Killing the American Dream: How Anti-Immigration Extremists are Destroying the Nation
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Killing the American Dream: How Anti-Immigration Extremists are Destroying the Nation
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Overview
As the US deports record numbers of illegal immigrants and local and state governments scramble to pass laws resembling dystopian police states where anyone can be questioned and neighbors are encouraged to report on one another, violent anti-immigration rhetoric is growing across the nation. Against this tide of hysteria, Pilar Marrero reveals how damaging this rise in malice toward immigrants is not only to the individuals, but to our country as a whole. Marrero explores the rise in hate groups and violence targeting the foreign-born from the 1986 Immigration Act to the increasing legislative madness of laws like Arizona's SB1070 which allows law officers to demand documentation from any individual with "reasonable suspicion" of citizenship, essentially encouraging states and municipalities to form their own self-contained nation-states devoid of immigrants. Assessing the current status quo of immigration, Marrero reveals the economic drain these ardent anti-immigration policies have as they deplete the nation of an educated work force, undermine efforts to stabilize tax bases and social security, and turn the American Dream from a time honored hallmark of the nation into an unattainable fantasy for all immigrants of the present and future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781137073747 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 301 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Pilar Marrero is editor and reporter for La Opinion, the largest and oldest Spanish language daily paper in America, winning awards from associations including New America Media, the New School, and the International Center for Journalists for her intriguing work exploring the trials and tribulations of the Latino community. With her 25 years of experience covering social and political issues, she is one of the most highly sought after commenters by international and local media for knowledgeable insight to the issues that face Latinos, appearing on such outlets as BBC World, CNN, and NPR, among others. She teaches journalism courses at UCLA-extension and lives in California.
Pilar Marrero is editor and reporter for La Opinion, the largest and oldest Spanish language daily paper in America, winning awards from associations including New America Media, the New School, and the International Center for Journalists for her intriguing work exploring the trials and tribulations of the Latino community. She is the author of Killing the American Dream. With her 25 years of experience covering social and political issues, she is one of the most highly sought after commenters by international and local media for knowledgeable insight to the issues that face Latinos, appearing on such outlets as BBC World, CNN, and NPR, among others. She teaches journalism courses at UCLA-extension and lives in California.
Read an Excerpt
Killing the American Dream
How Anti-Immigration Extremists are Destroying the Nation
By Pilar Marrero
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2012 C. A. PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-07374-7
CHAPTER 1
"I BELIEVE IN AMNESTY"
RONALD REAGAN, THE 1986 LAW, AND UNFINISHED REFORM
RONALD REAGAN IS WIDELY VIEWED AS THE PATRON SAINT OF THE REPUBLICAN Party. Republicans idolize Reagan, president of the United States from 1980 to 1988, as their quintessential leader and the most important president of modern times. Every four years, Republican candidates hoping to win their party's nomination and move into the White House make a sacred pilgrimage to Simi Valley, an upper-class white suburban enclave about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles, and hold a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, in the shadow of the very Air Force One that once ferried the president around the world.
The Reagan library houses the life and work of the president who always had a jar full of jelly beans on his desk and who had a successful career as a Hollywood actor and president of the Screen Actors' Guild before turning his attentions to conservative politics. Most of Reagan's transformation to what he is now, the ultimate icon of conservatism and independence, took place after his death in 2004.
Beyond everything else that Reagan stands for and the many controversies his administration became mired in — especially the Iran–Contra scandal and the US government support for paramilitary groups in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala — the former president is fondly remembered with great nostalgia by traditional conservatives, who consider him a true champion of their cause.
But there is one issue that Reagan's loyal admirers prefer to gloss over or to imagine that, if he were alive today, he would think and act on very differently than he did in the 1980s: Reagan's position on undocumented immigration. Even though a political current at that time advocated for hard-line measures against undocumented immigrants, the tone and scope of the discussion was very different from what is occurring today.
For those of us who have grown accustomed to the sharp, hostile tone in which the immigration debate has been cast over the past fifteen years, it is surprising and even refreshing to watch an exchange on undocumented immigration between Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush at a 1980 primary Republican debate, which we can do thanks to the magic of YouTube.
At that event, a young man in the audience asks both candidates if they believe that children of unauthorized immigrants should receive a free public education. To today's viewers, the answers of both presidential contenders are nothing short of shocking. One wishes that these two conservative leaders of the 1980s could counsel their party's current leadership on the issue.
Bush answered, "I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive and understanding of the labor needs and human needs that this problem would not come up. If those people are here, I would reluctantly say they would get what society is giving to their neighbors."
What Bush says next goes right to the heart of the matter. His observation is completely consistent with what analysts and historians who study immigration agree on but is something that would never come out of a leading politician's mouth today. And that includes most Democrats, the party that supposedly favors immigrants.
Said Bush: "But the problem is we are making illegal the labor that I'd like to see legal. We are doing two things, we are creating a whole society of really honorable, decent family loving people that are in violation of the law and second ... we exacerbate relations with Mexico."
Bush added, "The answer is more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools. If they're here, I don't want to see a bunch of six-, eight-year-old kids that are totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living outside the law, let's address the fundamentals ... these are good people, strong people ... part of my family is Mexican!" Bush expressed himself with all of the heartfelt passion that his reserved character would permit.
Then it was the turn of Reagan, who went on to win the Republican nomination and the presidential election that year. "I think the time has come that the US and Mexico have a better relationship than we've ever had. We haven't been sensitive enough with our power. They have forty to fifty percent unemployment ... this cannot continue without possibility of trouble below the border ... and we could have a very hostile and estranged neighbor on our border," said Reagan, who feared that the influence of Cuba and Mexico's poverty could be an explosive mix that would unleash a revolution.
"Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible to come legally with a work permit, while working they pay taxes ... they can go back, cross the border both ways," Reagan said.
Did this debate really happen? Did the candidates really say that? It's not some kind of YouTube hoax? It's simply amazing that Reagan was categorically opposed to a border fence and that both Republican candidates offered thoughtful answers and believed that the problem had to be solved rationally. Shrill warnings of illegals pouring over the border and taking over the country had not yet come to dominate the immigration discussion within the Republican Party, as they would in the 1990s and beyond.
Reagan talked about the critical importance of maintaining good relations with Mexico and having a system that would allow the free flow of labor: practically an open border, with some regulation. Reagan was more concerned with his southern neighbor's vulnerability to a guerrilla movement like the Castro regime that had prevailed in Cuba or the Sandinistas, then gaining strength in Nicaragua, than the effects immigrants were having on the United States. He understood that immigrant labor was necessary and that the presence of such workers could be regulated.
In a 1979 diary entry, Reagan wrote about a private meeting he was going to have with Mexican president José López Portillo: He hoped they would "discuss how the United States and Mexico could make the border 'something other than the location for a fence.'"
The leader who years later would utter the famous phrase demanding the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism — "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" — did not want to build a wall along Mexico's border, even when he had made comments on several occasions about unauthorized immigration being a serious problem.
Alan Simpson, the Republican senator from Wyoming who cosponsored the immigration bill of 1986 and who was a close friend of Reagan's, said in an interview in 2010 that the president "knew that it was not right for people to be abused. Anybody who's here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially or physically. They have no rights."
Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson said that "it was in Ronald Reagan's bones — it was part of his understanding of America — that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here."
As president, Reagan did more than just talk about trying to change the immigration system. In 1986, he signed into law the Immigration and Control Act (IRCA), which had been passed with bipartisan support in Congress. This legislation would also be known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Law, named after the two senators who sponsored it, Simpson and Roman Mazzoli, a Democratic congressman from Kentucky. It was known more widely as the Amnesty Law. Three million undocumented people were legalized thanks to this legislation.
In a 1984 debate with Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale, Reagan said he felt particular contempt for businesses that hired undocumented workers and paid them a substandard wage, knowing they would never complain for fear of being discovered working illegally. These same business interests have, for decades, blocked efforts to create a system that penalizes employers for hiring undocumented workers.
Until that time, no business had ever been sanctioned for that reason in the entire history of the United States. Until 1986, no legal mechanism had even existed for punishing those who provided the biggest single incentive for immigrants to come to this country: jobs.
The first efforts to develop a system for sanctioning employers surfaced in the 1950s. Paul Douglas, a democratic senator from Illinois, proposed imposing formal penalties, but he did not get far with his idea. In 1972, Congressman Peter Rodino, a Democrat representing New Jersey, tried to introduce legislation but that attempt also went nowhere. In 1977, the Democratic Carter administration proposed a law that would impose sanctions on employers. The initiative was quickly shot down by Senator James Eastland, Democrat from Mississippi, a strong advocate for the agriculture industry, which had always vociferously opposed any limitations on its ability to hire cheap labor. Eastland was the Judiciary Committee chair and refused even to hold hearings on it.
But the flow of unauthorized immigrants remained constant, especially after the Bracero Program came to a formal end in 1965. For twenty-five years, the program had allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to enter the country and work on farms and on the railroads, starting during World War II and continuing for two decades due to ongoing pressure of the agricultural industry, which claimed ongoing labor shortages. As the inflow of illegal immigration increased after the Bracero Program came to an end, in the mid-1970s Edward Kennedy, then a young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, proposed a special commission to study the issue. Those efforts eventually led to the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act, IRCA.
The commission's report evaluated all of the existing data available at the time and concluded that immigrants have a generally positive impact on the country because they contribute to economic growth and productivity. The report also issued a serious warning: Undocumented immigration brings a host of problems, and politicians had to do something about it.
Sophia Wallace, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, emphasizes that in spite of all the goodwill on the part of President Reagan and other politicians, the idea of creating a law to try to solve the illegal immigration problem met with wide resistance from groups on both sides of the political spectrum.
Nonetheless, after several attempts, it was achieved in 1986. IRCA included a series of measures, some of which were implemented more successfully than others: the legalization of undocumented people; heightened border security; sanctions against businesses or employers who hired undocumented workers; funds to assist local governments — states received $4 billion over four years to provide services to newly legalized immigrants; and a legalization program for agricultural workers.
Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers union, along with farm worker leader Cesar Chavez, pointed out to me in an interview that pressures from Southern congressmen, particularly Republicans, with close ties to the agricultural industry played a key role in Reagan's support of the final version of IRCA.
More than 1 million farm workers gained legal status, and for years the agricultural industry suffered no labor shortages. It was assumed that working conditions would improve as a result of legalization, but in the long run, the agricultural industry continued to keep the cost of labor as low as they possibly could. Eventually, a large number of jobs were filled by subcontractors, who in turn hired undocumented workers.
In all, 3 million undocumented immigrants were granted "amnesty" under IRCA. But critics considered the law a failure because it did not deter the arrival of more undocumented immigrants. The sponsors of the law, Simpson and Mazzoli, later published an article in the Washington Post explaining how IRCA had not worked as they had hoped it would: "We believe that the shortcomings of the act are not due to design failure but rather to the failure of both Democratic and Republican administrations since 1986 to execute the law properly," they wrote.
According to their article, the most successful part of IRCA was the legalization of 3 million undocumented people, a population that had been forced to live in the shadows, vulnerable to exploitation, and through the law could become an integral part of the US workforce and society as a whole. Studies also showed that the legalized immigrants benefited financially and socially and were generally no longer subject to exploitation and abuse in the workplace.
But according to Simpson and Mazzoli, the federal government did not begin allocating adequate funds to border control until ten years after the law had passed; that money was sorely needed to manage what had been up until then a very porous border. And groups on both the right and the left were opposed to creating a national identity card, which the law's sponsors had envisioned as a vital element to its success. The idea was that job seekers would have to present this uniform means of identification to potential employers before being hired and in order to obtain benefits.
"After two decades, the system is still not in place. Unfortunately, what is in place is the use of several different identifiers, which were meant to be temporary, and a flourishing underground economy engaged in creating fraudulent documents for illegal immigrants," the article points out.
This was the essential problem in the law's application: The necessary tools were not in place to effectively enforce the sanctions against employers, sanctions that were included in a federal law for the first time in US history. In the world of politics, both the right and the left also attacked this part of the law.
The right criticized sanctions as excessive and intrusive regulation into business activities that constituted exerting artificial controls on the labor market, going against the sacred principles of the free market economy.
The left viewed employer sanctions as discriminatory, because they meant that companies would ask potential employees for documentation based on the color of their skin. Some studies from the late eighties did verify the existence of just this kind of racial profiling.
The libertarian perspective — an integral part of US politics since colonial times, based on the notion that liberty means government should intervene in business as little as possible — rabidly opposed the use of a national identity card, something fairly common in other countries but that has never existed in the United States.
This one uniform identity card would have been preferable, according to Simpson and Mazzoli, to the dozens of forms of identification used to verify the nationality and eligibility of job seekers for work. And the lack of such a card was a key reason that the Amnesty Law did not work.
Before 1986, the closest thing to employer sanctions was the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which said it was illegal to "harbor" undocumented immigrants. But a section called the "Texas Proviso" stated that employment was not considered "harboring," so it was essentially legal for employers to hire undocumented workers, even if their presence in the country was illegal. After 1986, all employers had to do to comply with the law was demonstrate they had filled in the proper forms (the I–9, created by the Immigration and Nationality Act), providing information on each employee.
The results of this approach are not surprising: By maintaining a supply of jobs open to undocumented workers in certain sectors of the economy, illegal immigration continued unabated, especially when the country experienced economic growth. IRCA did not include any kind of mechanism for adapting the laws to the country's economic conditions. Instead, it preserved fixed numerical quotas already in place in various programs for workers.
History has shown that no border fence or number of agents along the border can stop the flow of immigrants as long as a jobs incentive exists and as long as a country with a massive population living in poverty shares a long border with a wealthy one.
But the politicians looking for easy answers, especially ones that would attract voters, keep on telling Americans that illegal immigration is a law enforcement issue, not an economic one. "You have to control the border, and I know just how to do it," most politicians assert, repeating the same tired slogans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Killing the American Dream by Pilar Marrero. Copyright © 2012 C. A. Press. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword Robert Guest,Introduction,
PART I TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF IMMIGRATION POLITICS From Ronald Reagan's Amnesty to the Persecution of "Illegals",
1. "I Believe in Amnesty": Ronald Reagan, the 1986 Law, and Unfinished Reform,
2. California Casts the First Stone,
3. Nativism: The Old and the New,
PART II THE RADICALIZATION OF ANTI-IMMIGRANT LAWS AND LEGAL CHAOS,
4. The New Millennium: Bush, Latinos, and 9/11,
5. Immigration: A Question of National Security,
6. "Illegals" and the New Hate Movement,
7. States Take the Law into Their Own Hands,
8. Hazleton, Pennsylvania: A Community's Demographic Shock,
9. Arizona, Alabama, and Kobach's Anti-Immigrant Laws,
10. The Booming Business of Immigrant Detention,
11. Rejecting Extremism and the Search for Solutions,
PART III DREAMS HAVE NO VISAS,
12. Immigrant Youth and the Broken Dream,
13. The Obama Era: A Perfected Deportation Machine,
14. The Republicans: Stuck on Immigration,
15. The Economy, Immigrants, and the Future of America,
16. Is the American Dream Dead?,
17. Demographic Change Won't Wait,
Notes,
Index,