Previously published in Samuel L. Myers, Jr., ed., Civil Rights and Tace Relations in the Post Reagan-Bush Era (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 11-27
Nativism and the New World Order
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The idea of "immigrants" and "immigration" has been central to the project of writing the dominant narrative of American history, and undergirds the construction of the American identity. "We are a nation of immigrants," children are taught to intone from an early age, a mantra reinforced by the powerful symbol and image of the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor beckoning immigrants--the poor, tired, huddled masses of Europe--to come to America and begin life anew.
This construction of America as a nation of immigrants who succeed once they are in this land is powerfully evoked by the Yale historian Donald Kagan:
Except for the slaves brought from Africa, most came voluntarily, as families and individuals, usually eager to satisfy desires that could not be met in their former homelands. They swiftly become citizens and, within a generation or so, Americans. In our own time finally--African Americans also have achieved freedom, equality before the law, and full citizenship.... What they have in common and what brings them together is a system of laws and beliefs that shaped the establishment of the country, a system developed within the context of Western Civilization. (Kagan 1990)
This dominant, official narrative is informed by a "triumphalist" view of American history, which is characterized as an unbroken string of successes, a relentless march toward freedom and democracy for all--all informed by the traditions and values of Western civilization. Indeed, America--meaning the United States--becomes the ultimate embodiment of Western culture, its most triumphant moment. Moreover, this version of American history would have been impossible without making the immigrant central to its narrative, because it was the immigrant who introduced Western civilization to the New World.
Triumphalists are reluctant to deal with the inconveniences of their historical construction, although Professor Kagan had to admit a caveat for the millions of Africans brought over as slaves. Even ardent triumphalists are hard put to characterize slaves as "voluntary immigrants," but remain generally unwilling to acknowledge other inconsistencies. What about Native Americans? How do they fit into this picture of immigrants building America around Western values? What about the first Mexican Americans, who were incorporated into America when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, giving the United States approximately half of Mexico's national territory and all the people living on it? They did not have to take one step while the international boundary was redrawn around them.
That left one group of non-Europeans who could reasonably be characterized as "immigrants"--the Chinese coolies who came first to California, then spread out to other mining states of the American West--in that they were not slaves, nor were they incorporated territorially. Consisting almost exclusively of men, the early Chinese immigrants provided cheap and docile labor for the mines and railroads of the Western states. But by 1882, responding to pressures mounted against the Chinese by Irish and other white immigrant workers who had made their way to California, attracted by its dynamic "frontier" economy, Congress passed a law denying further admission to Chinese laborers. Forty years later, in 1924, the Second Quota Act announced that "no alien ineligible to citizenship"&endash;meaning all Asians (Japanese, Koreans, South Indians, Filipinos)&endash;would be allowed into the country.
This ban made explicit the racialist construction of citizenship that had always been implied by die U.S. Naturalization Law, by which immigrants gained citizenship and thereby all civil and constitutional rights. Enacted shortly after the Republic was founded, in 1790, this law offered citizenship only to "free white persons." In other words, Asians, even while permitted to enter this country, formed a peculiar category of immigrants, those deemed "ineligible for citizenship."
Once this official differentiation between those immigrants who aliens were always meant to become citizens (i.e., immigrants from Europe and heirs to Western civilization) and immigrants ineligible for citizenship is exposed, the triumphalist version of history can be challenged. Indeed, an alternative narrative has been forcefully presented by the historian Alexander Saxton:
America's supposed openness to newcomers throughout most of its history has been racially selective. By the time of Jefferson and Jackson the nation had already assumed the form of a racially exclusive democracy--democratic in the sense that it sought to provide equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness by its white citizens through the enslavement of African Americans, extermination of Indians, and territorial expansion at the expense of Indians and Mexicans. If there was an "American orientation" to newcomers, It was not toward giving equal opportunity to all but toward inviting entry to white Europeans and excluding others. It is true that the United States absorbed a variety of cultural patterns among European immigrants at the same time that it was erecting a white supremacist social structure. Moderately tolerant of European ethnic diversity, the nation remained adamantly intolerant of racial diversity. It is this crucial difference that has been permitted to drop from sight. (Saxton 1990: 10; italics added)
In short, Saxton compels us to open our eyes to this critical separation between white, European immigrants deemed potential citizens, and nonwhite immigrants&endash;Mexicans and Asians&endash;grudgingly allowed into this country at various moments of territorial and economic expansion to fulfill labor demands, but never meant to become citizens and, hence, permanent members and of full participants in society. In the words of immigration historian Reed Ueda. "The founders assumed that persons of European ancestry would constitute the community of citizens. Thus they did not seek equal citizenship for blacks or naturalization rights for those who were not 'free-white person' (Ueda 1994:18).
U.S. immigration laws of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, which were based on national origins quotas, confirmed, reinforced, and consolidated this racial (and racist) dichotomy between the two groups of immigrants. The U.S. Naturalization Law which was ideologically consonant with the immigration laws, remained in effect until after World War II.
There was, however, one serious crack in this otherwise solid edifice erected to keep out the undesirables from gaining a permanent foothold in American society. What of the children born to parents ineligible for citizenship, given the existence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship strictly on the basis of birth on U.S. territory, regardless of race? One bright light in this otherwise bleak period for Asian immigrants was the ruling by the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which ratified the citizenship of second generation Chinese Americans, thus bringing "the Constitution squarely into conflict with the federal naturalization law making race, not place of birth, the touchstone of naturalization" (Ueda 1994: 28). On the other in 1922 the Supreme Court confirmed the "white-only" principle for citizenship in Ozawa v. United States, declaring once and for all that Japanese aliens were not white, and hence not eligible for American citizenship. We shall return to this point of citizenship for children born in the United States to noncitizen parents later on in this chapter.
Even as Chinese, then other Asians, were being excluded from admission to the United States, Mexicans began crossing the international border in larger numbers, in many ways replacing Chinese as labor migrants in mining, railroad construction, and agriculture. The original one hundred thousand or so Mexican Americans came with the territorial incorporation in 1848; most of them were Spanish-speaking mestizos, that is, people of mixed European and indigenous heritage. Indigenous tribal communities, such as the Tohono O'odham (Papagos) of Arizona, whose traditional homeland straddled the border, were permitted to go back and forth without documents (Silko 1994: 414). During the nineteenth century, Documents such as visas were not required, and most Mexicans moved back and forth, reflecting the vicissitudes of the border economy.
From the liberal ascendance to power in Mexico through the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), Mexicans were driven by loss of land and livelihood, then by civil wars and economic devastation, to seek employment in the United States. By the early twentieth century, they had ventured well beyond California and the Southwest, attracted by agriculture, fishing, lumbering, and other industries in the Northwest, and by agricultural, railroad, and factory jobs in the Midwest (in time making Chicago, after Los Angeles, the site of the second largest concentration of Mexicans). During World War I, the acute labor shortage made Mexican workers especially vital, causing the United States to lift all barriers to Mexican entry, including bans on contract labor. The government also experimented with a "guest worker" program that granted "temporary passes" to Mexican workers, and with relaxing head tax and literacy tests required by the Immigration Act of 1917.
While Asians were kept out and Mexicans were allowed in, the country also experienced the largest wave of European immigrants from 1880 to 1920. Up to twelve million southern and eastern Europeans--Italians, Slavs, and Jews--settled mainly in the East and Midwest. Although considered much less desirable than their western and northern European (Anglo and Protestant) predecessors, on the ethnic hierarchy of immigrants based on the criterion of "assimilability," they were nevertheless placed clearly above the Asians and the Mexicans, groups deemed inherently inferior and immutably "foreign."
Notwithstanding, the Palmer raids of 1919 and the early 1920s (which rounded up some six thousand suspected immigrant supporters of politically radical causes, five hundred or so of whom were eventually deported), the most serious nativist movement in the early twentieth century was directed toward Mexicans. During the Depression years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans (U.S.-born Mexicans, hence U.S. citizens according to the Fourteenth Amendment) were rounded up by government agents and deported to Mexico. A well-orchestrated, state-sponsored anti-Mexican hysteria, blaming Mexican workers for massive unemployment, justified this unprecedented act of deportation. By then the use of Mexicans as a reserve supply of labor for U.S. capital had become firmly established. In addition, the deployment and manipulation of this reserve, so readily available and poised on the long border with Mexico, produced a "revolving door" strategy that saw the United States not only alternating between letting Mexicans in and keeping them out but also, at times, simultaneously deporting and importing them. Such was the case during the Depression when the Department of Agriculture intervened on behalf of the California growers to ensure their supply of cheap Mexican laborers (Cockcroft,1986: 60-61).
Paradoxically, deportation and importation of Mexicans occur simultaneously and for identical reasons: to provide scapegoats for society's economic problems; to guarantee a large surplus of workers in the labor pool, in order to meet production needs or to hold the general wage level down; to deter other workers from seeking better wages or work conditions by implying that they can always be replaced; and to make things difficult for potential labor organizers while assuring a pool of potential scabs. In sum, the deportation-importation of Mexicans serves to keep workers intimidated, divided, and confused (Cockcroft 1986: 42).
By the twentieth century, the United States began to keep track of "illegal" immigrants from Mexico, a problem the government made sure to correct with their next major initiative regarding Mexican labor migration.
Relatively few immigrants came to the United States after the 1920s, when the last surge of European immigration had peaked. Asian immigration continued to be severely restricted by exclusionary laws and national origins quotas. Recurrent labor demands, however, did open the borders to labor migrants from Canada; about 1.25 million arrived between 1920 and 1950s. The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico became another new recruitment ground for U.S. capital. But it was Mexico that once again came to the rescue.
To meet high wartime demands in 1942 and for over two decades afterward, the U.S. government devised an official labor contracting system ostensibly to regulate and control the entry and supply of Mexican workers for the U.S. agriculture and industry. The bracero program admitted farmworkers on short-term contracts that were supposed to guarantee work and living arrangements. Mexicans admitted under this program were classified as foreign laborers, not as immigrants. By the end of the bracero program in 1967, 4.7 million Mexicans had entered the United States under its terms (Ueda 1994:3 3-34). During this time, the revolving door continued to operate, for the bracero program did not function continuously; rather, it was halted and restarted numerous times as labor demand in the United States ebbed and flowed. The tide of illegal immigration did not subside, however, as Mexicans overstayed their permits once admitted as braceros; others--the mojados (wetbacks)--simply preferred to enter and seek work on their own terms, to elude the restrictions of the official bracero program.
Following the well-established revolving door strategy, the U.S. government continued to deport "illegals" even as it recruited braceros. The fear of illegals reached a feverish pitch in 1954, in the midst of the bracero program, when the government launched "Operation Wetback," a dragnet that indiscriminately rounded up one to two million Mexican-looking people, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, for deportation to Mexico. The terror instilled in Mexicans limited the accessibility of labor organizers to Mexican workers. "In other words, the U.S. was sending a double message: Mexicans get out; Mexicans come in. The door revolved. Mexicans were harassed, wages held steady or dropped, and labor stability was assured for at least another decade" (Cockcroft 1986:78)
U.S. immigration history took the next dramatic turn in the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War began to wind down. By then, a number of fundamental changes in the U.S. immigration and naturalization laws had taken place. First, in 1943, the United States repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act repealed the race-based naturalization law, although it retained national origins quotas for immigrants first established in 1924.
In 1965, major immigration reform finally abolished national origins quotas, which had severely limited immigration from the Third World. This change occurred within the context of the emerging civil rights and antiwar movements, which challenged race and racism at home and abroad.
Beginning with actions taken during World War II, followed by the Korean War and the Vietnam War, later the class-based social revolutions of Central America, the United States firmly took its place on the world scene as an economic and political global power, the main bulwark against capitalism's nemesis, communism and the Soviet Union. Unable to distinguish the genuine, intense and internally generated desire by colonies of Western imperial powers for national liberation from the expansionist needs of Soviet communism, U.S. political and military intervention in hot spots all over Asia. Latin America, and the Caribbean, and to a lesser extent in Africa, created a new kind of immigrants pressing on American borders. These were refugees fleeing their ravaged homelands. With few exceptions, most came from the Third world, the source of immigrants previously defined as "ineligible for citizenship."
Even more numerous than refugees were immigrants--individuals or families--from Third World countries previously excluded from moving to the United States until the 1964 immigration reform removed those barriers. The increasingly globalized economy after World War II produced surplus populations (on both the high and the low end of the educational and economic scales) in dependent capitalist societies. From 1965 to 1990, a totally unexpected immigration surge of unprecedented numbers has appeared. Totaling over ten million, this influx has seemingly caught the nation by surprise. Certainly, the framers of immigration reform in the 1960s had no way of predicting the character and scope of this new wave, 90 percent of which are non-European, and therefore nonwhite.
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
When the Soviet Union collapsed during his watch, President George Bush declared the dawn of the New World Order. What he meant by this was not made clear, but anyone observing the world and the domestic U.S. scenes can certainly point to a number of new developments, realignments, and rearrangements. First and foremost was the end of the Cold War, which meant that the world no longer revolved around the East-West, capitalist-communist axis. The end of this ideological war had immediate repercussions on the economies of the superpowers and, indeed, worldwide. For the United States, it meant making a transition from a heavily defense-driven economy to a "peace" economy, one based on other imperatives, such as trade. Thus, both President Bush, a Republican, and President Clinton, a Democrat, were intent to get NAFTA--a North-South trade relationship--passed. Similarly, both presidents were willing to suspend human rights considerations to retain trade relations with China, the world's most populous nation. No state is as central to this transition, yet more caught in its difficulties, than California, now in the midst of persistent post-Cold War recession. The California economy is the country's second weakest, having experienced four years of budget shortfalls.
During the boom years of the war and postwar era, California experienced a population explosion induced by internal migrants from elsewhere in the United States, as well as by the refugees and new immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and Latin America as described above. In addition to a rise in sheer numbers, the nature of the population became even more diverse. Because 90 percent of the new immigrants come from Third World countries, they swelled the numbers of U.S. minorities already in California, making it a "majority minority" state by 1990. As the gateway for Asians crossing the Pacific and for Mexicans venturing across the U.S.-Mexican border, California has absorbed some 40 percent of the newcomers: refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants.
According to the 1990 census, foreign-born citizens and residents of
the U.S. number 19.7 million, constituting 8 percent of the total U.S. population, a proportion considerably smaller than the 15 percent foreign-born at the turn of the twentieth century. The vast majority--85 percent--of the newcomers are legal immigrants. Only 13 percent are undocumented (2.5 million), and they account for just 1 percent of the total U.S. population of 250 million (Cole 1994:410; Fix and Passel 1994:4,21). One-third of the foreign-born have become naturalized citizens; half are legal permanent residents; 6 percent entered as "humanitarian" admissions, that is, as refugees or asylum seekers; and five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand are them on temporary visas (students, businessmen, etc.).
Only about one-third of the undocumented are from Mexico, and slightly less are from Central America and the Caribbean. Putting it another way, four out of ten cross the U.S.-Mexican border illegally. Six out of ten enter legally and overstay their visas. Thirteen percent of the undocumented come from Europe and Canada, and eleven percent from Asia (Fix and Passel 1994: 24-25).
These dramatic demographic changes are taking place within the context of a multicultural discourse that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement, which in turn spawned a series of ethnic pride and empowerment projects: black power, brown power, red power, and yellow power. Multiculturalism has infiltrated every institution, from government to business (where it is best known as "managing diversity"), and especially higher education. But even as the rhetoric and politics of multiculturalism, empower racial-ethnic minorities, they further destabilize the traditional white "majority." already shaken and shrunken by the rapidly changing demographics. power, brown power. red power, and yellow power. Multiculturalism has infiltrated
Another way of describing the demographic changes in California is that the historical white majority is no longer so. Moreover, not only is the white proportion in the population declining, but it is aging as well. In other words, along with the "colorization" of California there is the "graying" of white Californians. Californians of color not only are becoming the numerical majority, but they are heavily concentrated in the younger age categories. In many urban districts, they overwhelmingly predominate in the schools. The student bodies of leading universities in California--Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford--are at or near "majority minority" status. Minorities are also the majority of the labor force, both employed and unemployed.
The middle class has also become more integrated--Blacks, Latinos and Asians having joined its ranks--but the political and economic elite remains largely white. This elite and this middle class watched on TV, with horror and from behind locked doors in the comfort of their homes, as Los Angeles erupted into the nation's first multicultural urban uprising in April 1992 (Kwong 1991: 44-46; Mann 1993).
Besides the African American urban underclass--venting their frustration by looting and burning the shops of Korean immigrants, whose small businesses have helped revitalize the neighborhoods that were abandoned by white businesses after the Watts riot of the late 1960s--new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America also joined in the melee. In fact half of those arrested were Latinos. While the Koreans concentrated on building small businesses in poor neighborhoods, Latinos took many of the recently created, low-paying manufacturing and service jobs. In this new urban economy of Los Angeles, the longtime black minority was left out (Davis). The L.A. uprising further destabilized an elite and middle class already made insecure by the post-Cold War recession that California seems unable to move out of.
THE RISE OF NATIVISM IN CALIFORNIA
The search for a way to explain California's diminishing quality of life landed on the defenseless backs of the new immigrants. Particularly singled out for scrutiny and opprobrium are the undocumented immigrants, or, as the media, politicians, and anti-immigrant forces prefer to call them, "illegal aliens." The need to scapegoat some group in our midst for society's ills has given rise to a new nativist movement in California, one that will surely spread across the West, the Southwest and the nation.
Technically speaking, anyone crossing the border into the United States without proper documents, or anyone overstaying an authorized visit to the United States, becomes an illegal immigrant. They come in all races, colors, and ethnicities, and from all corners of the world. In New York, for example, the largest groups of illegals are Irish, Italians, and Poles (Sontag 1993).
In California, Texas, and Arizona, however, illegal aliens have become practically synonymous with Mexicans, and secondarily Asians and other immigrants from the non-Western world. The racialized illegal immigrant is clearly evident in current political discourse and well planted in popular public perception. The category of "illegal alien" is more than just a legal question; it is equally a social construction with definite racial overtones.
Illegal aliens attained national notoriety in the late 1980s, when Congress debated a new round of immigration reform. The major thrust Of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, later incorporated into the 1988 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), was to deter illegal immigration by denying such persons employment through "employer sanctions." In other words, it attempted to shift the burden of proof on to those who did the hiring, by holding employers responsible for ascertaining the immigration status of job-seekers. The mechanism did not work well, however, for employers risked fines in order to hire cheap laborers, and the state of California under Governor Wilson never enthusiastically enforced it.
IRCA also contained an amnesty plan for illegal aliens. For a brief period of time, illegal aliens who could prove continuous residence in the United States for five Years--by showing such evidence as pay stubs, rent and utility bill receipts, precisely the kind of records that the undocumented are unlikely to have or to save--could regularize their status, become legal permanent residents, and eventually citizens. The point of this measure was to further isolate, marginalize, and criminalize the vast majority of undocumented immigrants, who were unable to provide proof of continuous residence.
From the enactment of IRCA into the mid-1990s, the social construction of illegal aliens as an unsavory and very undesirable social element continued to take shape. In short time, illegal aliens ceased to be merely those who enter the country without proper documents. They are the dark-skinned Arab/Muslim religious fundamentalist and terrorist who blows up the World Trade Center in New York City; the black Caribbean sociopath who shoots innocent passengers on the Long Island commuter train; the pregnant Mexican welfare cheat who crosses the border to San Diego to have babies who then become U.S. citizens and in turn enable the mother to claim welfare benefits; the unassimilable Southeast Asian war refugees too eager to take any job at any wage, thus depressing the wage scale and stealing the livelihood of bonafide, longtime Americans; the Mexican and Asian youth gangs contributing to urban crime problem; the single Hispanic men loitering on suburban street corners, urinating in the streets, sleeping under bushes in residential yards; they are the children crowding into the urban public schools, demanding bilingual education and other special services; the families without insurance who jam our public hospital emergency rooms. Television and the print media provide numerous other examples of what one commentator has termed "nativist paranoia" (Cole, 1993). The image and rhetoric invasion a century ago, has been especially effective (Kadetsk 1994; Rodriguez 1993; Weintraub 1994).
In short, illegal aliens are terrorists, criminals, welfare cheats, and freeloaders, social burdens who exacerbate our urban crime problem and severely strain the public resources that our taxes support. Gone is the idea that immigrants have built this country and exemplify prized American virtues of family and hard work. In fact, when some immigrants work too hard, that is turned against them, because their work ethic depresses wages and deprives American citizens of their livelihood. A common refrain is "Asians are unfair because they work too hard" (Rodriguez, 1993).
Local, state and national politicians, notably Governor Wilson of California, Governor Chiles of Florida (faced with a unique flood of undesirable black Haitians and more desirable "white" Cubans), Senators Feinstein and Boxer of California, and a host of other elected officials, have seized on the illegal alien problem for political gain. They figure it is a no-lose proposition for them, since illegal aliens cannot vote and have no voice. In contrast, by getting tough with illegal aliens, they have everything to gain with those who do vote, by providing them with a convenient, ready scapegoat for their frustrations. In the 1994 elections, incumbent governor Pete Wilson won reelection with his anti-immigrant stance by closing a twenty-point gap with his opponent, Kathleen Brown, who was more reluctant to use the illegal alien issue in her campaign. On the national level, the Commission on Immigration Reform (CIR), chaired by former Texas congresswoman and professor Barbara Jordan (who died in 1996), Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republicans' "Contract with America," and President Clinton himself have all entered the ring with their boxing gloves on. As Democratic political consultant Mark McKinnon noted rather sadly during the 1994 elections, when he saw Governor Ann Richards jump on the immigrant-bashing bandwagon: "Immigration is a potential powder keg kind of issue. It plays to the politics of fear, and the politics of fear can be very persuasive" (Berke 1994).
Indeed, in this New World Order of financial instability and political insecurity, at what price to the human rights of illegal aliens, and the civil and constitutional rights of all other Americans, immigrants and citizens alike, are we willing, as a nation, to solve a problem allegedly caused by 1 percent of the population? In order to exclude those among us designated foreign and undesirable, are too many Americans willing to create a fascist or police state built on racialist constructions and racist notions? A close examination of Proposition 187, also known as the "Save Our State" ballot initiative, which passed by a two to one margin in California in November 1994, and which is now certain to spread across the nation, sheds light on these troubling questions.
PROPOSITION 187: PLAYING THE "IMMIGRATION CARD"
Building on the theme first sounded by presidential candidate Pat Buchanan during the 1992 presidential campaign, when he proposed building a "Berlin Wall" on the U.S.-Mexican border, liberal incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer and gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Brown advanced ideas to militarize the border, such as posting members of the National Guard along its two thousand miles.
Indeed, a pilot project of this kind was already underway with "Operation Hold the Line" in El Paso, Texas, where a beefed-up Border Patrol force of four hundred armed agents claimed to have reduced monthly crossings from ten thousand to two thousand. Of course, the eight thousand who were unable to cross at El Paso merely went to other crossing points. So, in late 1994, at the San Diego crossing in California a similar plan was launched named "Operation Gatekeeper." Most recently, in February 1995, the Nogales border crossing in Arizona was promised additional armed agents, because by then it had become the new "hot spot" (Ayres, 1995). In time, according to the Berlin Wall logic, a new Iron Curtain will rise in the New World Order, this time along a North-South divide.
Champions of the border militarization strategy do not, of course, admit that the premises on which it tests are highly disputable: that most illegal immigrants arrive via the U.S.-Mexican border, which is simply not true, as already noted in this chapter that this long border can be permanently and seamlessly sealed, which is questionable, given the cost; and that sealing the border would deter Mexicans from crossing. There is also the question of NAFTA, which, after all, guarantees an open border for trade between Mexico and the United States, not to mention the fact that reverse crossings--U.S. citizens freely entering into Mexico for vacations, vacation homes, babies to adopt, servants--is taken for granted (Rodriguez, 1993).
Another simplistic but emotional notion that politicians have successfully planted in the popular imagination is the need to remove the "welfare magnet" as an incentive for illegal immigrants. The assumption here is that generous social benefits available in California have motivated Mexicans to invade the state. "Why does the U.S. Government continue to reward illegal immigration...at such costs to the American people?" Governor Wilson plaintively asked in his open letter to President Clinton (Wilson 1993).
These ideas for immigration control were embodied in the "Save Our State" initiative, or Proposition 187, which California voters approved by a two to one margin in California in November 1994. So popular was this initiative that Governor Wilson came from behind and won reelection on its coattails, and phantom senatorial candidate Michael Huffington nearly unseated incumbent Dianne Feinstein. Proposition 187 contained these major provisions:
In addition to the above restrictions that became Prop. 187, Wilson had advocated two other even more extreme measures that could not be included because their enactment would fall under federal jurisdiction. First, he argued for a constitutional amendment to deny U.S. citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants. Because this clearly contravened the Fourteenth Amendment, Wilson offered the rather lame rationalization that the Fourteenth was enacted only to validate the citizenship of former slaves and their children. He was either ignorant, or simply denied the existence, of the Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), in which the United States affirmed the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to a U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants who were themselves denied citizenship under the U.S. Naturalization Law (Wilson 1994; Tamayo, 1993)
The second drastic measure Wilson advocated was the use of tamperproof I.D. cards to identify "legal U.S. residents." Thus, anyone caught without one could be presumed illegal. This idea presaged the one that Barbara Jordan's Commission on Immigration Reform proposed one year later, which was a national computer registry of the names and social security numbers of all citizens and aliens authorized to work in the United States, so that employers could check the status of job applicants (CIR News 1994; Pear 1994). Again, anyone not in the registry can be presumed illegal.
So uncharacteristically radical were these proposals that to even to many conservatives, such as A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, erstwhile presidential candidates William Bennett and Jack Kemp, and Linda Chavez of the Manhattan Institute, mandatory I.D. cards and a national registry constituted"immigrant-hunting computer banks and work licenses that cut away at every American's liberty" (Rosenthal 1994), or smacked of totalitarian "big government meeting the information age" (The American Experiment 1995). In fact, to these conservatives, all of Prop. 187 is an overreaction, a "nativist abomination," in the words of conservative columnist William Safire (Safire 1994).
These otherwise powerful conservative voices found their objections failing on deaf ears, for the anti-immigration movement had gathered too much momentum to be sidetracked. Apparently nobody bothered to check key underlying assumptions in Prop. 187 against the facts. Will people really stop trying to come to the United States if we exclude them from schools, welfare benefits, and health care, or even from citizenship? Or will they keep coming to rich and developed nations of the world as long as theirs remain poor and underdeveloped? Do immigrants--legal and illegal--really take out more from society in benefits than they contribute in taxes and job creation? Will people in general, or even government authorities, really take care to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants once the punitive measures are put in place? Will California and the nation prosper again once there are no more illegal immigrants? Are illegal immigrants in particular, and immigrants in general, becoming a superfluous population, no longer required by our economy as a reserve labor force? In other words, can we really shut the "revolving door" that is the U.S.- Mexican border?
Although the impetus for Prop. 187 came from a range of grassroots middle class groups in southern California, intellectual guidance and resources came from a well known, anti-immigrant national organization. Feeding much of the hysteria and mis/disinformation behind Wilson's gubernatorial campaign and Prop. 187 was the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose well known agenda is to significantly curb all immigration to the United States. Cofounded by former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a longtime proponent of Zero Population Growth, FAIR membership numbers some fifty thousand, and the organization's operating budget is $2.5 million. Its California director is Alan Nelson, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner under Reagan. He wrote the "Save Our State" ballot initiative with former INS colleague Harold Ezell, who coordinated the many grassroots anti-immigrant groups into the successful Prop. 187 campaign. Among large financial donors to Prop. 187 was state Senator Don Rogan, well known for his association with the white supremacist Christian Identity movement (Kadetsky 1994).
FAIR's national director, Dan Stein, kriows exactly how to fan the fears of its largely older white male membership, whose insecurity has deepened with the state's worsening economy. In a FAIR publication, he pointed to a "bloody political battle" if immigration was not immediately curtailed, and predicted that if the problem was not settled by "effective political leadership," it would be "settled in the streets." Such alarmist sentiments, Frank Sharry of the National Forum stated, smacked of Nazi and skinhead pronouncements in Nazi Germany (Kershner 1993). Journalist Mark Cooper agreed, noting that what Rodney King did to bring out and heighten black-Asian tension, Prop. 187 did for black-Latino tension. Its passage "has already--and perhaps irreversibly--deepened the racial divides that rip this state like so many seismic faults and portend an almost unimaginable chain of political earthquakes in years to come" (Cooper 1994).
Sharry also criticized Wilson's and Nelson's allegations with research conducted by the Urban Institute of Washington, D.C., and other independent scholars. First, he noted that most undocumented immigrants, fearful of being discovered and deported, tend not to use social services and in any case are ineligible for most. Even legal immigrants are barred from receiving cash benefits for three years. For example, during IRCA's amnesty program in the late 1980s, less than 1 percent of those who sought legalization received general assistance, such as Social Security, supplementary security income, workers' compensation, or unemployment insurance. Less than 0.50 percent received food stamps or Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Sharry further noted that the vast majority of the legalized immigrants were working--83 percent compared to with 77 percent of the general population. Men and women of the legalized population worked more hours per week than other men and women in the workforce, usually with no overtime pay. Moreover, even those legalized under IRCA's amnesty plan were barred from receiving most social benefits for five years. Sharry concluded: "These figures make clear that undocumented immigrants are not the burden on our country that Mr. Nelson portrays them as being, nor is illegal immigration so great a problem as he states" (Sharry 1993). He vigorously protested FAIR's unscrupulous tactics of perpetuating ideas that immigrants drain resources and fanning fears that they diminish California's quality of life (Kershner 1993).
Precise, careful research undertaken at the Urban Institute researchers suggests that immigrants, legal and illegal, contribute much more in taxes paid than they cost in services received. They also create more jobs than they fill, directly by starting new businesses and indirectly through expenditures on goods and services. According to the 1990 census, total immigrant income in 1989 was $295 billion. Subtracting estimated cost of services received, Michael Fix and Jeffrey Passel of the Urban Institute calculated a positive net balance of $25-30 billion. In other words, immigrants "add up to an economic boon to America" (Rosenthal 1994; Fix and Passel 1994:47-51). These researchers also discerned no appreciable negative effect by working immigrants on wages, and no more than 1 percent displacement by immigrants of native American workers. If immigrants displaced anyone, they conclude, it is likely to be other recent immigrants (Fix and Passel 1994: 47-5 1). At the end of their careful study of the issues surrounding immigrants, legal and illegal, Fix and Passel suggested that, contrary to growing popular perception that immigrants are a drag on the economy, they "may be a key factor in future job creation and improving the United States' competitiveness in an increasingly global economy" (Fix and Passel 1994: 71).
Since the November 1994 elections, immigrant bashing did not abate; in fact, it soon spread to national politics. Republicans on the national level and President Clinton himself have chimed in with anti-immigrant measures. Ostensibly concerned only with illegal aliens, Clinton reiterated a number of popular myths about them in his State of the Union address of January 1995:
The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to Illegal aliens (Clinton 1995).
Going one step further was the Republicans' "Contract with America," which moved against its next target: "immigration itself, the concept of America as a haven for refugees and a place of economic hope for some of those who stupidly fail to be born in America" (Rosenthal 1994). Its welfare reform clause included a provision to exclude legal immigrants from over sixty federal programs, including education loans and scholarships, housing, immunization, Medicaid-Medicare, and school breakfast and lunch programs (Dong 1994).
In California, illegal alien bashing may have reached new heights immediately after the election. Refusing to concede defeat to Democrat Dianne Feinstein for the Senate seat. Republican candidate Michael Huffington aired a radio ad with the incredible claim that he had "evidence that the recent election of California was riddled with illegal alien voting." Prop. 187 author Harold Ezell set up a Voter Fraud Task Force phone number (800 FRAUD 90) (Claiborne 1994). All this seemed to have been another inflammatory tactic to stir up and maintain anti-immigrant fervor after the elections.
In the end, of course, no amount of immigrant bashing can deny the fact that California growers continue to rely on Mexican and other immigrant labor. Despite their silence on 187 during the campaign because "you don't want to offend the governor," Ed Angstadt, president of the Grower-Shipping Vegetable Association of Central California, admitted as much: We need all those people. You can't take a position against people you rely on to work for you" (Chavez 1994). In fact, Wilson knew that as well, otherwise, why would he have expressed support for a guest worker program during a speech at the Heritage Foundation (the conservative policy think tank) just before the November elections? "It makes sense--it has in the past it may well continue to do so in the future" (Chavez 1994). In other words, Wilson proposed reviving some version of the bracero program that had kept the revolving door on the border functioning so well.
And no amount of policing the border, no amount of welfare denial, can permanently halt the movement of Mexicans across we border. California writer Richard Rodriguez, son of Mexican immigrants, can attest to that: "Any coyote in Tijuana can tell you that illegal immigration is inevitable, as long as distinctions between rich countries and Poor, developed countries and the Third World, are not ameliorated" (Rodriguez 1993). And so it was that with the recent sudden and sharp drop of the Mexican peso, more Mexicans were massed on the border, ready to cross at the opportune moment, undeterred by the beefed-up border patrol.
CONCLUSION
Militarizing our border; denying citizenship to children born on U.S. soil; requiring teachers to spy on their students and doctors on their patients; registering all Americans in a computer bank--all these are strongly suggestive of fascist or police state tendencies. How could the new immigrants in general, and illegal aliens in particular, have provoked such intense revulsion that so many Americans are willing to approve so many unconstitutional, anti-human rights and anti-civil rights measures to rid ourselves, ostensibly, of just 1 percent of our population? The draconian solutions seem entirely out of proportion to the scope of the problem. As one commentator put it: "If all the problems of your country are attributable to this minuscule population, then your system's really in trouble " (Sontag 1993).
The answer, I believe, lies in America's growing insecurity about its preeminent position in the world, its global economic competitiveness, and its national identity as a people, a nation, and a culture. The new immigrants, because they are predominantly non-European and nonwhite, reinforce the contemporary multicultural challenge to the triumphalist construction of America as an English-speaking, culturally European nation that is the embodiment of the superiority of Western civilization. Seen in this light immigrant bashing is part of the backlash against multiculturalism. Immigrant bashing also has resurrected the race-based dichotomy between immigrants destined to become citizens and immigrants ineligible for citizenship.
The new immigrants also exemplify the new globalism. They are part of an international phenomenon of labor migration and mass population movements that began with the postwar decolonization of the Third World, and continued through the breakup of the Soviet Empire. They represent activities in the new global economy, in which capital, jobs, and labor are internationalized and increasingly acquire transnational characteristics.
The destabilized white power structure will soon re-focus all its attention from Third World immigrants to longtime Americans of color. Together with welfare reform and the crime bill, elimination of affirmative action means launching a full frontal attack on the numerically growing but increasingly vulnerable minority populations of this country. And the race war will accelerate.
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