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chaPTer 9 The Bush Presidency and immigration reform Rafael A. Jimeno i n the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election I was in my first year as a high school US government teacher. The Bush campaign continually stressed his status as a “compassionate conservative,” so I attempted to impress upon my students that there would be virtually no differences between a Bush presidency and a Gore presidency. This campaign was quite clearly reflective of the centrist nature of US politics, the epitome, perhaps, of a system designed to appeal to moderates and ignore the fringes. I was wrong. This is not to say that George W. Bush is responsible for the incivility and partisanship that have plagued our political system for the better part of the last decade. Nor is it to say that we are in uncharted waters, or in the worst state of affairs our polity has ever faced; there are equally acrimonious chapters throughout US history. Assessments of the legacy of Bush’s presidency, whatever that is determined to be, are best left to those who can detail every policy position and enactment that may have contributed to the charged climate.1 The focus here is on President Bush’s repeated attempts at comprehensive immigration reform, which actually positively distinguish him from those counterparts who have merely paid lip service to the topic. His earnestness may have been a function of his previous life as a “border governor” or perhaps part of his attempt to reach out to the Latino community and garner their support. President Bush had sought to mobilize the Latino vote by advocating for immigration reform in 2004. It is thus common wisdom to assert that the support Bush received from Latinos was a result of this advocacy. For whatever The Bush Presidency and Immigration reform • 137 reason, several significant pieces of legislation on the issue of immigration moved through Congress during President Bush’s terms. One such piece was the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which failed in the Senate and in part triggered the 2006 US immigration reform protests. The second, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, a Senate counterpart to the 2005 House legislation, failed in conference committee. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 was actually passed by both chambers of Congress and signed into law by President Bush. The fourth and final bill, which like the first failed in the Senate, was the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. There may be many key points of critique and support for each bill, but in broad terms it is possible to assert that the bills that failed were too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. This duality in the perception of the bills that failed could be seen as evidence of gridlock, or partisanship, but it is more likely indicative of the difficulty in legislating when groups of individuals, or classes of people, are directly affected; legislating a border is comparatively simpler. For example, provisions granting a path to citizenship were seen as rewards for breaking US immigration laws by conservative detractors, and provisions imposing fines or undercutting due process guarantees upon detention were seen as excessively punitive by liberal detractors. The bill that passed (the Secure Fence Act of 2006) merely sought to reinforce immigration controls along the US-Mexico border, which was not as divisive as dealing with immigrants themselves. In what follows I provide a brief history of immigration legislation (at the national and state levels) and its impact on the Latino community. I next analyze the difficulty in passing legislation that directly targets immigrants by employing a social constructions framework. I then use data from the 2010 Blair-Rockefeller poll to discuss the reason it is unlikely that immigration reform will, in and of itself, serve the political interests of parties and politicians when it comes to mobilizing the Latino vote. The data point to a Latino electorate that is itself divided on this key issue, as well as many other issues, and thus suggests that both parties can hope to make inroads with the community in the future. historical Background of immigration Laws While at the state level the Republican Party seems to spearhead much legislation that is perceived by the Latino community as “anti-immigrant” or “antiHispanic ,” at the national level the party has one major accomplishment under its belt: the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Signed into [3.133.144.197] Project...

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