Like a persistent virus, Hillary Clinton refuses to go away. Of late, she has been reinventing herself as a Political Elder of sorts and burnishing her reputation to make herself appear more progressive than she ever was. I grew tired of screencapping the same segments from various essays I’ve written over the years and posting them on social media, in order to expose yet another set of lies about her politics, so I decided to write this short essay on the great harm she has done to immigrants and the poor. Some of this is from my book project in progress, Strange Love: How to Kill Social Justice and Make It Work Again, and some of it is from essays I’ve written over the years (see below for links).
Now that Kamala Harris has been chosen, anointed, and crowned as the Democratic presidential candidate, it’s Hillary Clinton’s time to shine.
Or so thinks Clinton.
The former presidential candidate, who has a new book to sell, has begun to establish herself as an Elder Statesman, here to guide us all into a sunny future, wagging her finger all the while: Henry Kissinger, but in travelling silk pantsuits. And the same instinct to lie, lie, lie about her own record.
In a recent long, meandering New York Times op-ed that is mostly about herself, Clinton writes in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Clinton’s role here is like that of a surrogate, crafting and presenting official narratives that can then be parroted by liberals like Rachel Maddow and end up as the historical record. About Joe Biden’s decision to step away from the presidential campaign, she writes that “to accept that finishing the job meant passing the baton, took real moral clarity. The country mattered more.” This is nonsense: while we should certainly be glad that he stepped aside, there’s no need to perpetuate the fiction that he did so voluntarily. What really happened is that party elites and wealthy donors like George Clooney made the decision that he should give up his hope for a second term after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump. Until that point, they had no problem with his dismal showing in the polls, cared not one bit for the many voters who were dissatisfied with their abysmal choice in the upcoming election, and ignored the growing Uncommitted movement which demonstrated its rightful anger over Biden’s enabling of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Clinton’s op-ed appears alongside tweets in which she persists in reinventing history, her own and that of the country. We will have time aplenty, in the months ahead, to examine her real record on every topic she addresses but for now, her thoughts on immigration are especially curious because she uses the topic to claim an ideological distance from Trump, when her records shows that she is closer to him than she cares to admit. Consider, for instance, this tweet where she asks, aghast, “What is wrong with these people?”, about a USA Today headline that runs, “Republican states are blocking summer food benefits for hungry families.”
And there’s this tweet, about Trump’s promises on immigration, and the signs demanding mass deportations, held up by attendees at the recent Republican convention:
She’s right of course, that such a policy would have terrible effects. But Clinton cleverly avoids the fact that she, along with her co-president Bill Clinton, is responsible for the terrible state of immigration today.
Unlike Laura Bush or Michelle Obama, Clinton virtually and openly served as a co-President, eschewing cookie-making in favour of a role in government. They openly threw around the phrase “Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill,” and made no secret of her active role in her husband’s presidency. In 1996, they eviscerated “welfare as we know it,” and also set in place a series of prominent pieces of legislation that would have a detrimental and damaging effect on women, the poor, African Americans, and immigrants. In fact, they had already set about creating conditions for the displacement of millions across the globe as they added the pressures of neoliberal governance to both local and international areas.
In 1994, the Clintons oversaw the passage of the North American Free Trade Act, NAFTA. As a result of U.S goods flooding local markets, merchants and farmers, whether selling textiles or corn, were forced to shut down. Approximately two million farmers had to abandon their occupations, and today 53.5 million people in Mexico experience food insecurity. As Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy points out, “Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.” Restrictive trade policies, disguised as “free trade,” meant the displacement of millions of people who had up to that point been able to survive and thrive in their native economies. NAFTA eventually caused massive waves of immigration as desperate Mexicans streamed across the border.
The Clintons’ method of working with what was now a migrant/refugee crisis was to initiate the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), both in 1996. Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Murakama point out that while the latter was supposed to tackle domestic terrorism in response to the Oklahoma bombing, it has in fact “justified immigration restrictions in criminological terms and criminal penalties in anti-immigration terms.” Taken together, the Acts increased the penalties for what were formerly relatively minor infractions and expanded the reach of the PIC. For instance, before 1996, undocumented immigrants apprehended and imprisoned for crimes were released after serving their sentences. After 1996, they would remain in prison until deported. Minor offenses, like driving under the influence or filing a false tax return would now be classified as “aggravated felonies” and place immigrants on the fast track to deportation.
In 1996, the Clintons had to work on getting re-elected, and they began preparing for the next election by ratcheting up a socially and economically conservative set of policies under the guise of supposedly more enlightened “New Democrat” principles. They set in place the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, otherwise known as the Welfare Reform Act, which created TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). This allowed states to create their own welfare programs, and this had the worst effects on the poorest, mostly women, single mothers and mostly African Americans and, as Bohrman and Murakama point out, singled out immigrants and drug convicts. As for the former: “Cutting benefits to immigrants, both undocumented and legal, was at the heart of welfare reform.” IIRIRA made undocumented immigrants ineligible for food stamps, and the Personal Responsibility Act excluded legal immigrants from benefits like food stamps, Title XX block grants for child care, support services for abused children, and required hospitals to determine immigration status before treating people in non-emergency cases.
In addition, IIRIRA instituted the 3 and 10-year bars. This meant that immigrants who stayed in the U.S for a period of 6 months to a year or over a year would now be prevented from re-entry for 3 to 10 years, respectively.
All of these Acts worked along with the omnibus Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which instituted “reforms” like the Three Strikes provision; they had the cumulative effect of increasing the vulnerability of the most impoverished and in need populations, including citizens, legal immigrants, and the undocumented. Writing for Harper’s in October 2015, Virginia Sole-Smith reported on the after-effects of Welfare Reform:
Welfare reform has been successful by one measure alone: it has reduced government spending. In 1995, about 14 million Americans were on welfare; today, that number is down to 4.2 million. Meanwhile, the benefits received by families with no other cash income now bring them to less than half the federal poverty line, according to research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In 2014, the median family of three on welfare received a monthly check of just $428, and other government assistance programs have seen their budgets slashed even further. For every hundred families with children that are living in poverty, sixty-eight were able to access cash assistance before Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. By 2013, that number had fallen to twenty-six.
Over the years after the Clintons, George W. Bush would begin to tweak Welfare Reform, adding provisions that made it even harder for women in particular to keep their benefits and to support their families and dependents. These included imprisoning fathers of out-of-wedlock children who refused to participate in workfare jobs and prioritising marriage as a public policy goal by, for instance, encouraging single mothers to stay in relationships with their children’s fathers. Critics of such measures often blame them on the Bush years, conveniently forgetting that Bush was merely using a Clinton-led legislative agenda as a template.
The combined and cumulative effect of all the legislation set in place by the Clintons in their efforts to appear and be tougher on crime, the poor, immigrants and potential “terrorists” was to create a massive and deeply impoverished population of people. The effects of the return bars has been the creation of a huge pool of people barely eking out a living as undocumented immigrants in the U.S. but too desperate to leave because of their fear of not being allowed to reunite with the friends and family they have here. In other words, undocumented immigrants from countries like Mexico and Asia have much less mobility than the goods and services that are so freely “traded” under legislation like NAFTA.
It is ironic that Hillary Clinton now places herself in opposition to a man who had the temerity to defeat her, and whose policies she helped set in place. In her NYT op-ed, Clinton doesn’t hesitate to use Trumpian language, writing that “Illegal border crossings are also dropping fast and are now the lowest they’ve been since 2020, thanks in part to Mr. Biden’s recent executive order.” That particular order will “temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry, according to a senior administration official.” Since that threshold has been met, the order has already gone into effect. The measure was adopted in June, before Biden withdrew from the race, meant to desperately signal that he could be just as tough on immigration as Trump. Clinton fails to see the contradiction in her praising Biden for a cruel policy that bars entry for those whose lives have been ravaged by wars and abuse (often brought on by the U.S) and expressing horror at Trump’s policies that would have the same effects.
In the few scant months before November 4, Clinton will work harder to establish herself as a Fount of Wisdom, the Grandmother of all Girlboss Feminism, perhaps inspiring thousands of women to take up their pink pussy hats once again. But Clinton has never stood for anyone but herself. She writes, in the Times, “I wasn’t running to break a barrier; I was running because I thought I was the most qualified to do the job.” Well, yes, but she mostly ran because she thought she was owed a presidency that had eluded her grasp in 2008. In an October 2016 interview with the Times, she airily declared, “As I’ve told people, I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” She had little to say about what she could do for people, and could only emphasise her position as not-Trump (currently, Harris is in great danger of repeating her mistake by only attacking Trump and offering no real alternatives or changes).
Like Henry Kissinger, Clinton is mostly after power and money, as she too runs around the world dispensing wisdom for bucks (again mirroring Donald Trump). But most of all, she wants to feel that she still matters, showing up in interviews with journalists like Christiane Amanpour to pontificate on politics even though she has no formal place in politics and her only status is “former Democratic Presidential nominee,” someone whose 2016 loss should surely serve as a disqualification. A popular Onion meme shows her and Kamala Harris shaking hands, with the caption, “‘Really, Really, Really Happy for You, Kamala,’ says Hillary Clinton, Not Letting Go of Handshake.” This is an accurate rendition of what her words and constant media presence signal, a deep desire to acquire something like a shadow presidency.
Clinton, like James Carville, Paul Begala, and David Axelrod (her old pals from the ’90s and the aughts) is a dinosaur. But while these men are content with lucrative careers as “consultants” and media personalities delivering anodyne and predictable opinions, she is determined to carve out a political career in some form or the other. As we speed towards November, any closer alliance with Clinton will only make Harris seem out of touch. Millennials and Gen Zers are unlike Clinton’s generation: her decision to besmirch her husband’s lovers, including a 22-year-old intern, while standing by him in order to make sure she had a shot at the presidency is not the sort that wins praise among them. A generation of women who see themselves as perfectly capable of crafting careers on their own is not sympathetic to such choices.
It’s time for Hillary Clinton to let go of the fantasy that she has a place in the American political landscape. It’s time for us to stop letting her claim public airtime as some kind of progressive, and point out that she is a major reason for our current immigration crisis and the rise in poverty. And the next time she wonders, “What is wrong with these people?,” someone close to her should respond, “Everything that was wrong with you.”
For more, see:
“Rights Make Might: The Dystopian Undertow of Hillary Clinton’s Feminism.”
“Marry the State, Jail the People: On Hillary Clinton’s Carceral Feminism,” chapter in False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone.
With Eugenia Williamson, “Abortive Reasoning: What’s Wrong with the Reproductive Rights Debate.”
“A Monica for Our Time: Reinventing Sex and Trauma in the Age of #MeToo.”
“March As Feminists, Not As Women.”
“Choose Your Elite: Edith Windsor, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
