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ISR Issue 47, May–June 2006
War on immigrants
By JUSTIN AKERS CHACÓN
WHIPPING THEMSELVES into a frenzy, they prepare for war. The enemy are immigrant workers; invisible, yet ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, and pose an imminent threat to the American public. In case you weren’t aware of this “invader,” armed vigilantes, local politicians, governors, members of both houses of Congress, and the president are closing ranks to make sure you are afraid. Behind them, a phalanx of media pundits are joining the chorus to awaken a complacent population that immigrants are threatening to wreck society.
Anti-immigrant hysteria is pervading every corner of daily life, finding resonance and active support among a host of right-wing forces, and mobilizing the lower ranks of the state apparatus to take their own “initiative” to stop immigrants. The result is a volatile climate, where a hostile and often racist backlash against the presence of undocumented workers is manifesting itself across the United States.
“The border has become a war zone” declared Bill Horn, San Diego chairman of the Board of Supervisors, claiming that “shooters at the border end up on our streets shooting kids.” Building to a frenzy, Horn called on Bush to “build [the border fence] all the way to Texas”1 “I can guarantee terrorists have come across the border,” declared Arizona diner owner and Minutemen activist Carmen Mercer. Clutching her Colt .45 handgun, she reassures herself, insisting, “All they have to do is secure the borders [and] we won’t have fear of terrorists coming across. We won’t have fear of the sex-slave trade. We won’t have criminals crossing.”2
In this environment, immigrants—in particular Latino immigrants—are criminalized and morphed into the next potential “terrorist threat.” Hate crimes against immigrants are on the rise across the country. In late December of 2005, a twenty-year-old migrant worker named Guillermo Martinez was shot in the back and killed by Border Patrol agents, leaving behind his wife and two young children.
In the period of one election cycle, anti-immigrant politics have moved from the margins of the fringe Right into the mainstream of U.S. politics, emboldening organizations like the Minutemen, whose antics, though never involving more than a few hundred, get more media play than the substantially larger anti-Minutemen protests, and as much media play as pro-immigrant rallies of hundreds of thousands. Immigration is now at the center of a national debate, causing a flood of legislative proposals jockeying for position in the race to demonize migrant workers.
State legislatures are having trouble keeping up with the number of proposals to punish immigrants. Governors from states as far from the U.S.-Mexico border as Utah, Missouri, Tennessee, and Vermont are clamoring for tighter restrictions and punitive measures against immigrants.3
Leading the national charge are hard right, racist demagogues like Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo and Wisconsin congressman F. James Sensenbrenner. Tancredo has been loudly demanding a 700-mile-long border fence. His Immigration Reform Caucus in Washington has mushroomed from sixteen to ninety-one members. Tancredo calls undocumented immigrants “a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation,” bemoans the “cult of multiculturalism,” and claims that the U.S. is becoming a “tower of Babel.”4 In 2002, he tried unsuccessfully to get a Denver high school honor student and his family deported for being in the country illegally. Sensenbrenner introduced the now notorious bill HR4437, passed by the House, that would make all undocumented immigrants, and anyone who aids them, felons. He raises the specter of hordes of immigrants pouring over the border, threatening to “flood our schools” and cause the health care system, and the economy as a whole, to “collapse.”5
This atmosphere of open season on immigrants is the result of several interlocking factors: a bipartisan consensus on the militarization of the border, the “war on terror,” and an unflinching commitment to Corporate America.
Militarization of the border: A bipartisan effort
The issue of border control has been commonly framed as an extension of foreign policy objectives over the course of the twentieth century. In times of war or crisis, politicians have portrayed the border as a vulnerable last line of defense against an “invading enemy.” By infusing national security objectives into the issue of immigration, policy makers use the issue to build support for war abroad as well as draconian policies at home.
The militarization of the border, which includes increasing personnel, joint patrols with the armed forces, the infusion of military technology, and the construction of a border wall that was originally a by-product of the Cold War, began in earnest in the 1970s during the Ford and Carter administrations.
The border region was incorporated as part of the Cold War theater during the Eisenhower administration. In 1954, Senator Pat McCarran, declared that “Communist agents” were among the “wetbacks” who crossed the Rio Grande.6 The criminalization of the movement of Mexican workers began in earnest, as the federal government conducted “Operation Wetback,” a mass deportation campaign in which 1.5 million Mexican workers were rounded up and repatriated to Mexico. This military campaign began the process by which the border was integrated into the national security doctrine.
In 1976, then-Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) commissioner Leonard Chapman warned the nation about “a vast and silent invasion of illegal aliens.” William Colby, former CIA director, echoed his remarks. “The most obvious threat is the fact that there are going to be 120 million Mexicans by the turn of the century,” Colby said. “[The Border Patrol] will not have enough bullets to stop them.”7
Increased migration in the 1970s and the emergence of Central American revolutionary movements (opposed to U.S.-backed dictatorships) once again increased the focus on the border. Presidents Carter and Reagan both used the issue of an imminent border invasion as a justification to increase funds for the militarization of the border. Beginning with the Carter administration, the budget for the Border Patrol was increased 24 percent and personnel 8.7 percent.8 The border forces also experienced a significant upgrade in equipment, “ranging from the increased construction of fences to the deployment of helicopters and the improved ground sensors.”9
The alarmism of the Carter administration paved the way for a further lurch rightward by the Reagan administration. Reagan radically altered public perceptions of the border by portraying northward moving immigration as the harbinger of the three greatest “threats” to the US: hordes of poor migrants, Central American subversives, and narco-traffickers.
Acting to prevent a “tidal wave of refugees” and to deter “terrorists and subversives [who] are just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas,” Reagan launched a new era of border policing that involved the use of military personnel to train border agents and military hardware to arm them. The administration justified this with a new national security doctrine:
Pressures on our borders from the Caribbean and Central America—particularly Mexico—make it certain that in the foreseeable future, as never in the past, the United States is going to have to maintain a foreign policy, including pre-emptive and prophylactic measures, which has one of its objectives the protection of our frontiers against excessive illegal immigration.10
Funding for the Border Patrol under Reagan increased 130 percent. Detention centers were expanded, checkpoints set up, and the number of agents increased by 82 percent.11 Immigration hysteria culminated with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which cross-designated the Border Patrol as drug enforcement agents. Border militarization, in effect, criminalized migration and consequently normalized the ignominious labels “illegals” and “illegal aliens,” epithets designed to dehumanize poor migrant workers, segregate them, and desensitize the population to their deadly experiences crossing the border.
The killer at the border: Operation Gatekeeper
Operation Gatekeeper was launched in 1994 by the Clinton administration as part of Clinton’s get-tough policy on undocumented immigration. Similar operations were also launched or already existed in other regions along the U.S.-Mexico border. The operation aimed to stop the flow of immigrants by concentrating military and police forces along traditional crossing routes on the border to seal them off. “Since 1992,” Clinton boasted, “we have increased our Border Patrol by over 35 percent; deployed underground sensors, infrared night scopes, and encrypted radios; built miles of new fences; and installed massive amounts of new lighting.” “We must not tolerate illegal immigration,” he wrote in 1996.12
Operation Gatekeeper includes a wall comprised of welded sections of recycled Gulf War landing strips, Black Hawk helicopters, heat sensors, night-vision telescopes, electronic vision detection devices, and computerized fingerprinting equipment. Recent years have also seen a dramatic increase in the Border Patrol, now the largest federal law enforcement body, with nearly 12,000 agents in the field.13
The high-profile federal border presence has succeeded in preventing border crossing in highly populated urban zones. But this has simply forced immigrants to cross in more dangerous places. In California, immigrants must come through the Otay Mountains, whose peaks reach as high as 6,000 feet, with freezing temperatures six months out of the year. In Arizona, people attempting to cross the border are now forced to trek through the scorched Arizona deserts, where temperatures climb to as high as 120 degrees, and with sand dunes that reach 300 feet. As a result, Operation Gatekeeper has caused the deaths of more than 4,000 people along the border since 1994, about four deaths every three days, and well over ten times the number that died at the Berlin Wall.14 Deaths have become so common in Arizona, for instance, that the Pima County coroner’s office was forced to rent a refrigerated truck to store bodies that could not be accommodated inside its facility.15 The deaths, primarily male workers who get lost or left behind in the deserts or mountains, also include women and young children, often crossing to reunite with their families. And the deaths are on the rise. Over the last fiscal year, 2005, 460 people are known to have died on the border. That far exceeds the previous record of 383 in 2000.16
Clinton’s policies have set a new standard for border militarization, a trend continued by the current Bush administration. “Our goal is clear: to return every single illegal entrant, with no exceptions,” Bush recently assured senior congressmen and intelligence officers in the White House.17 He also backed up his invective against immigrants by signing a $32 billion homeland security bill for 2006 which contains large increases for border enforcement, including 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents.118 The integration of the border into the foreign policy objectives of imperialism has created the circumstance by which the discourse of immigration itself has been militarized.
All current legislative proposals, whether sponsored by Republicans or Democrats (or both) contain both the language and means to increase the war on immigrants. Under currently proposed legislation HR 4437 (the Sensenbrenner-King bill), the nation would spend more than $2.2 billion to build five border fences in California and Arizona, a length of 698 miles at a cost of $3.2 million per mile. It would not only make undocumented migration a felony, it would criminalize the very act of associating with them. The bipartisan Kennedy-McCain bill, another pending immigration proposal, is also called the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. The bill seeks to support Bush’s call for a guest-worker program, while “cracking down” on unauthorized crossings. As Republican co-sponsor, Arizona Senator John McCain explains,
Homeland security is our nation’s number one priority, this legislation includes a number of provisions that together will make our nation more secure. For far too long, our nation’s broken immigration laws have gone unreformed—leaving Americans vulnerable. We can no longer afford to delay reform. I am proud to join my colleagues today as an original Sponsor of this legislation.19
The proposal calls for increasing “border security enforcement with new technology, information sharing, and other initiatives.” In other words, it would continue and expand the current death-warrant policy of Operation Gatekeeper, and sets the stage for a new round of punitive measures against migrant workers, under the guise of the war on terror. The most recent “compromise” bill that failed in early April to break the congressional deadlock before Congress’s spring break [see “A choice between bad and worse” on page 32] fits the same mould. While it doesn’t turn immigrants into felons, it proposes even tougher border enforcement measures, combining a guest-worker proposal with a plan that requires the deportation of undocumented workers who have been here for less than five years. For those who can somehow prove they have been here for more than five years, it mandates that, in addition to paying a $2,000 fine, they must speak English, and pass a criminal background check, among other stringent requirements.
New front in the war on terror
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has devoted itself to conducting a so-called war on terror, a war it claims involves not only overseas military operations, but also various domestic measures. Stopping “terrorism” has justified a wide range of these measures, from domestic wiretaps, increased detentions and deportations, surveillance and infiltration of protest organizations, and now the criminalization of immigrants.
The Democratic Party has also made winning the war on terrorism its clarion call. Conjuring anti-Arab imagery in the 2004 presidential debates, Kerry declared that a Democratic administration could “do a better job of homeland security.” And he warned, “The fact is that we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the border…. Here’s what I’ll do: Number one, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is, we haven’t done what we need to do to toughen up our borders, and I will.”20
This conversion of the border into a theater in the war on terror has filtered through the ranks of both parties, and contributed to the growing perception of migrants as “potential terrorists.” This rhetoric has allowed the right wing to seize the initiative and push the debate onto their terrain. “Securing our borders” is now the common refrain, which translates into cracking down on immigrants. For instance, since 9/11, not only has amnesty been taken off the table, but also a host of other initiatives (such as providing drivers licenses to migrant workers) have been buried or overturned. Raids and arrests are now carried out wholesale, with the previously banal nature of immigration enforcement, now inflated through a political lens. Eager not to be painted as pro-amnesty, many liberal immigrant advocacy groups have accepted the terms of the debate set by the right wing.
A recent study published in the New York Times has exposed the increasingly political nature of immigration prosecution. While undocumented immigration actually declined from 2000–2003 (from an average of 1.5 million/year to 1.1 million/year),21 immigration prosecutions against undocumented workers increased from 16,300 to 38,000 over the same period.22 According to David Burnham, co-director of the research group connected to Syracuse University which conducted the survey,
This is a substantial shift any way you measure it…. We’re seeing choices being made by United States attorneys and by the president about what’s important and what’s not, and clearly, the administration has changed the priorities of the federal law enforcement machine.
Another study by the same group revealed that,
The Justice Department was now bringing many criminal charges in immigration cases that once would probably have been handled as administrative matters. This was particularly true in South Texas, where prosecutors went into “super drive” on immigration crimes last year and spurred a 345 percent increase in recommendations for criminal prosecutions, rising in a single year to 18,092 from 4,062, the study found.23
This is a clear-cut case of how an attack targeting one group can then be used to attack others. The climate in which Arab and Muslim immigrants can be rounded up, detained, interrogated, and deported with impunity has been used to lower the boom on other, mostly Latino, immigrants. In early 2003, for example, terrorism charges were filed against twenty-eight Latinos, accused of possessing false Social Security cards in order to work at Austin Airport.24 The goal of such campaigns is less designed to stem transborder migration as much as restrain and reverse the momentum towards the naturalization of undocumented workers.
Ironically, the same conditions that allowed politicians to connect the war on terror with immigration has allowed them to use immigration as a wedge issue to deflect anger away from the failures of the Bush administration and its war. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Some Republican strategists contend that the immigration issue offers an opportunity for the GOP to revive its flagging fortunes at a time when Bush and the party have been hobbled by public discontent over the war in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and ethics scandals.”25
The Democratic Party, as the enabler of this process, is incapable of offering more than tepid opposition. After telling Bush to “stand up to the right wing of his own party,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) went on to promote both the right wing’s deceptive characterization of the border and the need for a guest-worker program. “Unless we address the gap between our immigration laws and reality, illegal immigration will not stop, and the situation on the border will continue to be chaotic,” Reid recently stated.26 Others are trying to use the issue to jockey for position in future elections.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), no doubt responding to the growing immigrant rights movement that no one on Capitol Hill had anticipated, recently criticized Sensenbrenner’s HR4437, saying that it would probably criminalize Jesus.27 Prior to this, however, she was eager to position herself on the right of the debate, a fact that prompted even the conservative Washington Times to accuse her of “staking out a position on illegal immigration that is more conservative than President Bush, a strategy that supporters and detractors alike see as a way for the New York Democrat to shake the ‘liberal’ label and appeal to traditionally Republican states.”28
In an interview on WABC radio, she said: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants,” and in an interview on Fox News accused Bush of not doing enough to “protect our borders and ports.”29
Other Democrats have followed suit. Governor Janet Napolitano declared a “state of emergency” in Arizona, and “unveiled a $100-million proposal that includes posting National Guard troops along the border, toughening penalties for fraudulent identification papers and punishing businesses that employ illegal immigrants.”30 The cacophony of opposition to immigration, from both parties, has given the green light to immigrant bashers at all levels of government, as well as to those (such as the Minutemen) who seek to fight their own wars against cross-border workers. And amid the anti-immigrant furor, Corporate America is working quietly behind the scenes to ensure that even the harshest legislative proposal procures for them a steady flow of cheap, controllable labor in the future.
Immigration legislation: Corporate America’s wish list
Since both Democratic and Republican parties are hardwired to corporate capitalism (through their unconditional commitment to the “free enterprise system” as well as their main source of campaign funding) neither can deviate too far from the mantra of “what is best for business is best for America.”
The closer one moves to the centers of power within both parties, the closer one gets to the heart of the debate, the competing sections of the corporate elite. Farther along the peripheries of the parties, politicians seek to leverage themselves against their own party elite with a garden variety of populism. Nevertheless, it’s big business that sets the agenda, and in the case of immigration, it is their desire to have access to disenfranchised labor.
What results is a very slim degree of separation between existing immigration policy proposals, bipartisan efforts, and the intermarriage of economic and political objectives under the auspices of “immigration reform.” As labor journalist David Bacon points out, “Congress is divided between the supposed ‘conservatives’ who want to stop immigration and turn the undocumented into criminals, and the ‘liberals’ who want to give employers new guest-worker programs. But [these] proposals will cause immense suffering, and benefit only a tiny elite.”31
Aside from HR4437, which has no guest-worker provision, the current legislative proposals in Congress seek to combine both punitive enforcement measures and a guest-worker program, negating any opportunity for the undocumented to have the same rights as other workers. The reason? The criminalization of labor is profitable for Corporate America. As David Bacon points out,
These proposals incorporate demands by the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition [EWIC]—36 of the US’s largest trade and manufacturers’ associations, headed by the US Chamber of Commerce… [d]espite their claims, there is no great shortage of workers in the US. There is a shortage of workers at the low wages industry would like to pay.32
Membership in the new coalition runs from $50,000 and $250,000, the funds are channeled into their political campaign.33 The campaign reflects these employers’ desire to create a labor force that is cheap, pliant, and deportable. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition seeks to use temporary workers to fill the gap being created by the downward push on wages at home. By supporting the war on terrorism, big business benefits from anti-immigrant sentiment insofar as it divides workers and weakens their ability to organize to improve working conditions or resist wage and benefit cuts.
As Corporate America seeks to break unions at home (and dismantle social welfare), disenfranchised labor is a second layer of opportunity to keep unions out. Guest-worker programs (even with liberal modifications) are predicated on the idea that migrant workers are not entitled to the rights associated with citizenship and residency. To be clear, a guest-worker program will make the undocumented “legal,” but will not allow for citizenship rights or equal protection before the law, and current proposals are purposefully vague on the subject. The majority of workers are expected to return home, while those who want to remain will be required to overcome insurmountable hurdles in order to obtain legal residency.
While in the U.S., workers will be contracted through a government agency that prohibits separate or secondary contractual agreements with third parties. In other words, migrant contract workers can’t form or join unions, which is the only means for workers to negotiate better conditions and wages with their employers. They also have limited freedom of movement, since their right to remain in the country is contingent on being employed, which legally binds them to their employers. It is a form of temporary serfdom, in effect.
Under these circumstances, employers are free to police their own workers, and to select and deport them based on their tractability. The last guest-worker program, the Bracero Program, demonstrated this. This is why Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, the United Farm Workers, and the Chicano civil rights movement dedicated their struggle to its abolition in 1964.
This apparent contradiction—the criminalization of immigrant workers along with the desire to import more of them—is playing itself out now in agriculture. The executive vice president of the Western Growers Association, Jasper Hempel, recently declared his support for the war on terrorism, stating “we are like every other American…we want to make sure our borders are secure against terrorists and drug smugglers.” Nevertheless, in November 2004, when lettuce farmers in Arizona experienced labor shortages due to an expanded use of Border Patrol checkpoints, Western Growers “stepped in and requested ease up until the farmers could get enough workers to make sure the multimillion dollar crop wouldn’t perish.”34
Corporate agriculture is throwing its support behind the guest-worker program in full force. The last guest-worker program led to such a degradation of labor conditions that migrant workers are abandoning agriculture in droves, moving into urban industries with better pay. In fact, it is due to this “freedom of movement” that growers want a new Bracero Program, to force workers to remain in the fields. Current labor shortages and the freedom of movement, unless a new guest-worker program is implemented, can actually increase the negotiating power of undocumented workers since their labor is the source of profit for the multibillion dollar industry.
The main proponents of a new guest-worker program, EWIC, includes business interests in construction, health care, hotels and restaurants, transportation, manufacturing, meat processing, and other service industries eager to expand the program into their industries. Speaking of migrant workers,
“The economy needs them,” says John Gay, co-chair of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, an alliance of service-industry employers. The number of American-born, low-skilled workers fell by 1.8 million between 1996 and 2000, meaning there is a dwindling supply to staff the booming construction, health-care and hospitality industries.35
Having controlled labor in these industries will also serve to weaken and ultimately counter the unions that are present and growing in those industries, where immigrant workers have been a growth engine for the union movement. According to a study of the Migrant Policy Institute, 11 percent of the 17.7 million foreign-born workers in the United States are represented by unions, despite difficulties associated with citizenship. Reflecting changing attitudes in the unions and militancy among the workers themselves, the number of immigrants in unions has grown 23 percent between 1996 and 2003.36 The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with members primarily in property services, health care, and the public sector, has become the largest and fastest growing labor union in the U.S., claiming a membership of 1.8 million. Immigrant workers account for some two-thirds of that figure.37
According to Lance Compa, a former official of the North American Free Trade Agreement Labor Secretariat:
Two things are true. One, many immigrants are afraid to organize because of fear of deportation, thus retarding union organizing in many workplaces and communities, and two, many immigrants are the most active, fearless organizers, bringing new unions to many workplaces and communities.38p>
So-called compromise legislative proposals, therefore, that emphasize enforcement and guest-worker proposals, work counter to efforts to extend democratic rights to the undocumented, and are therefore detrimental to both immigrant workers and to the labor movement as a whole.
Immigrant rights at the crossroads
Historically, the segregation of immigrant workers due to their lack of citizenship has been reinforced by ideological campaigns that work to criminalize their presence. This has created major fractures within the working class that have handicapped efforts to organize for a common cause, and therefore creating a divided house of labor.
This changed in 1999, when the AFL-CIO officially adopted a pro-immigrant stance, and sponsored the Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides (IWFR) in 2003. Modeled on the anti-Jim Crow Freedom Rides of the 1960s, rights activists and immigrant workers set out across the country from major cities and converged on New York City to a mass rally of 100,000. The goal was to spread the message of amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and better protections of workplace rights for all workers, including the removal of employer sanctions.39
The last amnesty in 1986, helped set the stage for new organizing drives in the fields and in other sectors, such as the strikes and union drives among custodial workers in southern California in 2000. The labor movement, utilizing the strength of the united working class, native and foreign born, is the force most capable of beating back a generalized assault on immigrants. Nevertheless, since 2003 there has been no visible nationwide activity in the name of the IWFR or its sponsors.
Morever, several key unions with a high percentage of immigrant workers, including UNITE-HERE and SEIU have come out in support of the anti-union Kennedy-McCain bill.40 But the legacy of the fight for full equality is not lost. For Linda Chavez Thompson, executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO, the new guest-worker proposals are like the old South’s Jim Crow strictures. “There is absolutely no good reason,” she says, “why any immigrant who comes to this country prepared to work…should be relegated to a repressive, second-class guest worker status.”41
Among immigrant workers, especially those building today’s unions and who came out for the freedom rides, the stakes are clear and the debate is re-emerging. For instance, on January 21, 2006, Teamsters Local 952 held an Immigration Alert Forum at its hall in Orange, CA, which included a debate about whether or not labor should support a guest-worker program. Debates are beginning to emerge among workers and immigrant rights supporters across the country, especially in the wake of the growing protest movement that turned out 300,000 in Chicago in early March against the Sensenbrenner bill.42 Since then, the debate has been forced open even wider, as demonstrations and school walkouts for immigrant rights have spread throughout the country, including a million-strong protest in Los Angeles. The crossroads ahead for the movement are becoming clear. Will a new civil rights movement emerge that demands full equality for all workers, documented or not, or will we take a step back towards the tolerance of segregation and border violence that is embodied in the current legislative proposals in Washington? Now that immigrant workers themselves, and their natural allies in the labor movement, are raising their voices, the future looks brighter.
Justin Akers Chacón, a member of the International Socialist Organization in San Diego, is active in antiwar, cross-border solidarity, and immigrant rights work. He is the author, with Mike Davis, of the forthcoming No One is Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2006). He is also the author of “Vigilantes at the border,” (ISR 43, September–October 2005), “Farmworkers in the U.S.” (ISR 34, March–April 2004), and “Operation Gatekeeper: Militarizing the border” (ISR 18, June–July 2001).
1 Leslie Wolf Branscomb, “Board chairman delivers State of County address,” San Diego Union Tribune, February 8, 2006.
2 Carol Morello, Ernesto Londoño, and Allison Klein, “Guardian of the Green Card,” Washington Post, February 8, 2006.
3 Robert Tanner, “Governors want immigration changes,” San Diego Union Tribune, February 27, 2006.
4 Holly Bailey, “Tom Tancredo is pulling the immigration debate to the right—and away from Bush,” Newsweek, April 3, 2006.
5 Tom Curry, “Two Republicans personify immigrant fight,” MSNBC, April 6, 2006.
6 Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980) 22.
7 Quoted in “Immigration: Crossing the line,” Texas State Comptroller, http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch11/ch11.html.
8 Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexican Border, 1978–1992 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 37–38.
9 Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2001), 67.
10 Dunn, 2.
11 Nevins, 68.
12 “Bill Clinton on immigration,” OnTheIssues.org, http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Bill_Clinton_Immigration.htm.
13 Jim Abrams, “Little consensus on immigration policy,” Associated Press, December 1, 2005.
14 Two hundred sixty people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall. See Bruce Kennedy, “Order 101: Shooting to kill at the Berlin Wall,” CNN Interactive, http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/09/spotlight/.
15 Leslie Berestein, “460 border crossers died in past year: Posters on fence tell of 3,600 found dead in 11 years,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 1, 2005.
16 Ibid.
17 Francis Harris, “Bush vows to expel all illegal migrants,” Telegraph (U.K.), September 20, 2005.
18 Nedra Pickler, “Bush vows crackdown on illegal immigrants,” Associated Press, November 28, 2005.
19 “Members of Congress introduce comprehensive border security and immigration reform bill,” Office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, http://kennedy.senate.gov/~kennedy/statements/05/05/2005512A04.html.
20 Transcript of hird presidential debate, Commission on presidential debates, October 13, 2004, http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004d.html.
21 Jeffrey S. Passel and Roberto Suro, Rise, Peak, and Decline: Trends in U.S. Immigration 1992–2004, Pew Hispanic Center report, September 27, 2005, i.
22 Eric Lichtblau, “Prosecutions in immigration doubled in last four years,” New York Times, September 29, 2005.
23 Ibid.
24 Elaine Hagopian, ed., Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004), 28.
25 Janet Hooks, “Border security an issue for GOP,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2005.
26 “Bush turns focus to immigration,” CBS News, November 28, 2005, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/28/politics/
main1080957.shtml.
27 “Hannity falsely claims that Sen. Clinton ‘says immigration reform is un-Christian,’” March 24, 2006, Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/items/200603240016.
28 Charles Hurt, “Hillary goes conservative on immigration,” Washington Times, December 13, 2004.
29 Ibid.
30 Nicholas Riccardi, “States take on border issues,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2006.
31 David Bacon, “Equality or not,” Truthout.org,March 3, 2006, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030306S.shtml
32 David Bacon, “Talking points on guest workers,” July 6, 2005, http://www.dsausa.org/DavidBacon/guest%20workers.html.
33 Peter Wallsten and Nicole Gaouette, “President George Bush to build immigration reform coalition to court Hispanics,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2005.
34 Claudine LoManaco, “10m illegal immigrants in US: Push is on for faster immigration,” Tucson Citizen, July 4, 2004.
35 June Kronholz, “Guest-worker proposals prove divisive,” Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2005.
36 Complete statistics available at http://www.migrationpolicy.org/
pubs/7_Immigrant_Union_Membership.pdf.
37 Peter Costantini, “A new internationalism rising,” IPS News Service, January 9, 2006.
38 Ibid.
39 Alan Maass, “Freedom ride for immigrant rights,” Socialist Worker, October 3, 2003.
40 According to a press statement issued on March 7, 2006 by the breakaway Change to Win labor federation, the support for the bill is somewhat ambiguous, but it is nevertheless an open endorsement, http://www.changetowin.org/press.html#leadervoices.
41 Bacon.
42 See Lee Sustar, “We’re here and we’re not leaving,” Socialist Worker, March 17, 2006.
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