Is the “Anti-Immigrant Tide” Reversible?
by: Jan Garrett on September 30th, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Well, it’s only an apparent tide and to the extent to which it seems to have momentum, it is reversible. Those are conclusions of what is, in my opinion, an excellent analysis of the current political state of play on the immigration rights issue, in a just published article, “The Preventable Rise of Arizona’s SB 1070,” by Justin Akers Chacon.
Last June the General Assembly of my Unitarian Universalist denomination adopted Immigration Rights as a 4-Year Study-Action Issue, orienting its associated congregations, as much as possible given UU pluralism, toward a single primary topic of shared conversation. Since then I have been looking for a coherent way to understand the causes, the political forces standing in the way of a just resolution, and a sense of how progressives might engage this issue with some chance of a positive outcome.
Chacon’s article is the best analysis I have seen so far. On a first reading, three major points stood out. A close look at the politics behind SB 1070 and similar proposed legislation reveals not only the shenanigans of the Tea Party types and their backers but also a depressing performance on the part of Democrats from whom many Tikkun readers (and, no doubt, many sympathizers of the immigrant rights movement) hoped to see better, a performance that has played into the hands of the anti-immigrant right. Secondly, in spite of the impression that one easily gets from most of the media, current opinion in the United States, which has not been effectively mobilized, is not uniformly hostile to immigrant labor. Finally, Chacon points the way for more effective progressive political (not entirely electoral) action on this issue.
On the first point, he writes, “Undocumented immigrants are being scapegoated in the lead-up to the 2010 elections with the hope that red-faced, fear-mongering campaigns will inflame the sensibilities of the population and create an internal threat to focus on and united against.” Conservative Republicans see immigration as “a wedge issue to supersede the . . . real and tangible crises facing the populace, problems for which they have no solution.” He adds, however, that this effort is “gaining more traction in places like Arizona because the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party have not only abandoned immigrant legislation as part of their strategy, but they have opened their own front in the war on immigrants.” The Democratic leadership, he argues, adopted a unilateral commitment to bipartisanship even when they had little chance of winning Republican allies on this question. As a result of their attempt to “court intransigent Republicans,” the Democrats ended up “capitulating to their anti-immigrant rhetoric.” Chacon impressively marshals the evidence for this claim.
In a section entitled “Is the public becoming anti-immigrant?” Chacon shows that careful study of poll evidence shows a mixed picture, showing a split along age lines (“young people are disproportionately pro-immigrant rights,” party lines, and, not surprisingly, in Arizona among Latino and non-Latino respondents. Moreover, “84 percent of national respondents who support SB 1070 also support comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization.”
Chacon makes the bold (and hopeful) claim that the polls “should also tell us that if there were a sustained, grassroots, pro-immigrant social movement that challenges the bipartisan campaign against immigrants, … public opinion could be shifted in favor of legalization for all undocumented immigrant workers and their families without criminalization. This movement – taking shape today in the belly of Arizona, has the power to change the equation.”
I’ve only scratched the surface of this substantial article. I hope Tikkun Daily readers will read it and share their perspectives.
The question one should be asking – Is the destruction from a over flow of illegal immigration reversable. – and the deep rooted hatred of those like the Koch brothers – reversable – when to many – once again America is under attack – lifes destroyed – lifes stolen and lost – and those same type of people like the Koch brothers and bill bennet – who thinks – destroyed lifes are a good thing.
Thats the question to be answered – will one sow what they have reaped???
The anti-immigrant tide cannot be reversed so long as people actively gin up what I call political fundamentalism. Frightened and angry people seek solaced and mental comfort in embracing what they think are the givens of the conventional wisdom. Fear of the “Other” is always part of it, and in the case of the United States, there is a lot of Social Darwinism, which has always been partly fueled by xenophobia aqnd racism.
This phenomenon is similar to right-wing populism but different from it.
Scholars long thought that right-wing populism was a short-lived phenomenon. But we have now seen that it can be extended for many decades. I suspect, but cannot prove, that bright social scientists in the conservative think tanks have figured out how to do that.
We know from history that political fundamentalism can last quite a while, and it has a way of intensifying and getting uglier. Daniel Goldhagen identified it as exclusionism, and I think that we are seeing a mild form of it here in the Tea Bagger phenomenon.
There are probably enough built in cultural restraints here to prevent it from becoming like what occurred in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s, but we might have to endure worse conditions
for immigrants, blacks, and liberals.
Even if the economy improves, the Right will need to appeal to political fundamentalism to get the masses to accept cuts in social services and entitlements. The time is coming when the nation must chose between a big war machine, wars, corporate welfare, and tax cuts for the rich on the one hand and entitlements and social services , on the other hand. It will no longer be possible to put so much on the tab. At t he state level, look for big cutbacks in education and slashed public pensions.
Besides the article by Justin Chacon that I discussed in the blog, the publication in which the article appeared also contained a substantial article by Chacon on the social and economic history of “The U.S.-Mexico border: Free trade without free people,” which is equally excellent and provides a broader context for the analysis given in the article I discussed. For those generally familiar with the real history of U.S.-Mexican relations, some of what Chacon recounts in this article will be familiar, but even people who fit this description are likely to emerge better armed to deal with the politics of immigration from reading it. Unfortunately, only the first of the two articles (the one discussed in my blog entry), seems to be currently available online.