Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform

Conclusion: Power and Image in Immigration Policymaking

163 Conclusion Power and Image in Immigration Policymaking We typically study public policy as a mechanism for problemsolving and expect that research, deliberation, and rationality are applied to solving social problems. Likewise, when public policies fail, analysts quickly attribute these failures to factors such as budget inadequacies, illogical mandates, poor administration, and unanticipated consequences. However, if we consider immigration policy not simply as problem-solving mechanism but as an opportunity to structure and manage claims on the state, we can more easily understand why these policies appear on their surface to be contradictory or designed to fail. The conflict over immigration is not about differences in research, pilot program evaluations, or task force recommendations. Rather the conflict is at its core about a politics of reassurance. Debates over contemporary immigration policy comprise Murray Edelman’s concept of “political spectacle,” or the use of events, crises and social problems to threaten, reassure, and ultimately, create consensus regarding a contentious issue. Nor is the politics of reassurance a smokescreen, or diversion: its expressions are fundamentally instrumental, enabling government to channel real benefits to or force real burdens upon certain groups of people. The deliberative process reveals the critical role that values can play in policy design, especially when officials classify some groups and actions as necessary for the public good. With the issue of immigration control running contrary to traditional partisan divisions and incorporating numerous conflicting interests, legislators rely heavily on established immigration myths and carefully crafted story-telling to generate consensus on appropriate action. Official discourse pays regular homage to immigration as our national story—our civic myth—but immigration policy language reveals that ambivalence about immigration is our less celebrated national phenomenon. Nonetheless, this ambivalence sits quite comfortably Newton_pp137-182.indd 163 Newton_pp137-182.indd 163 5/3/08 3:55:06 PM 5/3/08 3:55:06 PM 164 Conclusion alongside our nation-of-immigrants mystique, and both are ready and available for deployment during immigration reform discussions. The IRCA debates showed members of the legislature competing over the political construction of the illegal immigrant population. A decade later, the IIRAIRA debates showed minimal struggle over the decidedly criminal construction of illegal immigrants or the construal of immigrants as freeloaders. The language officials employed to justify the passage of the 1996 IIRAIRA combined the contemporary ideology of balanced budget conservatism and the divisions forged between deserving and undeserving members with ascriptive traditions that linked Mexicans to undesirable attributes. Not only did deviant constructions of the unauthorized correspond with punitive policy measures, but these constructions also accentuated a list of qualities and behaviors that marked immigrants more broadly as unworthy of consideration for social membership. Immigrants’ roles as laborers, or even as reproducers of the labor force, virtually disappeared from congressional discourse in the 1990s. The immigrant family was portrayed as another invasion of the nation, as individuals brought their unproductive dependents into the nation: pregnant wives, children, and elder family members would end up on welfare or take up space in schools, hospitals, and communities. This image of the immigrant freeloader obscured the various legal statuses of the subject groups. For example, from 1994 to 1996 both congressional rhetoric and policy promoted a construction of legal immigrants that looked much like that of the undocumented. Virtually none of the characteristics that would commonly mark legal immigrants as deserving emerged in the IIRAIRA discussions. However, while legal immigrants were negatively portrayed in the IIRAIRA debates, they were never fully ascribed the criminal essence which marks the illegal immigrant. A Point of Contrast: The Not-So-Negative Construction of Employers There was also a shift in the negative construction of U.S. employers during the periods examined here. While in the 1984–1986 period there appeared a negative image of agricultural employers that highlighted the worker and workplace abuses associated with this industry, by 1996 the association of employers with criminal or abusive behaviors was virtually non-existent, even though by this time it was illegal to hire unauthorized Newton_pp137-182.indd 164 Newton_pp137-182.indd 164 5/3/08 3:55:07 PM 5/3/08 3:55:07 PM Conclusion 165 workers. Instead, by 1996, employers appeared as victims of government regulations, drowning in paperwork, and fearful of punishment, even though evidence showed that sanctions were weakly enforced. Negative stories about employers appearing in the 1980s focused on their disproportionate influence in Congress and charged them...