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176 chapter t welve Building through Exclusion Anti-Immigrant Politics in the United States Luis Ricardo Fraga In January 2004, President George W. Bush called for comprehensive immigration reform in launching his reelection campaign. Immigration became a high profile issue in U.S. national politics in late 2005, received unprecedented attention in spring 2006, and remained significant through parts of the 2008 presidential election . Usually, this pattern happens during major economic downturns but this focus on immigration occurred well before the economic meltdown of September 2008. Nor was there a major immigration scandal, albeit there were some arguments that several of the 9/11 perpetrators had overstayed their visas. No one predicted, however, that the House of Representatives would adopt Representative James Sensenbrenner’s (R-Wisconsin) H.R. 4437 in December 2005, a bill that deemed unauthorized immigrants felons subject to immediate deportation. Equally surprisingly, no one predicted the mass demonstrations against the bill in March and May 2006, during which upward of 3 million people took to the streets in major cities throughout the country. Finally, in the wake of the shift of control of Congress from the Republicans to the Democrats in November 2006, few predicted that immigration reform would reemerge in 2007 through a small bipartisan group in the House and the Senate seeking to craft a compromise that included border enforcement, new legal status for the undocumented, and a shift in selection criteria from family connections to skills. Immigration politics has always made strange bedfellows in the United States (Zolberg 2006). Few issues so consistently defy the logic of a liberal-conservative continuum or even simple partisan differences (Wong 2006). Recent debates have put major employers on the same side as immigrants’ rights advocates, put low-wage workers together with cultural conservatives, and put a majority of congressional Democrats with a minority of Republicans. These debates have featured both a labor-market component (the desire of employers for low-wage or high-skilled immigrant workers) and an ethnic identity component (the claim of immigrants’ rights organizations and native-born minority groups that the civil rights agenda has not yet been fulfilled). Building through Exclusion 177 Polls of U.S. adults consistently reveal that 51–65 percent support a path to citizenship for unauthorized workers currently living in the United States, if they meet a criminal background check, pay a fine and back taxes, and learn English (National Immigration Forum 2007; PollingReport.com 2008). Yet strong and vocal subsets of the electorate opposed to reform often seem to have an unusually significant impact in structuring the public discourse regarding immigration policy. This chapter explores how the recent anti-immigrant impulse in U.S. politics reflects a propensity to strengthen national identity and gain partisan advantage by excluding some from the body politic. I refer to this pattern as the identity-community trade-off. It also outlines the main threads of the current immigration debates with special reference to the undocumented, illuminating the ways in which advocates on both sides talk past one another. This nonengagement explains why members of Congress and the White House provided the key to identifying what common ground might make immigration reform possible; but it also explains why these public officials have not yet been able to build legislative coalitions to enact comprehensive immigration reform. I outline the major components of immigration legislation considered in 2005–2007 to further examine this failure. The chapter concludes by considering the inevitable risks that arise when the nation writes off part of the population in positioning itself on the identity-community trade-off. As the United States pursues its interests in an increasingly globalized world, choices about who belongs to the nation and who does not will have dramatic consequences for U.S. democracy and the moral position of the United States in the world. Citizenship, National Identity, and the Evolution of Community Rogers Smith (1997) argues that the U.S. polity gradually, at times painfully, assigned full citizenship rights to new segments of the population because it was simultaneously denying these rights to other groups. Expansions of citizenship have never included all who might want it. The notion that inclusion involves exclusion helps us begin to understand anti-immigrant politics in the United States today. Smith suggests that three fundamental civic myths have animated the expansion of who is fully part of the United States. The first, individual liberalism,1 holds that not only do individuals have certain inalienable rights and liberties but that government...

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