How illegal immigration became a U.S. debate
James Osborne
January 19, 2008 - 2:27PM
McALLEN — Only a few years ago illegal immigration drew about the same level of public interest as farm subsidies or highway funding — important to the people directly involved but of little concern to the majority of U.S. citizens.
Blue-collar workers at a failing Midwest factory might complain about “cheap Mexican labor.” Medical workers along the southwest border were overwhelmed by the bulging lines waiting in their emergency rooms. But to the average U.S. citizen, the steady flow of illegal immigrants into the United States was just a fact of life.
Fast-forward to 2008, and illegal immigration is a near constant topic on cable news channels and one of the principal issues of this presidential election, particularly for Republican candidates.
“There’s a fire and a fury about immigration,” said Kevin Johnson, a law professor at the University of California-Davis.
“But I think it’s a periodic thing. You saw it in California in the mid-1990s with Proposition 187. … There was a lull, but now you’re seeing it again.”
To policymakers and academics, Prop 187, the California ballot initiative to deny healthcare and education to illegal immigrants, represents the coming of age of the modern anti-immigrant movement. A federal court eventually overturned the measure, but 58 percent of California voters approved it in their 1994 statewide election.
That same sentiment has now found a place in communities across the United States. Small towns like the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch and Hazelton, Pa., have passed laws restricting people from hiring or renting property to illegal immigrants. Congress spent much of the last legislative session debating how to reform immigration.
Just the term itself seems to inspire a degree of passion and excitement rarely seen in national policy matters.
“There’s crackpots on the ultra-left and crackpots on the ultra-right,” said Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, which ran civilian patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border to thwart illegal immigration.
“The patrols were a starting point for creating national awareness, and it worked beautifully. It was about waking up a bunch of sleeping bureaucrats, letting them know our nation was being plundered.”
The question of why immigration inspires debate the way it does is a relatively muddied one.
Johnson, who worked as an immigration attorney for years before turning to academia, sees the phenomenon as rooted in a combination of circumstances: the struggling economy, post-9/11 security fears, the spread of Hispanics into areas of the country where they have not traditionally lived, and a coalescence of political fervor around the issue.
In brief, combine people out of work with fears of another terrorist attack, add in some upset over changing demographics in Middle America, throw in one of the most contested presidential elections in decades, and you have a recipe for turning immigration into a major political issue.
“From a political standpoint, some politicians think this is good politics,” said Douglas Levlin with the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant advocacy center in Washington, D.C.
“A lot of these guys on talk radio and talk TV have picked up on it. It’s an easy issue to create some outrage around.”
Of course, the arrival of new immigrants has been a source of tension in this country — and for most developed countries, for that matter — throughout modern history.
In the mid-1800s the massive influx of immigrants from Ireland inspired the creation of anti-Catholic political parties and small riots in a number of Eastern U.S. cities. A few decades later Congress, concerned about the mass influx of Chinese railroad workers into California, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
This latest debate over immigration has been squarely focused on those immigrants coming over the Mexican border, whether from Central or South America, the Middle East, Asia or Mexico itself.
Significant numbers of Mexicans have been migrating north to work in the United States since the early 1900s, at first to work in the farming industry but now also in construction, meatpacking and manufacturing.
At times they have been welcomed — during World War II, Mexicans were brought to the United States under a bi-national program to help farmers whose employees were off fighting in Europe. But just as readily immigration laws have been written to try to restrict their movement.
In 2005 both Democratic and Republican members of Congress set about trying to reform immigration with a bill that would simultaneously increase border security and provide new, legal status for immigrants wishing to work in the United States. But the measure quickly drew criticism for its plan to confer U.S. citizenship on the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already living in this country.
For one segment of the United States, the debate that followed was a welcome exchange.
In affluent Orange County in Southern California, Gilchrist, a 59-year-old retired accountant, had been watching more and more immigrants from Mexico move into the neighboring towns. Flush with time and money, he decided he’d had enough and in 2004 launched his group, which drew considerable media attention by putting patrols of similarly minded people along the U.S.-Mexico border to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in capturing illegal immigrants.
While there are now an untold number of Minuteman organizations still operating along the border, Gilchrist’s group no longer conducts active patrols but instead dedicates itself to lobbying.
More than three years since he launched the Minuteman Project, Gilchrist likes to think he helped put immigration on the national radar. It’s a source of pride, but even he is shocked at the extent to which people are talking.
“At the beginning there were too many small groups. There wasn’t the national awareness,” he said.
“What we needed was a literal dog and pony show. Though I didn’t think we would get as far as we have so fast.”
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