Muzzled (20 page)

President Bush defeated Buchanan in the primary but lost his bid for a second term to President Bill Clinton. But immigration remained an issue. The persistent conservative complaints about high numbers of illegal immigrants came into play during debate over a regional U.S. trade pact with Mexico and Canada. To win Republican votes for the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, President Clinton argued that an improved economic climate in Mexico would reduce the flow of Mexicans coming to the United States illegally to find work. But while U.S. corporate investments in Mexico grew under NAFTA, there was no improvement in Mexican schools, roads, or social services. Combined with an economic slump in the mid-1990s, fear of drug violence, and widespread corruption, Mexico’s lack of opportunity and quality of life continued to give its people seeking a better future plenty of good reasons to risk entering the United States illegally.

When Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives
for the first time in forty years in the 1994 midterm elections, President Clinton faced pressure to deal with illegal immigrants. His 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act increased border patrols, reduced government benefits available without proof of citizenship, and started a system for employers to check by phone on any job applicant’s immigration status. The plan passed the Republican House and, along with an economic boom in the late nineties, calmed the national anxiety that had heightened over immigration.

Over the next decade, however, Mexican immigration to the United States increased, from four hundred thousand annually to more than five hundred thousand a year, and the government estimated that 80 percent of those people crossed the border illegally. George W. Bush, the former governor of Texas, a border state with a large Hispanic population, campaigned in 2000 to bring “compassionate conservatism” to the immigration debate. That approach by Governor Bush included reforming immigration laws to legally bring together the supply of Mexicans seeking work and the demands of American employers seeking low-wage workers. On September 5, 2001, the president met at the White House with Mexican president Vicente Fox to promote a “guest worker” program, under which Mexicans could enter the country for a set period of time to do specific jobs. The two presidents spoke about the crisis surrounding illegal immigration in terms of exploited workers and the sad loss of life that occurs when people face dangerous currents to swim across deep rivers to get into the United States, or when people walk through the blistering desert risking death to get a job and support their families. They also addressed concerns about the social and financial burden—in
terms of crime and added people in hospitals and schools—to states on the southern border.

Six days later, progress in the debate on illegal immigration expired in the fires of September 11, 2001.

After the terror attacks the national focus on preventing future attacks locked on the question of how the 9/11 terrorists got into the country. The answer was not a simple one. The nineteen hijackers had come in legally. Some of their visa applications contained false information and some of their passports had been doctored, but they had been granted legitimate visas by the U.S. government. A Gallup poll the year after the attacks found that the percentage of Americans who felt immigration was a “bad thing” had jumped ten points higher than before 9/11 to 42 percent of the nation. And in Washington the discussion of immigration took on a singular focus—stopping any more terrorists from getting into the country. That meant tightening border security and imposing more requirements on anyone applying for a visa. The George W. Bush administration increased funding for border security by 60 percent. And the Immigration and Naturalization Service was restructured and integrated into the new Department of Homeland Security with a new sense of purpose, namely searching for any potential terrorist hiding in the country.

The immediate result was a reduction in the number of legal immigrants arriving in the United States. About two million fewer immigrants gained admission, dropping from 7.6 million in 2001 to 5.7 million in 2002. There is no reliable measure of the number of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, but with increased security it is likely that number also fell.

By 2004 the ongoing fears of illegal immigration, drug activity
and violence from Mexico, and terrorism led a former Marine and retired accountant named Jim Gilchrist to found the Minutemen, a group in southeastern Arizona, to defend the “state against an overwhelming siege by drug and human-trafficking cartels.” Hundreds of people signed up. Most sat along the border with walkie-talkies, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, looking for any sign of people walking across the border. Some amateur pilots took to the sky to search for illegal immigrants. President Bush called the group “vigilantes.” When Gilchrist was invited to speak at Columbia University in New York, students stormed the stage in protest. Another presentation at Harvard was canceled because of protests. Gilchrist complained that students were violating his right to free speech. Again, conservative groups picked up the cause and talk radio trumpeted the message that left-wing radicals who wanted open borders did not want to hear about the threat it would pose to national security. Fake videos began to circulate of an illegal immigrant being killed by two people identified on the video as members of the Minutemen. The video was tied to two members of the group who said they made it because “we’re old men and we’re bored.” But xenophobes and bigots began flocking to the Minutemen movement. In May 2009 two people in a Washington State Minutemen splinter group participated in the real murder of an immigrant and the man’s daughter in a robbery.

Even before those murders, Gilchrist told an interviewer he was “very, very sad, very disappointed” with what had become of his movement. “I have to say some of the people who have gotten into this movement have sinister intentions.… I very well may have been fighting for people with less character
and less integrity than the ‘open border fanatics’ I have been fighting against. And that is a phenomenal indictment of something I have created.”

It is hard to understand the Minutemen as anything but a desperate plea for the federal government to face down hysterical voices and political threats to get ahold of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system. At their best the Minutemen simply wanted to protect the borders against an indisputably large number of illegal immigrants. The group’s creation was an outburst by people who feel powerless and ignored, people whose emotions are played on with scare tactics instead of serious debate. It was an expression of frustration with the failed leadership at all levels of American politics. This is what we get when leaders are so easily intimidated and refuse to engage one another constructively in order to find some consensus and solution.

The aggravation over inaction combined with heightened fear of immigrants and concern over the threat to national security also played a role in the 2004 presidential campaign. The overall campaign between President Bush and Democrat John Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, boiled down to competing claims about which party could better protect the country from terrorist invaders. Historically, polls have shown Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on national security. And President Bush’s reelection team, predictably, hammered Senator Kerry as weak on defense. Part of the president’s antiterrorism message was a hard line on immigration. But Republicans did not want to alienate naturalized immigrants who had the right to vote. At the GOP convention, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denounced Democrats
as “girlie men” on the issue of national defense but told his own life story of an immigrant who achieved his dreams by legally coming to America.

After winning reelection, the president held the first-ever prime-time presidential address to the nation on the issue of immigration. He pledged to tighten border security but also to open the nation’s doors to immigrants willing to work. The key to this two-step policy would be getting the base of his own Republican Party to agree to a “path to citizenship” for people already in the country illegally.

The “path” required paying fines, paying back taxes, learning English, and going to the back of the line, waiting behind people outside the United States who had applied earlier for immigration papers. To some illegal immigrants the requirements seemed onerous. Well-organized protest rallies by Hispanics calling for immigration reform became regular events. On one memorable day, April 10, 2006, a coalition called the We Are America Alliance mobilized over two million people for marches in major cities. But the legal and illegal immigrants calling for reform to deal with the more than ten million people already in the country—a group of people attending schools, going to work daily, contributing to the American economy—were met by a fierce outcry from conservatives and conservative talk-show hosts. Once again, conflict and not compromise, pitched battle and not progress, were what both sides seemed to crave.

The right-wing media became enraged at the sight of Mexican flags at some of the marches. They cited these as evidence of disloyalty to the United States. Some called for immigration authorities to wade into the marches and demand visas and
passports. They latched onto any report of violence, even a car accident involving an illegal immigrant, as evidence that the country was under siege by illegal immigrants. Coverage of drug cartel violence and kidnappings on both sides of the border took on hysterical tones. One talk-show host, incredibly, suggested the illegal immigrants might pose a health risk by bringing leprosy into the country. The fear extended to scenarios in which Middle Eastern terrorists followed the path of Mexicans crossing the southern border illegally.

The frenzied media made honest debate on immigration difficult—some might say impossible. President Bush made several speeches calling for fellow conservatives to support his relatively balanced immigration plan. He went so far as to support construction of a wall along sectors of the border that included a patchwork of physical walls and the use of sensors and cameras to create “virtual fences.” The White House got Senator McCain and Democratic senator Barack Obama to sign on as supporters of a billion-dollar appropriation to build and maintain the wall. That bill passed and was signed into law, but there was no follow-up to deal with the need for overall immigration reform.

One proposal to win over conservative critics and allow reform to go forward came in 2010 from Senators Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. The idea was to issue a national identification card. The card, as proposed, is a tamper-proof plastic device that has the citizen’s fingerprints as well as bio-metric scans of eyes and facial characteristics. Some private companies now issue similar cards to frequent travelers who want to speed through airport screenings. But the Schumer-Graham
proposal drew cries of “big brother” from civil-liberty groups, which suggested the government could begin to track people, including critics, and violate constitutional protections of individual rights and privacy. The idea stalled as Graham and Schumer failed to effectively respond to these fears.

President Bush and his top political aides appealed for Republicans to wise up to the potential of the growing Hispanic population as potential future members of the Republican Party. They highlighted all the added money in the bill for security, including funds to put new high-tech surveillance technology on the border. But the conservative talk-show universe gave a bullhorn to every congressman opposing the larger immigration bill. In the end, the Republican majority in the Senate did not pass the bill.

The immigration problem, both legal and illegal, continued apace after President Bush left office. His successor, President Obama, promised during his campaign to deal with the issue during his first year in office but never brought the political attention to what remained of Bush’s proposals or any other. In the lame-duck session of 2010, President Obama did try to get Congress to approve the DREAM Act, which had been hanging around in the legislature since 2001 and had been included in Bush’s attempted compromise. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act allows children brought into the United States illegally to gain citizenship if they serve in the military for two years or finish two years of college. The bill had support from a range of Democrats and Republicans. But even with President Obama’s last-minute support, the DREAM Act failed to pass in the final days of a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

In response to the failure of the DREAM Act and the broader immigration reform bill, several state governments began to issue their own laws. Most of the laws played to the same angry, extreme voices, the “populism” described by President Bush, which made it politically impossible for national politicians to resolve the issue. In Arizona, for example, Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. The bill made it a crime for anyone in the state not to have proof of citizenship when asked for it by a police officer. Opponents said the law invited racial profiling because the people most likely to draw suspicion as illegal immigrants are sure to be brown-skinned people with a Spanish accent. Several police chiefs spoke against it because they feared that illegal immigrants would stop cooperating with crime investigations and even become violent when approached by police if they feared deportation. President Obama opposed the bill. President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, also opposed the bill: “I think there is going to be some constitutional problems with the bill.… I wished they hadn’t passed it.”

But the proposal and the law proved a boon to Governor Brewer, who became a champion of the talk-radio, anti-immigration crowd and easily won a reelection fight in which she had previously been an underdog. Her success has prompted other states, including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas, to consider similar legislation.