“The Self Delusional Party Of No”: Carrying On As If Whistling Past The Graveyard Were A Plan
Self-delusion is a sad spectacle. Watching Republicans convince themselves that killing immigration reform actually helps the GOP is excruciating, and I wish somebody would make it stop.
House Speaker John Boehner’s unruly caucus has been busy persuading itself not to accept or even modify the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate. Rather, it wants to annihilate it. It’s not that these Republicans want a different kind of comprehensive reform; it’s that they don’t want comprehensive reform at all.
The Obama administration “cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill,” Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership said in a statement. Instead, the idea is supposedly to deal with the tightly woven knot of immigration issues one at a time.
That’s like sitting down with a piece of cake and saying, “First I’m going to eat the flour, then the sugar, then the eggs.”
House Republicans think they can begin with “border security,” which would be laughable if the need for real immigration reform were not so serious. It is ridiculous to think the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico can be made impregnable.
The border, after all, was judged 84 percent secure last year by the Government Accountability Office — meaning that only 16 percent of attempts to enter the country illegally from Mexico were successful. Any improvement, at this point, would necessarily be fairly modest. Perhaps Republicans know of a border somewhere in the world that is 100 percent secure. I don’t.
And never mind that the flow of undocumented migrants is way down from its peak, while apprehensions of would-be migrants are way up. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Senate bill, if enacted, could slash illegal immigration in half. No realistic increase in border security would do as much.
So the House Republicans’ intransigence isn’t really about the border. It’s about avoiding the central question, which is what to do about the 11 million undocumented migrants who are here already.
In the view that has become far-right dogma, giving these people a path to citizenship “rewards bad behavior” and puts them ahead of presumably well-behaved foreigners who are waiting “in line” for admittance. For the most adamant House Republicans, giving the undocumented any legal status and permission to stay would amount to “amnesty.”
No legal status, of course, means no solution. Opponents of comprehensive reform should just come out and say what they mean: Rather than accept measures that studies say would not only reduce illegal immigration but also boost economic growth, House Republicans would prefer to do nothing.
This makes no sense as policy or as politics. Amazingly, however, some conservatives who should know better — magazine editors Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Rich Lowry of National Review — contend that the GOP would actually help itself politically by killing the Senate immigration bill.
This line of argument — I can’t call it reasoning — holds that the Senate bill must be killed because it does not end illegal immigration for all time, it does not fix the legal immigration system for all time and it is really long. The GOP should not waste time and effort chasing after Latino and Asian American votes, according to this view, and instead should concentrate on winning working-class whites with an economic message for the striving middle class.
As for the Senate bill, Kristol and Lowry wrote in a joint editorial that “House Republicans can do the country a service by putting a stake through its heart.”
Some House Republicans worry openly that giving undocumented residents a path to citizenship would eventually add millions of Democratic voters to the rolls. But they should be more concerned about the millions of Latino citizens who are unregistered or do not bother to vote. Democrats are making a concerted play for these people. Republicans are telling them they’d like to deport their relatives and friends.
Most House Republicans have nothing to worry about for the time being; their districts are safe. But the GOP’s fortunes in national contests — and eventually in statewide races — will be increasingly dim. Maybe they’ll wake up when Texas begins to change from red to blue.
In the meantime, it’s sad to see a once great political party carry on as if whistling past the graveyard were a plan.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 11, 2013
“Remember The Minutemen”: The Movement Collapsed But Its Legacy Lives On With “Secure The Border” Fantasists
When people hear House Republicans ranting ad nauseam about “border security” – as will everyone for the next several weeks as a comprehensive immigration-reform measure works its way through Congress – they should remember the Minutemen.
You remember the Minutemen, right? Those noble citizen border watchers, out there braving the desert heat to try to stop brown people from crossing the desert illegally, who were the media darlings of 2005 but who seemed to drop off the radar afterward. The Minutemen changed the national conversation about immigration away from a debate about the state of immigration laws and trade policies and into a laser focus on those lawbreakers coming over our borders in large numbers.
They made “border security” the top priority for every politician in the country (including, it should be noted, President Obama, who has deported more immigrants found to be here illegally than any president in history). When you hear them debate immigration, inevitably you will hear some version of the following: “We need to secure the border first before we can pass comprehensive immigration reform.”
That’s the Minutemen’s legacy speaking. This mindset played a large role in shaping the immigration-reform bill that just passed the U.S. Senate, and it may prove decisive in attempts to pass it through the House. A key provision of the Senate bill, for instance, requires certain border-security benchmarks be met before the government may begin permitting undocumented immigrants to become citizens.
Republicans proposed a number of draconian border-security measures as amendments to the Senate bill, but these were mostly rejected, leading to grousing by House members that the bill coming out of the Senate will have a difficult time passing the House.
“Let them secure the border and we will have an agreement within a month that will be in law, but he [President Obama] has to do the job of making sure that we’re secure in our persons and in our homes,” announced Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas. “He’s going to need to make sure that people that come in, come in legally. Until he starts actually doing his job, there should be no discussion about doing anything with people who are here illegally.”
This is, however, a classic instance of putting the cart before the horse. Because we will never be able to secure our borders until we fix the broken system that made them insecure in the first place.
“Securing the border” will always remain illusory as long as Americans insist on operating an antiquated immigration system that remains mired in its xenophobic origins, instead of replacing it with an efficient, modern 21st-century system designed to keep the United States competitive in a global economy by providing its economy with the workers it needs in a rational and lawful program, and which eliminates the endless red tape that typifies the current immigrant experience.
We should recall how we got here in the first place: After the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 1994 by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the Clinton administration began a series of crackdown operations at key ports of entry along the Mexico border. The treaty, which in creating a trilateral trade bloc opened up the ability of investment capital to cross borders freely, was sold to the American public as, among other things, an essential component in controlling immigration.
The Clinton border operations were apparently intended to ensure that, even if capital could now cross the borders freely, labor could not. The first of these was called “Operation Hold the Line”, begun in late 1993, and its focus was to clamp down on the steady flow of illegal immigrants who came to the United States through the border cities of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso, Texas. By adding manpower and enhancing patrols in weakly secure areas where people traditionally walked across the border, the Border Patrol was able to effectively close off one of the major ports through which people usually crossed on their way north to work. This was followed shortly, in October 1994, by “Operation Gatekeeper” at the San Diego/Tijuana crossing corridor in California.
At first, the Border Patrol boasted of the marvelous success of these operations: Apprehensions dropped precipitously in the months after they were initiated, indicating, according to analysts, “better deterrence”: that is, it was believed the programs effectively discouraged people from trying to cross the border. “We can control the border, in fact,” boasted Mark Krikorian of the nativist Center for Immigration Studies, which eagerly supported the operations. “But there is more to be done.”
In reality, these operations not only eventually proved the futility of an enforcement-heavy approach to securing the border, but they became a human disaster – precisely because immigrants were no longer crossing at El Paso or San Diego. Instead, they were now fanning out into the countryside, attempting life-threatening border crossings in the middle of the desert. Like a river when a boulder falls into its path, the immigrants simply flowed out into the outlying areas.
The numbers kept growing because the tide of immigrants had swollen to a tsunami – in large part because of NAFTA and its effects on the Mexican and American economies. When Mexico approved NAFTA in 1992, President Salinas abolished a provision in the Mexican constitution that protected the traditional small Mexican farmers from competition with corporate agribusiness, particularly American corporations. Cheap American corn put over a million Mexican farmers out of business, and that was just the beginning. With the economy collapsing around them, scores of manufacturers who specialized in clothing, toys, footwear and leather goods all went out of business. The only upside to NAFTA for Mexico – the arrival of new manufacturing jobs, including auto-building plants, as they departed the United States for cheaper shores, and of a fresh wave of maquiladora, the plants where various manufacturers would outsource their labor to Mexico – proved illusory: by 2000, many of those jobs had been taken to even cheaper labor sources in Asia, and the bleeding only grew worse from there.
In the meantime, the American economy – riding along first on a technology bubble, and then on a housing bubble – was bustling, creating in the process in excess of 500,000 unskilled-labor jobs every year, the vast majority of which American workers either would not or could not perform. Yet the antiquated American immigration system only issued 5,000 green cards annually to cover them.
The result was a massive demand for immigrant labor in the United States, and an eager supply in Mexico seeking work – but at the border where a rational transaction should have been taking place, there was instead a xenophobic crackdown aimed at keeping Mexican labor in Mexico, with predictably limited success.
All that really happened as a result of the various border crackdowns was that increasingly desperate people were being forced into longer and more death-defying treks across the desert, and there were more and more of them coming.
So when the wave of immigrants began filtering out into the desert, soon enough, people began dying in large numbers. The chief causes of death, unsurprisingly, were dehydration, sunstroke, hyperthermia and exposure (coming in fifth was drowning: people often died crossing the Rio Grande in Texas). Mind you, immigrant border crossers had been dying on the U.S.-Mexico border for years; the previous peak year was 1988, when 355 people perished while attempting desert crossings or the currents of the Rio Grande. It had declined to as few as 180 in 1994 when, suddenly, it began to rise again beginning in 1995, breaking the old record in 2000 when 370 people died. In 2004, some 460 migrants died, and by 2005, more than 500 people were perishing in the desert.
Those numbers have receded dramatically since 2008 because the Great Recession knocked the legs out from under the U.S. economy, ending a substantial portion of the demand for unskilled labor; at the same time, the economy in Mexico has made a significant recovery, so both the “push” and “pull” components of our most recent immigration wave have all but subsided. In certain sectors of the economy – particularly in agriculture – the demand for unskilled labor remains largely unabated, nonetheless.
On the other hand, a national fetish about “border security” – which seems to entail building a massive fence that has “gigantic construction boondoggle” written over it, and a functional militarization of the border with one of our closest trading partners – will do nothing to address the real issues driving the immigration debate, and in fact will only put that secondary cart before the horse. The people who want “border security” will find it an endless mirage until they fix their messed-up immigration system.
They’re still living out the nativist legacy of the Minutemen. And so it ought to be worthwhile for Americans to remember, or at least be made aware of, just what exactly became of those noble citizen vigilantes.
The Minuteman movement, in fact, crumpled into a heap after 2009, when a leading Minuteman figure named Shawna Forde committed a horrifying home-invasion robbery at the residence of a small-time pot smuggler in Arivaca, Ariz., and shot and killed the man and his 9-year-old daughter and wounded the man’s wife. Forde and her Minuteman cohort are now on Death Row in Arizona, and her former close associates in the movement all denied any association with her – a line largely swallowed by media reporting on the case.
But as I lay bare in my book “And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border,” not only was Forde closely associated with leading Minuteman figures right up to the day of her arrest, she was amply reflective of the kind of people the movement attracted and who rose to leadership positions within it. (This was borne out again by co-founder Chris Simcox’s arrest last week for three counts of molesting children under 10.) Yes, she was psychopathic, but then, this was a movement whose appeals were virtually tailored to attract dysfunctional and disturbed personalities (which it did in large numbers): profoundly unempathetic, predicated around scapegoating an easily identifiable Other, and inclined to anger and paranoia and ultimately violence.
That is the path down which the Minutemen wanted to lead the country, the well-worn path of nativism, which has a long legacy of misery, suffering and death in this country. When we make a fetish out of “border security” at the expense of rationally fixing our immigration mess, that’s the road down which we’re headed. At some point, we need to get off.
By: David Neiwert, Salon, June 29, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 