Latinos for Latinos

Identity politics gets results. Every four years Latino groups come together to demand that the incoming administration appoint Latinos to the cabinet and other high-level positions. The results, too often, have been appointments that dismay, such as former HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Mel Martinez and former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Latino groups, as varied as the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity and the National Council of La Raza, celebrated Bush’s nomination of Alberto Gonzales for attorney general. Despite his weak credential and ideological righteousness, Gonzales was widely praised during the confirmation process and later defended by Latino groups. The National Council of La Raza, which is now calling for President-elect Obama to nominate Latinos to his cabinet and other high-level positions, had criticized President Bush for not bringing a Latino in his cabinet after the departure of conservative Mel Martinez.

“We are very encouraged by the Gonzales nomination,” declared NCLR, “We previously criticized the Bush Administration for not having an Hispanic in the cabinet since the departure of former HUD Secretary, now Senator-elect, Mel Martinez. We are pleased that one of the first acts since the President’s reelection both rectifies that situation and marks an historic milestone for the Latino community.” “Never before has an Hispanic served as head of one of the four major cabinet posts – Secretary of State, Treasury, Defense, and Attorney General,” stated Janet Murguia, NCLR Executive Director.” Not a word about his political views. Being Latino seemed to be sufficient, that and that Gonzales was regarded by NCLR to be “a thoughtful, reasonable public servant, a man of his word.” This idea that a Latino in high places is good for all Latinos persisted within the Latino community through Gonzales’ sorry tenure as the country’s chief defender of constitution. In March 2007, the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity In March 2007, HAPI issued a media release in support of the beleaguered Gonzales.

“On behalf of the nearly 20,000 members of the HAP Institute, we write to reject calls for the resignation of Attorney General Al Gonzales, and offer our full support for his long-term service to our President, our country, and the Hispanic community.” “Attorney General Gonzales has achieved what few other Hispanics have been able to accomplish. He is a role model for the entire Hispanic community and his success proves to our children that they too can realize their dreams. General Gonzales should not be used as a scapegoat by those who are against the policies of the current Administration. The Hispanic community will not tolerate partisan politics, with the end result being to sacrifice one of its most respected, and productive members.”

Isn’t it time to end the identity politics whereby political officials are evaluated, supported, or promoted mainly because they are of a certain race, ethnicity, or sex? Too often the results are characterless figures like Alberto Gonzales and Clarence Thomas who are party loyalists not champions of the disadvantaged or disempowered.

Apparently not. A few days after the elections Latino groups mobilized to pressure the president-elect and his transition team to advance the nominations and appointments of a bevy of Latino politicians, educators, and businessmen. Apparently not. A few days after the elections Latino groups mobilized to pressure the president-elect and his transition team to advance the nominations and appointments of a bevy of Latino politicians, educators, and businessmen.

Anti-Immigration Groups React to Obama Victory -- Part Three

Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, is on a roll, and the Obama victory provides momentum for one of his central messages about immigration, namely that large number of legal and illegal immigrants undermine the welfare of U.S. workers.

Author of the 1996 book, Case Against Immigration, Beck has catapulted his argument that that high immigration flows negatively impact citizen workers and the environment into an increasingly high-profile stature for NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration institute organization he founded in 1997.

Beck’s case against immigration has also led him to become a leading adocate of the “Attrition Through Enforcement’ policy supported by the two overwhelmingly Republican congressional caucuses closely tied to NumbersUSA – Immigration Reform Caucus (House) and Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus (Senate) – and implemented by the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Michael Chertoff.

The day after the election of Barack Obama, Beck told NumbersUSA members and activists (800,000 claimed) that “I feel mildly optimistic at this moment about the next Presidency.” That’s because, said Beck, that Obama “must choose between two contradictory campaign promises.”

He calls for a “small army of committed citizens” to force the news media and politicians to look at the contradiction between 1) Obama’s “barely whispered perfunctory campaign pledges to offer U.S. citizenship to an estimated 7 million illegal foreign workers, plus their 5-13 million relatives”, and 2) his “loudest shouted priority to put Americans back to work.”

NumbersUSA isn’t waiting until January 20 to mobilize its army of anti-immigration activists to pressure Obama to stand down on his promise for liberal immigration reform and stand up to his promise to support workers. A petition to Obama organized by Beck asserts that a “legalization program would permanently remove 7 million jobs from being available for American workers.”

Economic downturns traditional ramp up anti-immigration sentiment, and NumbersUSA is already jumping on the purported immigrant-joblesses connection. According to Beck, "Every illegal foreign worker given amnesty permanently ties up a U.S. job that an unemployed U.S.-born worker or longtime legal immigrant is seeking in these hard times.”

Rather than pressuring Obama from the right on such issues as immigrant crime and the cost of social services for immigrants, NumbersUSA, along with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, has concluded that there is new opportunity in making the case for restrictionism from the political left by playing on the plight of U.S. workers.

In Beck’s view, “Whatever the Obama campaign may have said about immigration before the stock market crash, his priorities have clearly changed and immigration policy will have to serve his top priority of getting American workers back into jobs that offer decent wages and benefits, especially health insurance.”

But a left-centered argument against legalization is not the only tactic that NumbersUSA will wield in the coming debate. NumbersUSA and other restrictionists also intend to pressure the Obama administration and the new Congress to continue with an "enforcement-only" policy. And Beck believes that they are on firm ground since Obama and other Democrats have stressed their support for secure borders and employment verification.

During the electoral campaign, Beck said NumbersUSA regarded the positions of the two presidential candidates as being from “bad” to “abysmal.” Now, however, the restrictionists say in Obama's campaign promises there much to work with as they seek to advance the enforcement-only agenda of “Attrition Through Enforcement.”

Beck, for example, points to the immigration platform on Obama’s campaign website, which states: "To remove incentives to enter the country illegally, we need to crack down on employers that hire undocumented immigrants."

Moreover, Obama’s website also supports employee verification, which if effected, would force millions of undocument immigrants to leave their jobs. As the campaign website boasts, Obama cosponsored a bipartisan amendment to ensure that "employers can verify that their employees are legally eligible to work in the U.S."

Obama signed a Dear Colleague letter to other senators that said he "strongly support[s] creating an effective, mandatory employment verification system for all employers to verify the legal status of their workers."

A one, two, three action restrictionist agenda, according to NumbersUSA, should be: 1) support the authorization of the E-Verify program, 2) support the SAVE Act which provides for a phased-in verification system, and 3) continue the Bush administration’s executive order that requires federal contractors to use the E-Verify system.

The choice, says Beck, is Obama’s:

"If Obama follows his own instincts and past words of support for turning off the jobs magnet for illegal immigration, he potentially will open up millions of jobs for millions of unemployed Americans.

“This would be the cheapest, fastest job-creation program he has any chance of achieving.

“Or he can choose to favor illegal foreign workers and turn his back on unemployed Americans.”

In contrast to the sharply focused jobs-and-economy argument that is being aggressively promoted by NumbersUSA and other restrictionist groups, the pro-immigration camp has yet to emerge from its pre-election focus on getting out the Latino and immigrant vote. All but ignoring the jobs issue, the pro-immigration groups, including National Immigration Forum, America’s Voice, and National Council of La Raza, are emphasizing the importance of Latino and immigrant votes to Obama’s success and to the future of the Democratic Party.

This highly partisan strategy did work as an electoral strategy to register new voters and to get out the vote of what they call the “New Americans.” It did increase the numbers for Democrats in the general election, but that aggregate number of Democratic voters – some 6.5 million – is only a small part of the larger electorate.

What’s missing is a post-election strategy that goes beyond ethnicity and immigration status to appeal not just to Latinos and immigrants but to all Americans, especially those concerned about the future of their jobs.

Anti-Immigration Groups React to Obama Victory -- Part Two

While not thrilled with the prospect of an Obama presidency, the restrictionists don’t necessarily fear it. Some, including NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, already are trying to leverage Obama’s promises to protect workers and create jobs During the campaign the anti-immigration groups despaired over the prospect of either McCain or Obama. But now the two leading restrictionist policy institutes, NumbersUSA and FAIR, point encouragingly to Obama’s strong positions in favor of employee verification and employer enforcement. They have also been confident that the aggressive enforcement regime instituted by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will persist into the next administration, especially given the way that many Democratic congressional representatives have supported increases in the department’s immigration-enforcement and border-control budget. However, it’s the country’s economic downspin that gives the restrictionists the most confidence that liberal immigration reform is dead for the foreseeable future. FAIR’s Post-Election Framing The Federation for American Immigration Reform immediately jumped into the post-election debate over immigration reform with media releases, polls, and new policy analysis about the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform. Rather than focusing on how pro-immigration and anti-immigration candidates did on Nov. 4, FAIR entered the post-election debate with a new framing for its anti-immigration message. According to FAIR, “The results of yesterday's elections are a clear rejection by the voters of government of, by, and for, special interests, and policies that have brought this nation to the brink of an economic crisis.” While pro-immigration groups like the National Immigration Forum and America’s Voice were citing the heavy Latino and immigrant turnout for the Democrats as evidence that the time has come for liberal immigration reform, FAIR posited that Americans were mostly concerned about their jobs and economic stability and, as such, would not support what “failed special interest-driven policies” like immigration. FAIR asserted that “Americans are fed-up with immigration policies that have placed the interests of immigration lawbreakers, cheap labor employers, and ethnic power brokers ahead of those of struggling workers and taxpayers.”

Casting aside Obama’s promise to enact comprehensive reform including legalization in his first term, FAIR’s president Dan Stein zeroed in on Obama’s commitments to create jobs and to back “change that voters can believe in.” Instead of focusing on the cultural, national security, environmental or “rule of law” arguments that FAIR has previously favored, Stein argued that FAIR’s position in favor of restricted immigration was an economic, worker-centered stance.

"To the extent that Senator Obama received a mandate,” said Stein, “it is to put government back on the side of working Americans. A critical component of an economic recovery plan for struggling workers must be to set rational limits on immigration, enforce laws against employing illegal aliens, and resist calls for more guest workers.”

Rather than situate FAIR as a negative force opposing comprehensive immigration reform, Stein called for Obama to “put forward a coherent immigration policy that recognizes that reforming immigration is critical to getting our economy back on track.” Typical of the restrictionists that see legal and illegal immigration as a causal factor for most any problem – from climate change to the subprime crisis -- FAIR now regards restrictionism as central to economic recovery.

"At a time when the economy is faltering, when nearly a million Americans have lost their jobs this year alone, when federal, state and local governments are facing unprecedented deficits, President Obama will need to institute and enforce immigration policies that do not add to these problems.”

Like the pro-immigration forces, the anti-immigration camp brandishes polls to back its statements. In making its new pitch for a conservative reform package that would restrict both legal and illegal immigration, FAIR points to exit polls and a post-election poll it commissioned to support its contention that liberal immigration reform can’t count on widespread public support. Exit polls commissioned by FAIR show that only a third (32%) of surveyed voters voting for Obama said they supported legalization of illegal immigrants, while six in ten of those who voted for McCain opposed “amnesty.”

FAIR contends that “by wide margins Americans believe that their interests would best be served by overall reductions in the flow of immigration, and enforcement of immigration laws in a way that sends a clear message to both illegal aliens and their employers that the interests of law-abiding, hard-working Americans is paramount.”

To support this assertion, FAIR points to a post-election poll (Nov.5-6) conducted by Zogby International of actual voters that found, according to FAIR, that “a decisive majority of voters believe that an illegal alien amnesty would "further harm the interests of struggling American workers.”

Obviously formulated to confirm FAIR’s own positions, some of the survey questions seemed to prompt restrictionist answers from respondents. Citing the survey results, FAIR reported that “57% of voters stated that amnesty would harm American workers and further strain public resources, while only 26% believe amnesty would aid economic recovery and ease public burdens.” While FAIR and other immigration institutes don’t dispute the widespread conclusion about Latino turnout for Democrats, they question the assessment that Latinos favor liberal immigration reform. As Stein noted in another post-election release, “Arizonans overwhelmingly rejected a deceptive ballot measure which would have made it easier for businesses to hire illegal aliens. Proposition 202 was rejected by 60% of Arizona voters, including 56% of Latino voters in the state.” Immigration proponents argue that the unprecedented turnout of Latino and immigrant voters – about 10 million – and their overwhelming support for Obama – 67% of Latinos – demonstrated the salience of the immigration issue for a large constituency angered by the immigration crackdown. What’s more, this expanding constituency proved key to moving four swing states – Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and New Mexico – into the Democratic column. But FAIR counters that exit polling, including an Univision/Zogby survey, showed that the economy was the number-one voting priority for the majority (54%) of Latino voters, while only 11 cited immigration reform as their top concern. "All voters, including Latinos, turned to the Democrats last Tuesday in the hope that they will get our economy back on track. Notwithstanding a massive spin effort on the part of the ethnic advocacy network, the electorate, including Latinos, did not vote for amnesty and more immigration. In fact, the polls show that voters believe amnesty would be an impediment to economic recovery and putting American back to work," Stein concluded.

Instead of bemoaning the victory of Democratic candidate committed to liberal immigration reform, FAIR’s Stein said they looked “forward to working with his new administration to bring long overdue changes to an immigration policy that, along with many other policies of the past eight years, were soundly rejected by voters across the country and across the political spectrum.”

Clearly, many voters went to the polls on Nov. 4 concerned mainly about the nose-diving economy, their jobs, and their savings. But immigration proponents are certainly well-founded in their conclusion that the widespread rejection of the Republican Party included, especially among Latinos and immigrant citizens, concerns about the anti-immigrant policies embraced by many in the party.

But as immigration advocates gear up for another round in the immigration debate, they would do well to follow the example of their restrictionist counterparts who are framing their message not in terms of political parties, ethnicities, or status as “New Americans” but in terms of what’s good for the economy and all workers, not just immigrants. And in their call for legalization of 11 million immigrants living and working illegally in the country, supporters of liberal reform shouldn’t shy away from injecting values into the debate.

The economic bottom line of immigration reform can’t be ignored, but reform advocates should also be talking about what’s fair and just. Values played a major role in the Obama victory, and they also belong in the immigration debate.

See TransBorder Profiles:

NumbersUSA

Center for Immigration Studies

Immigration Reform Caucus

Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus

Immigration Law Reform Institute

Immigration Problems and Plan from Obama Transition

It’s only a sketch but it’s enough for a first assessment of how the Obama/Biden Transition Team see the immigration issue. As part of the transition, the transition team has opened a nifty government website – http://www.change.gov/ --that concisely outlines the problems and policy solutions, as they see them, and invites viewers to provide feedback.

The problem is three-fold, according to the transition team:

“Undocumented population is exploding: The number of undocumented immigrants in the country has increased more than 40 percent since 2000. Every year, more than a half-million people come illegally or illegally overstay their visas.

“Immigration bureaucracy is broken: The immigration bureaucracy is broken and overwhelmed, forcing legal immigrants to wait years for applications.

“Immigration raids are ineffective: Despite a sevenfold increase in recent years, immigration raids only netted 3,600 arrests in 2006 and have placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families.”

True enough that illegal immigration has rapidly expanded since 2000, but what is not recognized that according to U.S. census figures, the influx of undocumented immigrants has slowed since 2005 and the population of illegal immigrants has actually declined by some half-million in the last year. The Pew Hispanic Center reported: “Inflows of unauthorized immigrants averaged 800,000 a year from 2000 to 2004, but fell to 500,000 a year if you average from 2005 to 2008 with a decreasing year-to- year trend. The unauthorized immigrant population grew more slowly in the period from 2005 to 2008 than it did earlier in the decade.”

Some combination of new enforcement practices (including steady rise in deportations – up 20% over 2007 to 349,000 in 2008) and the economic downturn makes the statement that the “undocumemted population is exploding” appear alarming and supportive of restrictionist fear-mongering.

Yes, the immigration bureaucracy is plodding, but that’s to have been expected after the old and maddeningly slow INS was folded into the entirely new department of Homeland Security in 2003. A recent DHS announcement that the system for visas and residency documentation is being computerized may mean that help is already on the way. Main problem, though, is that the immigration bureaucracy is now part of a national security bureaucracy.

The assessment that raids “have placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant familes” is welcome indicator that the new administration will move beyond a policy with a simplistic enforce-the-law logic, and will shape a new immigration policy that has heart and is concerned with justice not just law enforcement. One can only hope that the new administration will instruct Homeland Security to end the raids on selected worksites that while netting relatively few illegal immigrants have terrorized and devastated entire communities

Now what’s the “Barack Obama and Joe Biden Plan” for immigration and border control?

Create Secure Borders Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. They support additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.

Improve Our Immigration System Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.

Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally Obama and Biden will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.

Bring People Out of the Shadows Obama and Biden support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.

Work with Mexico Obama and Biden believe we need to do more to promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.”

“Control Our Borders” – long a rallying cry of U.S. nativists and anti-immigration forces – is now a core piece of the liberals’ immigration policy agenda. Virtually all the freshmen members of the 110th Congress have said, like Obama and Biden, that border security is the top priority. And the Democratic Congress keeps throwing Homeland Security billions of dollars more for the “personnel, infrastructure, and technology” that the transition teams calls for. But this is problematic, just as employer crackdowns are, because the control and enforcement budget keeps expanding without any reform that keeps people in the shadows. What needs to be stated is that enforcement can’t come first. If we are to enforce “existing laws”, as DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has repeatedly said, we must at the same time “bring people out of the shadows” with a reform that makes them legal. Otherwise, we will simply see the immigrant crackdown continue. Not enforcement first, not enforcement only, but legalization and enforcement as part of same package.

Image: Feedback icon on www.change.gov

Emanuel's Immigration Report Card

Rahm Emanuel, a former aide to President Clinton and Obama’s pick for chief-of-staff, will come back to the White House with a failing record.

During his first year in Congress, the Federation for American Immigration Reform gave Cong. Emanuel (D-IL) a 0% rating – with the number reflecting the percentage of time that Emanuel voted FAIR’s preferred position. Other restrictionist organizations that track congressional votes have confirmed FAIR’s assessment that Emanuel is irredeemably liberal when it comes to immigration reform.

NumbersUSA, the organization that spearheaded the grassroots mobilization against the Senate’s 2007 immigration reform bill, gives Emanuel a failing lifetime position. He flunked the NumbersUSA test, receiving an “F” on his “immigration-reduction report card.” U.S. Border Control gave Cong. Emanuel an 8% rating, indicating his “open-border stance.”

In other words, Emanuel, picked to exert control over Obama’s team and its policy agenda, is about as bad as you can get. He has, after all, cosponsored the McCain-Kennedy reform proposal, voted no on building a border fence, and even cast a “no” vote on a bill that would require hospitals to notify immigration agents when treating illegal immigrants.

But immigration restrictionists aren’t particularly worried. That’s because Emanuel, after the drubbing that immigration reform received in mid-2007, let it be known that the Democratic leadership in Congress wouldn’t be pushing comprehensive reform in 2008 or even in the first term of the next administration.

Calling immigration the “third rail” of American politics, Emanuel began backing away from comprehensive reform in 2007, even as he continued to oppose overly restrictive immigration and border bills.

Emanuel has come under fire from Latino columnist Ruben Navarrette for keeping immigration reform off the table this year. “House Democrats, under orders from Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., kept the controversial issue off the legislative agenda in 2008. Why? Organized labor. Democrats' slavish adherence to unions required that they derail any proposal that includes guest workers, as any bill with a chance to win Republican support would have to do,” wrote Navarrette. At the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza, Juan Salgado, board chairman of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, shocked participant, stating: "Congressman Rahm Emanuel said to me two weeks ago, there is no way this legislation is happening in the Democratic House, in the Democratic Senate, in the Democratic presidency, in the first term.” Emanuel’s office confirmed the congressman’s position. Emanuel’s spokesman Nick Pappas told the Washington Times: “Congressman Emanuel has worked hard to make comprehensive reform a reality and that work continues. However, President Bush and congressional Republicans’ failure on this critical matter has set back efforts to enact real reform.”

In turn, Salgrado said, “I was caught off-guard by the statement. I interpret his comments as a lack of courage on what they know is right. Listen, we’re here at the NCLR conference, and what it’s to take is not the attitude of Rahm Emanuel, if this is a second-term issue. What it’s going to take is boldness by the president.”