The Bell Tolls—Again—on Immigrant Rights
In December 2005, a Republican-dominated House passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). The bill proposed making undocumented status a felony and criminalized any person who provided assistance to undocumented immigrants, including family members and educational, health, and social service personnel. Passage of the bill touched off a veritable firestorm of reaction among Latino students, workers, and their allies. A massive spring 2006 mobilization encompassed the April 10 National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice and then May 1 demonstrations that brought an estimated 3.5 million protesters to the streets with U.S. and Mexican flags in over 200 cities and towns for what was called "la gran marcha" or "the day without immigrants."
That mobilization effectively brought national immigration restriction to a legislative standstill that has lasted to this day. Congress took no further action on the Sensenbrenner bill, and, as the political climate shifted with election of Barack Obama to the presidency, hopes rose for major immigration reform including earned pathways to citizenship for the undocumented, or at least passage of the Dream Act to benefit the children who'd been brought to the U.S. illegally. Alas, a priority on passage of the Affordable Care Act expended the capital for immigration reform. No legislation was advanced, but the immigrant community, led by Latinos, had put the nation on notice that it would not tolerate abusive or punitive measures against the millions of migrants who had made the U.S. their home and their place of work.
There are, of course, several conceivable explanations for the difference in responses to the Sensenbrenner and Trump initiatives. One is that the deportation threat does not yet seem fully real. It was not an issue raised by the Harris-Walz campaign, as Harris and the Democrats tried to steer all talk about immigration policy to their own hard line on tightened border enforcement.
That silence, however, is not likely to keep the wolf at bay. When people are pulled from homes and workplaces and sent to Thomas Homan's ICE detention centers, will immigrant communities, churches, human rights groups, and their political allies figure out ways to highlight and raise the social costs?
Rather than trust political power brokers, today's immigration defenders must trust themselves to build support across civil society.
More worrisome is the possibility that established immigrants and their offspring no longer feel a kinship with their newer-immigrant neighbors. The differences among Latinos, or Spanish-speaking immigrants, are of course well known. And given the concentration of Central Americans and Venezuelans, not to mention Haitians, among those recently seeking refuge, are more numerous (and politically powerful) Mexican Americans washing their hands of the issue?
Disorder at the border, linked in Republican messaging (although not actual statistics) to rising violence and drug addiction, no doubt also resonated with deep wells of Latino cultural conservatism. Evangelical churches, more than the old-line Catholic Church, which has always preached immigrant rights and the right to refuge, provide conduits for the message of a needed crackdown on all social turbulence. These same evangelical churches are also the most suspicious of and hostile to the banner message of the Harris campaign for reproductive rights.
A further explanation centers on identity, especially male. For many Mexican Americans, as eminent Mexican journalist León Krauze writes, Trump's appeal partook of that of many of the region's "caudillo," or strongman, leaders, the latest of whom was Mexico's own Andrés Manuel López Obrador. If so, the economic "protection" and sense of belonging promised by the strongman may now mistakenly serve to anaesthetize the community from the threat embodied in Trump's actual agenda.
A final possibility is that ethnicity itself has shriveled as a mainstay of identity within the Latino community. Preferring to identify as successful (and implicitly) white Americans with little affinity for poorer, and often darker, new arrivals, better-established Latinos may feel less solidarity than they once did with people of their home or ancestral countries. Although a plausible explanation in the abstract, anyone who has visited or tuned into a recent MLS or World Cup match should hesitate before dismissing the continuing emotional hold of Latin American identity on family or neighborhood ties and character.
Although incomplete and frustrated, the 2005-2006 immigrant rights upsurge may still offer lessons to an America today facing an imminent resort to mass deportations. Rather than trust political power brokers, today's immigration defenders must trust themselves to build support across civil society—in the streets, in schools, at workplaces and churches. An estimated 65 million Latinos, including some 11 million undocumented contributors to the national economy and national security (including many in uniform), will not likely be easily pushed around—or out. Poking the immigrant bear did not work the last time, but will it work now?
