Update, September 12: The September 10 presidential debate included troubling narratives about immigrants, from both sides. And, predictably, press coverage, including from Democracy Now, has done little to dislodge the “good immigrant/bad immigrant” narrative. I’ll have more on that later.
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I’m still working on those deadlines, and biting my tongue as I watch bits and pieces of the ridiculous spectacle that is the Democratic National Convention, going on right now in Chicago. But today, I watched Maria Hinojosa and others on Democracy Now (DN), and decided I couldn’t just stand by and let the combined neoliberal blather on immigration go uncontested. So, here’s something I wrote quickly but, I think, efficiently. It reuses some parts of my older and still relevant analysis on immigration. I wish I didn’t have to keep repeating it, but here we are in 2024, and still faced with the same old narratives about immigration and good and bad immigrants.
In a segment of today’s Democracy Now, Maria Hinojosa, a longtime and popular journalist, appears with Oscar Chacón, executive director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant rights group, and Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, described by DN as “a national digital organising hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.” All three and co-host Juan Chavez called for people to “change the narrative” on immigration, referring to the Republicans’ tactic of painting immigrants at the border as hardcore criminals bent on entering the country to rape and steal from hard-working Americans. The “change” they want to see is a shift in perception among Americans, an understanding that criminality is not a defining trait of new immigrants. Chavez pointed out that 70% of landscape gardeners are Mexicans, as are half of all restaurant workers. In different ways, the panel emphasised that immigrants are simply here in search of a “better life” for themselves and their families.
While all of this is true, and the Republican demonising of immigrants does need to be challenged, changing the narrative about the criminality of immigrants is not much of a change. Calling for people to understand that immigrants are hard-working people (who also perform much of the labour required to keep this country running) is not a new narrative: it’s the same old and tired one that the mainstream immigration rights community has clung to for a long while. Insisting that immigrants are not criminals ignores the fact that both criminality and legality are shifting concepts. Such rhetorical tactics will prove to be ineffectual and, ultimately, only create an immigration rights movement designed to help a few while leaving millions in the dust. And the “better life” trope erases the fact that many are forced to leave their home countries because of the economic and political devastation brought about by the United States.
Over the last decade, immigration has moved from being seen, correctly, as a labour issue to one that is cast in terms of personal stories of tragedy and triumph (vibes, if you will). Most recently, it was hijacked by the Undocumented movement and turned into a narrative about bright young people who had been brought here as minors. In this popular narrative, the undocumented were the opposite of criminals: hapless children brought into the country illegally by their parents, through no fault (read: criminal behaviour) of their own. (It should be noted that, in its initial years, the movement was happy to throw the adults under the bus, and only stopped vilifying them after criticism from me and others.)
The Undocumented movement brought about a major change in immigration rhetoric, with its campaign to stop using the word “illegal” and use “undocumented” instead. This was designed to remove the stigma of “illegal”—which implied criminality—and replace it with a word that reflected the real problem for many immigrants: a lack of papers. But as I’ve pointed out, this is a distinction without a difference: it ignores the fact that “legal” is a shifting construct. Consider the fraught terrain of abortion rights: overnight, “legal” abortions or even miscarriages can become grounds for imprisonment. There is a growing movement to make it illegal to recognise trans identity (and many attempts to make it illegal for trans people to seek medical resources). This is also true of immigration and the rights of welfare recipients, including American citizens. Time and again, what we see is that the most marginalised, including poor women who might need abortions, people on welfare, and immigrants without the necessary class standing and/or papers are most likely to see their basic rights taken away. In the DN segment, Hinojosa blames Trump for the current situation at the border, but this is a canard, repeated often by liberals and progressives who deny the facts: that many of today’s problems with immigration began with the Clintons (who ruled as a co-presidency).
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. This complicates the “better life” narrative.
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 offences, 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. Here, the concept of legality is tweaked in an act of pure discrimination, one that makes a bloc of immigrants more vulnerable to the law than citizens.
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. Here, again: the concept of the “legal” is meaningless since even “legal” immigrants are made to suffer food insecurity and worse.
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.
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 (estimated at 12 million, but that is probably an undercount) 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.
What we see in all of this is that “legal” is a meaningless term, determined by the shifting nature of the law itself, and immigration activists who use it to define and separate good immigrants from the supposedly bad ones are leading us towards failure. At one point in the segment, Hinojosa says that people should, as individuals, note the hardworking immigrants around them: “Actually open your eyes and see the immigrants all around you. And be like, ‘Huh, oh, this one’s working at 4:00 in the morning doing this or that.’” But, well, if anyone’s noticing an immigrant working at 4:00 in the morning, it’s likely because they’re also off to work at the same time. The point is not to decide which people are more or less hardworking, but to understand that capitalism forces people to rise that early in the first place, exploiting vulnerable immigrants and citizens who have no choice but to work in the worst of conditions.
Already, we’ve seen how these kinds of sorting processes can lead to a large pool of people being led into years of limbo. In 2012, Barack Obama left us with the Deferred Act for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, widely hailed as a move that now made tens of thousands of young people “legal.” In fact, his toothless executive order has done very little to bring about substantive change for the millions who are still undocumented, and it has left DACA recipients in limbo. In July 2021, Texas U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that DACA is unlawful, and the Department of Homeland Security is now blocked from approving new applications. In the meantime, tens of thousands of young people had emerged “from the shadows” of being undocumented, lured by the promise of working legally (not an insubstantial benefit!) and an eventual road to citizenship. The latter has not materialised and is not likely under a new administration, whether led by Donald Trump or Kamala Harris (who takes pains to assure voters that she will be even tougher on immigration than Trump or Biden).
Hinojosa also calls for Joe Biden to issue a presidential order that would grant a path towards citizenship for millions of undocumented people.
Make no mistake: that could, overall, be a good thing, for the many who have been forced to live in the U.S without papers, the ability to make a living, or to even leave to attend the funerals of their loved ones in their home countries. But a presidential order, devoid of legislative support, is pointless and will more than likely end up where DACA is today: subject to the whims of any administration, and with millions left vulnerable by their exposure and waiting for years towards any meaningful change.
As with DACA and the Dreamers, we face many more decades of seeing large numbers of people forced to enter the U.S for refuge from conditions created by this country, compelled to wait in humiliating and dangerous conditions. Progressives like Hinojosa don’t want real change: they want the status quo. They repeat anodyne stories about hardworking immigrants in search of the good life, of people who never question the supremacy of the United States,, even as they are forced into their roles as essential contributors to a rapacious, capitalist economy that continues to wreak havoc in the worlds they were forced to leave behind.
The DNC is hardly the space for radical visions, but it’s disappointing when a left-leaning media outlet like Democracy Now showcases little more than a warmed over liberal narrative about good and bad immigrants, and fails to interrogate the very concept of criminality.
On immigration, the questions that animate those of who remain on the actual left, should be: What is a left, materialist stance on the issue? What is a movement on immigration that radically challenges the premises of immigration reform? How do we think about immigration in terms of labour and not as stories about poor, sad immigrants, promising to be good citizens? How do we effect actual, meaningful, lasting change for millions, here and elsewhere, without making them grovel for incremental, toothless measures?
It is entirely possible that Biden will leave with an executive order granting a pathway to citizenship for millions. As with DACA, anyone who needs it should grab the chance to leave an unstable and precarious life behind. But the left failed on DACA, and allowed the loud and clamouring voices of the Undocumented movement and its allies to insist that this was the best outcome (after years of getting nowhere with Obama). In the way forward on immigration, the left should not capitulate to progressives and liberals. It should, instead, demand much more than useless executive orders. It must insist that a privilege for some cannot come at the cost of the demonisation and exclusion of the many. “Changing the narrative” is not the point: we have to demand a full and complete overthrow of the old paradigms and actual, legislative change.
This is a quick and short essay on immigration, and, of course, the history of the movements related to it are more complex than I’ve been able to describe here. For more, see the links below and my (forthcoming) book: Strange Love: Why Social Justice Needs to Die.
Hillary Clinton Needs To Retire
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
Undocumented vs. Illegal: A Distinction without a Difference
What’s Left of Queer?: Immigration, Sexuality, and Affect in a Neoliberal World
Romancing the Border: Or, Making (Self) Deportation Sexy
Radio Interview with Karma Chávez on Wisconsin Public Radio, WORT
KBOO Interview on “Illegal vs. Undocumented“
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