party lines during this supposed period of party homogenization and hyper-partisanship.” (6) “Finally, in explaining how the rise of restrictionist energy often yielded less than many hoped, or feared, The Walls Within puts the Tea Party and Trump- fueled anger that has emerged since 2008 in the context of this three-decades- long history of anti-immigrant activism. Restrictionists have had reason to be unsatisfied, and to become ever more radical, as the policies that have dimin- ished the rights of immigrants have not diminished the growing size of the foreign-born population.” (6) Following this period of severe restriction, the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 drastically remade the nation’s immigration patterns and its racial composition more broadly. Approved by Congress under an ethos of civil rights and fairness and as part of the Great Society, the Act set a uniform cap on all nations at 7 percent of the annual total. (7) This work focuses on the changes in immigrants’ rights during and in the wake of these demographic changes and in particular looks at education, labor, and welfare rights and civil liberties protections, four key arenas where the state touches individuals’ lives. The first half of the book covers roughly 1965– 1990, the period when new arguments over immigrants’ rights emerged and efforts at restriction were met with mixed success. The second half addresses 1990–2000, a time when anti-immigrant activism began to make consequential gains and states began to play a significant role in immigration policymaking. The debates over the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the United States in the 1970s were undoubtedly shaped by the perception of many native-born Americans that they faced increasingly limited opportunities for economic mobility and that the political and social means to achieve their own aims and aspirations had narrowed. (9) The long simmering ambivalence toward social welfare in the United States entered a new era during the 1990s, and its confluence with the changing immigrant population had dramatic constricting effects on immigrants’ rights as well as on the broader social contract. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the War on Poverty and the welfare rights movement made gains in expanding social welfare and opportunity for minorities and the poor in the United States.28 As a result, the meaning of citizenship and the social contract had expanded, fueling the growth of the conservative right. (11) Taken together, these chapters show that the politics of immigration reform and immigration restriction were powerful not only at the country’s edges, but at its core. Debates over education, labor, and welfare rights and civil liberties for noncitizen immigrants revealed the growing strength of the restrictionist movement in the United States. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, anti-immigration activists forged a new restrictionist movement with rhetoric drawn from the language of rights, benefits, and burdening the state. Pivoting its tactical approach during the 1990s, this modern anti-immigrant movement made inroads, coming to dominate national politics and ushering in a new era of immigration federalism. (12) Immigrants in the United States entered the twenty-first century with few of the governmental benefits that they had enjoyed thirty years earlier. Locally, they continued to carve spaces to live, work, and thrive in the face of shifting political winds. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, while many in the United States still referred to the country as a “nation of immigrants,” it was more accurately a nation of citizens and noncitizens, in which the benefits of citizenship had been both narrowed and denied to a very significant population living permanently in the United States. (12) Chapter 2: “A Subclass of Illiterates” - The Presidential Politics of Unauthorized Immigrant Education “With these three issues at hand: DOJ’s politicization, the administration’s [Carter] failing immigration policy, and its uncertain commitment to civil rights, the administration’s various arms began to argue over the scope of the government’s position and brief.” (32) “Turning to foreign policy, Days outlined a twofold reason for intervention. First, he noted that the department had been tasked with investigating any possible violations of the country’s human rights obligations under the Helsinki Accords. But an even more compelling reason for intervention, Days argued, was that discrimination by a state toward foreign nationals could impact foreign relations with their home nations, echoing the Chy Lung decision of a century earlier.13 Finally, Days pointed to the administration’s own immigration policy position as a reason for intervention. If Congress were to pass the president’s immigration plan, many unauthorized children would become legal residents, yet they would have been denied an opportunity for a basic education.” (35) During the fall of 1980, rising domestic political pressures including the impending presidential election led the Carter administration to publicly address the issue of unauthorized students’ access to education in a way that differed significantly from its positions espoused in court. While White House staffers continued to seek out discrete policy solutions that would help to diffuse the issue, on the campaign trail, Carter and others embraced more neutral and vague positions, distancing themselves from the positions they had taken in court. (42) Facing a tough battle, President Carter followed his advisors’ suggestions and sought to distance himself from the government’s role in the case and instead embrace a neutral position which would alienate neither Latino voters nor moderate Republicans who were drawn to the fiscal rhetoric used by conservativeactivists. (43) “When the moderator turned to Governor Reagan, he voiced his support for an open flow of individuals and a recognition of the issues in Mexico; he claimed 40–50 percent unemployment was driving people to cross the border. Rather than put up a fence, as was being floated, Reagan suggested, “Why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with work permits, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And they can cross, and open the border both ways by understanding their problems. But, like Carter, when the polls showed the race tightening that fall, Reagan gave a more nuanced and conservative response. When he returned to Texas that fall for the general election, he was asked about the issue during a cam- paign stop in Brownsville. He noted that he was “disturbed that the Carter administration has allowed this problem to become a burden to your district’s taxpayers.” But, like Carter, Reagan demurred from taking any stance on the issue, instead promising that the issue would be carefully reviewed were he to be elected. (44) “At the end of the twentieth century, immigrants lived and worked in the United States, making essential contributions to both the American economy and society, but were facing greater harassment and more limited protections on a daily basis. By the turn of the twenty-first century, immigrants—both legal residents and unauthorized—had lost many of their claims on the state, creating sharpened distinctions between people who had full citizenship status and rights and those who did not. This loss of rights did not mean that immigrants had disappeared, as they continued to be a critical component of the economy and society whether as farm workers or physicians.” (166) “Debates over immigration, citizenship, and rights were reinvented in the wake of the shift to a postindustrial economy and the large demo- graphic changes that resulted from the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. The Act not only transformed the nation’s demographic profile, but it also changed the politics of immigration policy. While progressive in its removal of the national origins quotas and its diversification of immigration, the Hart- Celler Act drove an evolution in the anti-immigrant movement that would eventually restrict immigrants’ rights within the United States. It was a unique moment when shifts in the economy and their consequences for workers com- bined with changes in notions and patterns of immigration and the emergence of a strengthened anti-immigrant movement. This confluence of forces led to massive fractures, fissures, and realignments regarding immigration policy at local, state, and federal levels.” “As shown in this book, the politics of immigration changed significantly in the 1990s—a pivotal decade. Citizenship status became the litmus test for basic rights. A new, restrictive era had begun, in which citizenship—rather than resident status—was the new boundary for access to certain rights and the welfare state. The interparty fracturing exposed during the 1986 passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act continued throughout the politi- cal debate over the removal of immigrants’ access to welfare benefits. This internal dissension over immigration policy within the Democratic and Republican parties complicates the story of increased polarization and party homogeneity that scholars often ascribe to the 1980s and 1990s. The passage of welfare reform also highlights clearly how efforts to restrict immigrants from rights furthered the deterioration of rights for citizens. Removing noncitizen immigrants from welfare enabled the removal of millions of citizens from welfare under welfare reform. At the same time, the concern with entitlement spending overall drove the removal of authorized immigrants from welfare. These debates were fundamentally intertwined.” (168) “The anti-immigrant movement that emerged in the 1970s was successful at framing immigrants as a threat not just to citizens’ jobs, but as a burden on the state, taking government benefits away in a moment when the new economic order was leaving many citizens without economic security and turning toward the welfare state’s safety net. This narrative continued with Donald Trump’s first general election television ad in 2016 ominously warning that, in Hillary Clinton’s America, “The system stays rigged against Americans . . . Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay. Collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line. Our border open. It’s more of the same, but worse.”7 While famous for his calls to build a wall, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies extend far beyond border and admissions policies to targeting the rights of immigrants already residing within the United States.” (169) The George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations undertook large-scale deportation efforts using tools created by the 1990s legislation. IIRIRA and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, also passed in 1996, radically expanded the crimes that made an immigrant eligible for deportation and created expedited deportation procedures for removal of certain noncitizens without a hearing before an immigration judge (170) Immigrants in the United States today have dramatically different access to rights and the welfare state than they did fifty years earlier. These changes have enormous consequences, not just for immigrants and their families, but for native-born Americans as well. Immigrants’ relationship to the administrative state is what has explicitly changed, but there are implicit consequences for all Americans who face a vastly reduced welfare state. Although many of today’s immigration debates pit immigrants versus native-born American workers, these debates ultimately undermine the notion of citizenship, creating a new reality for all living in the United States. (171)