CHAPTER 1

Finding Political Openingsin a Hostile Country

The immigrant rights movement emerged in the late 1980s and 1990sduring a time of great hostility toward immigrants. By that time, anti-immigrationadvocates had become more sophisticated, national, andlegitimate. They included well-respected politicians such as Pete Wilson,scholars such as Samuel Huntington, and sophisticated grassroots activistswith national-level reach such as John Tanton and Roy Beck. Many likethem argued that immigrants posed an economic problem to the country,but even more importantly, they argued that their inherent culture posedan existential threat to national institutions and identity. Anti-immigrationadvocates in the 1990s had not only been successful in pushing theidea of the immigrant as a central threat to the country, but they alsosucceeded in persuading President Clinton and the Republican-controlledCongress to pass laws that rolled back rights, sharply expanded borderenforcement, and required local and state officials to deny basic servicesto immigrants. Most politicians embraced the anti-immigrant fermentand accepted sealing borders and deporting settled undocumented immigrantsas common-sense policy responses to this so-called threat. The "waron terror" only augmented hostility and reinforced the "border first" andenforcement instincts of political officials.

Facing greater penalties, restrictions, and surveillance, all undocumentedimmigrants encountered considerable risks to come out inpublic, protest, and make rights claims. How was it possible, in thatenvironment, for undocumented youths to emerge and establish themselvesas a prominent group in national immigration debates?

In a rather paradoxical way, the more the government pushed to sealthe borders, the more ambiguities and cracks surfaced in the country'simmigration system. Repressive measures ran up against liberal legal norms,economic needs of employers, the resource constraints of law enforcementagencies, and humanitarian and moral concerns of the public. A politicallandscape characterized by general hostility and many cracks providednarrow openings for undocumented groups like refugees, farmworkers,children, and young adults to make claims for basic rights and legalization.While the inhospitable environment reduced the possibilities for big andsweeping immigration reforms, small niche openings provided footholdsto push for the legalization of some groups of immigrants. This resulted inan immigrant rights movement characterized by narrower mobilizationsand campaigns (from El Salvadoran refugees in the 1990s to the DREAMcampaign in the 2000s) aimed at pushing smaller measures that wouldbenefit particular groups of immigrants.

The years 2006–7 marked an important shift in this political environment.After a decade of enacting one restrictive measure after another,the population of undocumented immigrants had grown dramaticallyand the cracks and contradictions in the country's immigration systemhad become unavoidable. In response to these problems and the politicalconcerns of top Republican strategists, the Bush administration initiatedan effort to pass reforms to fix what many believed to be a broken system.For many immigrant rights advocates, this new opportunity requiredthem to rethink the past strategy of small mobilizations pushing piecemealreforms. Even though these first efforts to pass comprehensivereform failed, immigrant rights advocates believed that they could passcomprehensive immigration bill in a friendlier Congress if the movementcentralized its efforts, both organizationally and strategically, andfocused exclusively on securing the 279 congressional votes needed topass a bill (that is, 219 House votes and 60 Senate votes). The DREAMAct would be part of comprehensive reform and the DREAMers wouldserve as an important group in driving this collective effort forward.Thus, in response to the new openings of 2006, the leading immigrantrights associations began a long effort to centralize and exert controlover the many different parts of the movement, hoping that would allowthem to focus their energies on pushing through a sweeping law thatwould benefit most undocumented immigrants once and for all.

The Hostile 1990s

Immigrants and immigrant rights advocates in the 1990s faced anextremely hostile discursive and political environment. Anti-immigrantforces had begun to produce compelling messages for why federal andstate governments should strip immigrants of all rights (social, political,and civil) and forcefully remove them from the country. Immigrants werepresented as a core threat to national stability, both economically and culturally.They were viewed as transforming large parts of urban and suburbanlandscapes into ethnic spaces, making Americans into foreigners intheir own country. Immigrants were accused of competing for jobs andbeing welfare cheats. They drove down the wages of the American workingclass while bankrupting the welfare state. Anti-immigrant forces arguedthat even if some immigrants might have sympathetic stories, it would beimpossible to grant them basic rights because that would open the "floodgates"for more immigrants. In order to sustain the integrity of the nationin these global times, tight border restrictions should be put into place andno rights should be given to "illegals." This overall argument was framedas a matter of life or death for the country.

Where earlier anti-immigrant mobilizations had largely been localand fragmented, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-immigrant activistsbegan to deliver their message on the national stage through theincreased prominence of large and professional anti-immigration associations(for example, Federation for American Immigration Reform,Americans for Immigration Control, Numbers USA, U.S. Inc., amongothers). These national organizations served as important vehicles forpresenting a strong and compelling anti-immigration message to themedia and Congress. Meanwhile, a new generation of public intellectualsbegan to articulate a coherent discourse that painted immigrants, particularlyLatino immigrants, as a cultural threat, not simply an economicone, to the nation. They claimed that Latinos failed to become a part ofthe national fabric, and because of their inability to assimilate, these immigrantsthreatened the cultural coherence of the country. In 1996 Stanfordhistorian David Kennedy wrote in an Atlantic Monthly essay, "They [Latinos]can challenge the existing cultural, political, legal, commercial, andeducational systems to change fundamentally not only the language butalso the very institutions in which they do business.... In the process,Americans can be pitched into a soul-searching redefinition of fundamentalideas such as the meaning of citizenship and national identity." Latinoimmigrants were, in short, irreducibly different from "normal" Americans.This assertion was coupled with the argument that some Latinos soughtto reconquer the American Southwest (la Reconquista), with prominentcommentators like Patrick Buchanan arguing that Mexicans were a fifthcolumn in the country. According to Leo Chavez, the immigrant threatdiscourse therefore rested on three major themes: Latinos as competitorsfor scarce resources; Latinos as irreducibly other; and Latinos as a politicalforce seeking the territorial dissolution of the nation.

Framed in these ways, immigration was an existential problemthat required some kind of action by local, state, and national governmentofficials. Anti-immigrant advocates presented a zero-toleranceline, arguing that recognizing even the most basic right of the mostinnocent immigrant introduced major risks to the national community.When governments recognized the rights of seemingly sympatheticand innocent undocumented immigrants for limited services,immigrants would use this as a toehold to make additional rightsclaims. This would allow them to accumulate a range of additionalrights and privileges in a slow and incremental way. For instance, onceprimary education was provided to seemingly innocent undocumentedchildren as the result of the Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe in1982, the children graduated from high school and expected the rightto attend higher education and work in the country. Granting theserights and privileges would eventually result in the de facto legalizationof the population at best, a broad amnesty at worst. Additionally,anti-immigration advocates argued that recognizing basic rights servedas a magnet for further rounds of immigration. Recognizing the rightsof children born in the United States, who were called "anchor babies,"opened the door to legalizing the status of parents, grandparents,aunts, uncles, and cousins through family reunification laws. Eachimmigrant, no matter how innocent or deserving, was conceived asa virus that threatened to spread and eventually drain life from thenational host. The aim of anti-immigration advocates was thereforenot only to enhance border protections and aggressively strip immigrantsof all basic rights but also to apply severe restrictions equally toall undocumented groups. By building a strong and impenetrable wallthrough border security, enforcement, and the rollback of basic rights,undocumented immigrants would not be able to implant themselvesin localities and spread to communities across America. This idea andits associated policy proposals came to be known as "attrition throughenforcement" or "self-deportation."

These arguments achieved great resonance in the public sphere andhelped structure the media's framing of the immigration issue. Nationalmagazines including US News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and others employed the "Latino threat" discourse to framereporting and editorials on the subject of immigration. As the discoursewas diffused through the media, it helped shape public perceptions onimmigration. Massey and Pren note, "The relentless propagandizing thataccompanied the shift had a pervasive effect on public opinion, turningit decidedly more conservative on issues of immigration even as it wasturning more conservative with respect to social issues more generally."The effects of media on public perceptions were most powerful in areasundergoing rapid demographic changes: "Sudden demographic changesgenerate uncertainty and attention. Coverage of immigration in themedia can inform people about demographic changes and can politicizethose changes in people's minds. Acting in tandem, local demographicsand nationally salient issues can produce anti-immigrant attitudes andoutcomes."

In the 1990s these arguments were bolstered by the support ofkey politicians with national reach. Governor Pete Wilson of Californiaplayed a particularly important role in 1994. Entering an electionyear with low levels of voter satisfaction, the one-time moderate Republicantook a strong anti-immigration position in his bid for reelectionand expressed strong support for Proposition 187 (known as the SaveOur State [SOS] initiative). This measure aimed to deny undocumentedimmigrants the right to key social services and undocumented childrenthe right to attend primary and secondary schools. Wilson became oneof the first national-level politicians to use publicly the term "self-deportation,"and he held up Proposition 187 as a model policy to achieve theseends. His overwhelming reelection was attributed to his support of themeasure, giving state and local politicians around the country a blueprintto win campaigns. Proposition 187 won with 59 percent of the vote,only to be deemed unconstitutional by several federal courts.

Seeking to preempt a patchwork of local and state-level variantsof Proposition 187, the Clinton administration introduced measures toenhance border security. In 1994, the government introduced OperationGatekeeper, which reinforced the southern border by expanding thenumber of border agents by 1,000 per year until 2001, reinforcing theborder fence, and bolstering other surveillance methods. In 1996, theClinton administration supported the Illegal Immigration Reform andImmigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which allocated more resourcesto border-enforcement and deterrence measures. In addition to allocatingmore money to border protection, IIRIRA expanded monitoringof immigrant entry and exit data, expedited deportations by loweringthe threshold of deportable offenses, restricted judicial discretion duringdeportation proceedings, and extended periods of admissibility fordeported immigrants, among other things. According to Durand andMassey, between 1996 and 1998 the budget of the Immigration and NaturalizationService grew by eight times and the budget of the BorderPatrol by six. In this very short period, the latter agency was transformedfrom one of the most insignificant federal law enforcement agenciesin the country into the most funded and best armed.

The heavy emphasis on border enforcement had important effects,but decreasing the number of undocumented immigrants was not oneof them. Between 1988 and 2002, border crossings shifted from traditionalpoints around San Diego, California, to nontraditional areasin the eastern desert. Arizona increasingly became an entryway forunauthorized border crossings. The increased risks of crossing the borderraised the monetary costs of migration, which in turn favored theexpansion of the human-smuggling industry. The death rate of unauthorizedborder crossings also tripled as immigrants were compelled topass through dangerous desert terrain. The growing costs and risks ofcrossing resulted in a lower return rate for migrants, decreasing fromapproximately 50 percent in 1986 to 25 percent in 2007. As immigrationrates continued to hold steady and return rates plummeted, moreimmigrants permanently settled in the country, which contributed tothe rapid growth of the undocumented population. The population ofundocumented immigrants, in other words, grew as a direct response toborder enforcement, growing from an estimated 7 million in 1997 to 10million in 2002 and then to 11.9 million in 2008.

Border enforcement encouraged not only permanent settlementbut also families to take hold inside the country. As border enforcementraised the costs and risks of circular migration, migrants were encouragedto raise their families in the United States. By 2008 nearly halfof undocumented immigrant households were couples with children.While 73 percent of the children of undocumented immigrants were citizensby birth, approximately 1.5 million children were undocumented.This came to account for approximately 16 percent of the total undocumentedpopulation. The unanticipated consequence of restrictiveimmigration has therefore been to accelerate family settlement, whichhas given rise to households with very mixed legal statuses rangingfrom citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, to unauthorizedmigrants and a large population of undocumented children. Theseundocumented children would eventually fill the ranks of the DREAMmobilizations of the 2000s.

While the population of undocumented immigrants grew andbecame much more complex, it faced increasingly hostile environmentsas rights and privileges were rolled back and better enforcement measureswere developed to detect and extract immigrants. In addition toexpanding external border security, IIRIRA created a memorandum ofunderstanding called the 287(g) agreements between federal immigrationand local police agencies. These agreements empowered local authoritiesto enforce federal immigration laws. They also provided local police officialsimportant levels of financial support and training to take on theseadditional responsibilities. While this program was voluntary, it providedstrong incentives for local police agencies to assume a direct rolein detecting and removing undocumented immigrants residing in theirjurisdictions. Congress, with the support of President Clinton, alsopassed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity ReconciliationAct of 1996 (PROWARA). This law introduced key restrictions on welfaresupport for permanent and undocumented immigrants. This measuremade permanent immigrants ineligible for a range of benefits, includingfood stamps, Supplementary Security Income, welfare, and nonemergencyMedicaid for the first five years of their residency in the United States.Undocumented immigrants were made ineligible for publicly funded stateand local services. States were permitted to provide undocumented immigrantswith in-state services, including in-state tuition for higher education,only if they passed a law that explicitly stated the law's support of thispopulation. These measures therefore enhanced the enforcement capacitiesof the federal government by integrating state and local governmentofficials into its efforts. Local and state officials were now required to usethe immigration status of residents as a criterion of detecting whether peoplebelonged in their communities and whether they merited basic rightsand privileges.