American Immigration After 1996: The Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Despite this attention, there was a noticeable silence on the immigration issue after the candidates for president were nominated in 2008. I believe this is because Senators Obama and McCain had sponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2006 and therefore were too similar on this issue to give fodder to an increasingly divisive campaign. 2. As one fact sheet on immigration states, “It is obvious there is no more defining issue in our Nation today than stopping illegal immigration. The most basic obligation of any government is to secure the Nation’s borders.” “Dianne Feinstein on Immigration,” On the Issues, July 8, 2008, accessed October 6, 2008, http://www.ontheissues.org/International/ Dianne_Feinstein_Immigration.htm. See also Editorial, “The Nativists Are Restless,” New York Times, February 1, 2009. 3. See Mae M. Ngai, “No Human Being Is Illegal,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 291–95. 4. Associated Press, “Feds Deny Protests Affected Immigration Arrests,” MSNBC.com, June 23, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19389988/print/1/displaymode/1098: “During the height of the 2006 immigration debate, from April through June, the number of arrests jumped to 4,516. That was more than double the 2,234 arrests for the same period of 2005.” 5. Associated Press, “Border Patrol Swells to More Than 18,000,” National Border Patrol Council, December 4, 2008, http://www.nbpc.net/index.php?option=com_content &task=view&id=181&Itemid=57; Kevin R. Johnson, “The Forgotten ‘Repatriation’ of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the ‘War on Terror,’” Pace Law Review 26, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 17. 6. Jim Salter, “Amendment Would Require English,” Belleville News-Democrat, October 3, 2008. 7. See Karen Lee Ziner, “Governor’s Advisory Panel to Report on Concerns of Immigrants ,” Providence Journal, October 5, 2008; Mark Hemingway, “SAVE-ing Immigration Reform,” National Review, March 14, 2008; Gregg Krupa, “Metro Detroit Area Deportations Climb 45 Percent in One Year,” Detroit News, December 4, 2008. President Obama has expanded the deportation program. 8. See Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 34 –36, 371–72. I discuss this backlash in the next chapter. 9. This is true even as the language of war is receding under the Obama administration. 10. See Cheryl Shanks’s intellectual history of debates preceding the 1965 Immigration Act and those leading up to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA): 143 notes Immigration and Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890 –1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 11. On the use of the terms “illegal” and “unauthorized,” please see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xix, xx. Both are highly inaccurate (not to mention derogatory in the first case), and I use them only for the sake of convenience. 12. This was known as the Sensenbrenner Bill (H.R. 4437) or, more formally, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. 13. See Richard Vogel on the various proposals for a guest-worker scheme proposed in 2006: “Transient Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program for Exploiting Mexican and Central American Workers,” Monthly Review, January 2007. 14. Subsequently a proposal in May 2007 combined the worst of these proposals, making political and economic conditions harder for poorer immigrants and easier for elite foreigners. Similar measures have since been proposed, but nothing has been passed. 15. Statement of Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, regarding a hearing on “the Arrest, Prosecution, and Conviction of 297 Undocumented Workers in Postville, Iowa, from May 12 to 22, 2008,” Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, July 24, 2008, accessed January 11, 2009, http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Camayd-Freixas080724 .pdf. It is important to note that Camayd-Freixas believes that Mexicans are a proxy for real terrorists, and thus he charges that the arrests have been executed cynically. In other parts of this book, I cite public figures who honestly appear to believe that Mexicans themselves are security threats. Like during the Cold War, the construction of a prototypical enemy is most likely a mix of both approaches. 16. This is not to argue that there is only one sort of foreigner that should be the focus of analyzing anti-immigration efforts. First, other groups are also the targets...