“The Right Likes Massive Programs”: GOP Small Government Fetish Is Selective Garbage
The delicate immigration reform negotiations in the Senate were supposed to pass a bill that allowed undocumented immigrants to earn American citizenship — because that is the entire point of doing immigration reform, for reformers. It is also, apparently, supposed to make the process, and America’s immigration system in general, as inconvenient as possible — for conservatives who wish to see immigrants punished for their border crossing — without making the process so punitive that liberals could no longer support the bill.
Late in June, two Republicans, Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.) and John Hoeven (N.D.), inserted an amendment into the Senate bill to strengthen security at the American border with Mexico. No Democrats opposed the measure in a “test vote” before the Senate’s passage of the larger bill. The amendment’s proposals are referred to as a “border surge,” because “surges” are a great thing in Washington ever since “the surge worked” became a very popular catchphrase for a while. (Washington is full of very simple-minded people, on the whole.) So we will “surge” the border, just like we “surged” Iraq, and, like Iraq, we will Win the War, against Mexico and Mexicans.
Basically the “border surge” is a very expensive new expansion of a massive government program, only it’s the sort that conservatives like because it involves detaining people instead of giving them healthcare or something. The “surge” is a massive military buildup along the border, involving 700 miles of fencing, 20,000 new border agents, and more drones, perhaps even ones fitted with “nonlethal weapons,” for the Border Protection Agency to loan out to various other law-enforcement agencies. It will install, at various points along the border, an exciting array of new infrastructure and equipment of the sort usually not seen outside of actual war zones. Many lucky communities will soon have multiple new “fixed towers,” dozens of “fixed camera systems (with relocation capability), which include remote video surveillance systems” and “mobile surveillance systems, which include mobile video surveillance systems, agent-portable surveillance systems, and mobile surveillance capability systems,” and hundreds of new “unattended ground sensors, including seismic, imaging, and infrared.” Chuck Schumer described the entire deal as “a breathtaking show of force.” Even actual border-patrol agents are sort of confused by the proposal, which will double their ranks. “I’m not sure where this idea came from, but we didn’t support it, and we didn’t ask for it,” their union vice president told the National Review.
The whole thing will cost $38 billion. Fun fact! House Republicans recently attempted to cut $20 billion from the federal budget for food stamps. The measure failed when many Republicans decided the cuts weren’t large enough. But there is always money for new unattended ground sensors!
This week, two things happened as a result of the Corker-Hoeven “border surge” amendment. First, the Congressional Budget Office “scored” it. The CBO found that it will be expensive. Second, it found that under the proposal, illegal immigration “would be reduced by between one-third and one-half compared with the projected net inflow under current law.” Success! This, honestly, seems like one of those findings that the CBO just sort of made up. There will be … half as much illegal immigration, we guess. “CBO once again vindicated immigration reform,” Chuck Schumer said.
Second, Rep. Filemon Vela, a Democrat from Texas, quit the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, after the caucus failed to do anything to stop the amendment from passing. He posted an explanatory message on his Facebook wall, saying:
I grew up on the border, and until recently, border towns in Mexico and the United States shared a common economic and cultural vitality. Now we have border fences, and they don’t work. They harm the environment, inconvenience everyone and promote fear between neighbors.
And: “Mexico is a friend, neighbor and one of our top three trading partners. The US-Mexico border should not remind us of places like East Berlin, West Berlin, North Korea and South Korea.”
(As Molly Ball reports, Vela’s decision came after two immigrant advocacy groups turned against the Senate bill for its inclusion of the Corker-Hoeven proposal.)
The best hope for getting something that resembles the Senate bill through the House is with a great deal of Democratic support. This probably isn’t a great time for the bill to start dropping liberals. Especially if the House ends up passing something after all, and then security is “beefed up” even more in conference with the Senate. (“Let’s say, 100,000 new agents, plus maybe some tanks, and also the drones can talk now.”)
Still, it looks like the price for a legal route to security for millions of undocumented Americans is the total militarization of vast swaths of the country at great expense, simply so that some conservatives feel we’re being sufficiently “tough.”
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 5, 2013
“Either Way, They Could Be Screwed”: The GOP Might Just Stick With This “Party Of White People” Thing
Since the 2012 election, most (not all, but most) Republicans have agreed that if they’re going to remain viable in presidential elections in coming years, the party will have to broaden its appeal, particularly to Latino voters. There has been plenty of disagreement about how to go about this task. Especially over comprehensive immigration reform, which many Republicans see as too high a policy price to pay to achieve some uncertain measure of good will from those voters. But outside of conservative talk radio, there weren’t many voices saying that they should junk the whole project. Every once in a while some voice from the past like Phyllis Schlafly would come out and bleat that the party should focus on the white folk who make up the party’s beating heart, but to many it seemed like the political equivalent of your racist great aunt saying at Thanksgiving that she doesn’t feel comfortable around those people.
But as immigration reform wends its tortured path through Congress, more mainstream Republicans are having second thoughts. In fact, significant backlash is brewing, not just to this bill but to the whole idea of Republicans working to appeal to minorities. Benjy Sarlin at MSNBC has an excellent article explaining how this backlash is spreading, noting that even some people who six months ago were blaming Mitt Romney’s position on immigration reform for his loss are now saying that the only viable path to victory is getting turnout up among white voters.
I’ll get to why this is a very bad idea in a moment, but the logic at work isn’t completely crazy. After all, by now the Republican party going after minority votes is like the fast-food joint that puts a salad on its menu amid all the bacon cheeseburgers and chili fries. It’s there so they can say they’re offering something for people with different tastes, but they don’t expect anyone to order it. And when Rush Limbaugh warns that a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants will create millions of new Democratic voters, he’s probably right to a degree. Under the bill the Senate passed it would be 13 years before any undocumented immigrant could earn citizenship and vote, but as Sarlin discusses, the argument some Republicans make that Latinos are “natural conservatives” has always been weak.
After every election, a significant number of people within the losing party argue that the problem wasn’t one of persuasion but one of turnout. They just didn’t get enough of their voters to the polls, so they don’t have to change what they’re arguing. There’s often some truth to it; when only 50 to 60 percent of eligible voters are coming to the polls, turnout on your side could always be higher. But the problem the GOP now faces is that the way you relate to one group of voters affects how other voters perceive you.
This was something George W. Bush and Karl Rove understood well when they built his 2000 campaign. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” consisted mostly of things like pulling African-Americans on stage with him and putting lots of pictures of Latinos on his web sites. It got him a few extra votes among minorities, but that was always just a bonus. The real target was moderate white voters, who saw it and learned, in the phrase reporters repeated over and over, that Bush was “a different kind of Republican.” He wasn’t like those mean-spirited old white guys who seemed to dominate the GOP, and they’d be comfortable voting for him.
By the same token, if you decide that you’re going to focus your efforts on turning out the white vote, you won’t only be sending a message to Latinos (and African Americans, and the fast-growing Asian American population) that you’re not interested in them, you’ll also be sending a message to moderate whites that your party might not be the kind of place they’d feel comfortable. This goes double for young white voters, who have grown up in a much more diverse culture than their parents and grandparents, and aren’t going to be so hot on joining the Party of White People.
This is a dilemma for Republicans. Both paths are strewn with obstacles and dangers. Whichever one they choose, there’s likely to be trouble.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 2, 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
“Slipping A Little Deeper Into Madness”: The Imaginary White House Immigration Ruse
Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) told Dave Weigel yesterday one of the main reasons he and his House Republican colleagues will not support comprehensive immigration reform.
“If you’re the White House right now,” he theorized, “and you have a signature law — that is, Obamacare — that is completely a legacy issue for the president, and it’s looking like implementation is going to be a disaster, and if you’re on your heels in terms of these scandals, and you’re flummoxed by the NSA, there’s one issue out there that’s good for the White House. That’s immigration. The question is: How much energy does the White House actually put into getting the legislation, or do they want to keep the issue for 2014?”
I hear this quite a bit from the right. Democrats say they want to pass reform legislation, the argument goes, but it’s a sham. What those rascally Democrats really want, conservatives argue, is for immigration reform to fail so Democrats can use the issue against the GOP in the 2014 midterms and beyond.
And every time I hear this, I’m convinced our public discourse has slipped a little deeper into madness.
Look, this isn’t complicated: Democrats want to pass immigration reform. President Obama wants to pass immigration reform. When the reform bill reached the Senate floor yesterday, it received 100% support from Democratic senators, and support is expected to be at a similar level among House Dems. If the party were engaged in some elaborate ruse, they’ve apparently managed to fool everyone, including themselves.
In fact, I’d love to hear Roskam and others who share his ideology explain the electoral rationale behind their strategy. He seems to be arguing, “Democrats want immigration reform to fail so they can use it against us, therefore, we should make sure reform fails so that they can use it against us. That’ll show ’em!”
If Roskam and his like-minded allies really believe their own rhetoric, wouldn’t they want to pass a reform bill, take the issue off the table, and undermine Democratic efforts to beat them over the head with the issue?
As for the notion that the president is keeping a low profile on immigration, Roskam thinks it’s part of a fiendish plan. In reality, Obama is giving lawmakers space because proponents in both parties asked him, too — the more the president is directly associated with the legislation, the harder it is to earn support from Republicans who are reflexively against anything and everything Obama is for.
Behind the scenes, however, the White House is heavily invested in helping reform succeed — it’s not because the president’s team secretly wants it to fail, delusional arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.
As for the policy approach Roskam would prefer, Weigel’s report added:
Roskam insisted again and again that “up until now, the immigration issue has been a powerful political issue for the White House,” and that Team Obama likely wouldn’t be “willing to give that up in 2014 in order to have a bill.” But “if they’re willing to get a remedy, that suggests we go to the consensus. The consensus is on a border that’s secure.”
First, the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate includes so much border security one of its conservative Republican supporters characterized it as “almost overkill.”
Second, Roskam is describing a fascinating scenario. The point of comprehensive reform is that the two sides effectively accept the others’ condition — Dems get a pathway to citizenship; the GOP gets increased border security.
Roskam’s argument is amazing: as soon as Democrats agree to give Republicans what they want, in exchange for nothing, then there will be a “consensus” bill.
And if Dems don’t agree to this, it’ll prove once and for all that they’re secretly against immigration reform.
And to think some policymakers find it difficult to negotiate with the House GOP….
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 28, 2013
“John Boehner’s Dilemma”: Your Choice Mr. Speaker, Tea Party Uprising Or Latino Uprising
On immigration, Speaker John Boehner is caught between two unpleasant possibilities: A Tea Party uprising or a Latino uprising. Eventually, he’s going to have to choose which presents a bigger risk to his party.
So far, all of his rhetoric and body language suggests he is trying to protect his House Republican caucus from a Tea Party uprising that would take out incumbents in Republican primaries, and perhaps himself from a challenge to his speakership.
Even though the Senate passed landmark immigration reform with a supermajority of 68 votes, Speaker Boehner is refusing to bring the Senate bill to the House floor. He is insisting the House pass its own legislation with “majority support of Republicans,” a needless standard designed to produce a far more right-wing bill than the Democratic-led Senate can tolerate, increasing the chances of a deadlocked House-Senate negotiation.
If it even gets that far. Considering how House Republicans recently failed to come together to pass a farm bill, it’s not a given the House can pass any immigration bill with Republican votes alone.
Failure to pass a final bill suits Tea Party Republicans just fine. But if Boehner buries a widely supported bipartisan Senate bill, the uprising he faces may be far worse.
On Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told CNN, “This has the potential of becoming the next major civil rights movement. I could envision in the late summer or early fall if Boehner tries to bottle the bill up or put something in without a path to citizenship … I could see a million people on the Mall in Washington.”
This is not idle musing. This has already happened.
In December 2005, the House passed legislation that would turn undocumented workers into felons. A wave of mass protests by Latinos swept the country the following spring, lasting for three months. Half a million poured into the streets of Los Angeles, and 400,000 marched in downtown Chicago. Seeing the strength of the Latino vote, the Senate quickly backed off of the House approach and in May 2006 passed an immigration bill providing a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
Neither the House nor Senate bills became law. But back in 2006, with conservative Republicans controlling both chambers, gridlock was a win for the protesters. Today, with immigration advocates so close to winning historic reform, gridlock would be a devastating blow.
And if the highest-ranking Republican in the country was the clear roadblock, the Republican Party in general would be on the receiving end of visceral hatred, most likely voiced once again in the streets.
A wave of protests targeting Republicans that matched or surpassed the level of street heat generated in 2006 would be devastating to the Republican Party’s attempts to win back the Latino votes that proved decisive to Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories. With the Latino share of the electorate continuing to rise — most ominously for Republicans, in their lone bastion of strength, the South — killing immigration reform could fast-track a demographic disaster that would condemn Republicans to minority status for a generation.
In the end, Boehner will have to decide which uprising he wants to face least: A Tea Party uprising that could spell personal defeats for himself and his friends, or a Latino uprising that could spell the end of the Republican Party.
If he takes the long view, he will recognize that his speakership won’t last for long if his party crumbles all around him.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, June 28, 2013
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