Immigration Crackdown Successful, Drug War Not So Much

Dispatches From Obama's Other Wars — on Immigrants and Drugs

By Tom Barry, AlterNet
Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153323/dispatches_from_obama%27s_other_wars_%E2%80%94_on_immigrants_and_drugs

President Obama came to office promising immigration reform in his first term. As a candidate and as president, Obama also made it clear that he stood firmly in supporting the “rule of law,” even if the law was overdue for reform.

Nearly three years into his administration, Obama has failed to make good on his promise of immigration reform.

But that’s not surprising to close observers of immigration politics. Since Republican opposition blocked comprehensive immigration reform mid-2007, there’s been no clear legislative path for an immigration reform bill.

The anti-immigrant constituency of the Republican Party adamantly opposes any reform that would include legalization of the immigration status of the estimated 11 million immigrants lacking visas, green cards, or working permits.

Within the Democratic Party, support for comprehensive immigration reform has steadily eroded over the past decade. Even with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, an immigration reform bill that included legalization provisions would have little chance of moving forward absent strong presidential leadership.

The president has repeatedly affirmed his continuing support for immigration reform. But the president never — despite all his expressions of support and all his promises — made immigration reform a real goal of his administration. There’s been no leadership or even an attempt to set forth a new vision of immigration reform that could transcend the divides of the current debate.

This too can be readily explained. No one could have expected the president to put immigration reform — whose main prospective beneficiaries aren’t even voters — ahead of the economic stimulus program, medical care reform, and other pressing issues, such as financial regulation reform, extension of unemployment benefits, and passing the budget.

Nonetheless, the failure of President Obama to chart a new path toward pragmatic immigration reform has deeply disappointed reform advocates and the immigrant community. After all, this is an issue that acutely affects the lives of millions and its lack of resolution creates tragic divides in families and roils the stability of thousands of communities.

But even for many who can excuse Obama, citing the constraints of politics in a badly divided America or for those who skeptically viewed Obama’s promises as political manipulation, the administration’s harsh enforcement of immigration laws and its wholehearted embrace of border security have surprised and shocked.

Drug War Continues Under New Name

The first three years of the Obama presidency have also left drug policy reformers reeling.

As a candidate, Barack Obama distanced himself from the illegal drug issue, but he did indicate that his administration would end the four-decades-old “war on drugs” and shift U.S. drug policy to a more balanced, less militarized framework. Candidate Obama also indicated that he didn’t oppose the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

At the same, though, Obama scoffed at questions about drug legalization as if this were not a serious issue and only a concern of the social fringe.

As promised, the Obama administration has dropped the drug war rhetoric that has framed U.S. drug policy over the past four decades. Instead, the administration has reframed the drug war as part of a combat against transnational organized crime. Within the White House’s Office on National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), there is, as promised, more emphasis on the need to treat drug users, not simply incarcerate them.

However, in all but name, the drug war under Obama has escalated, both abroad and at home, particularly along the southwestern border.

Under the new rubric of “combating transnational organized crime,” the Obama administration has increased U.S. support for the drug war in Mexico, increased federal support for state and local drug task forces, and mounted a coordinated crackdown on illegal drug use and trafficking in the Southwest.

This summer the administration released its National Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, whose main focus is international drug trafficking. All the federal departments and agencies — DOD, DHS, DOJ, DEA, FBI, AFT, and ONDCP — previously involved in the “war on drugs” have adopted the new official language about transnational crime.

Foreign drug war ventures, like those in Mexico and Colombia, are now designated as fronts in the combat against “transnational threats” and “transnational criminal organizations.” 

Under this administration, the Department of Homeland Security has become more of a drug warrior agency, launching an array of counternarcotics initiatives that are closely tied to new border security and immigration enforcement operations.

Along the border, the administration has made Arizona the forefront of its new combat operations. DHS selected Arizona in 2009 as the location of the Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats — with other similar counterdrug alliances planned for three other sections of the border.

The Justice Department, the traditional home of most of the federal government’s domestic drug control operations, has also elevated its profile as a committed combatant against illegal drugs, with an array of new border-related initiatives aimed at transnational crime and criminal aliens.

With respect to immigration, DOJ has challenged the rights of states like Arizona and Alabama to institute their own immigration-enforcement policies. Similarly, DOJ is asserting federal supremacy in drug law enforcement over new state initiatives, particularly with respect to medical marijuana.

Immigration and Drug Policy Joined

Immigration enforcement and drug enforcement are not disassociated issues.

There is, of course, the common denominator that violators of immigration and drug laws are committing nonviolent infractions that don’t endanger public safety or security except in rare cases. Immigration and drug possession infractions, too, are both victimless “crimes.”

In both cases, the immigrants and drugs targeted by law enforcement illegally cross the border into the United States. The border security operations mounted by the U.S. government over the past decade — the border fence, the electronic virtual fence, the doubling of Border Patrol officers, and drone patrols — aim to stop both illegal immigrants and illegal drugs.

Policy reform advocates and activists in both camps have been careful to keep the two issues separate. Immigration policy reformers and immigrant-rights advocates are rightly concerned that immigrants, both legal and unauthorized, are being increasingly categorized as “criminal aliens.” 

The Obama administration has reinforced and expanded the “criminal alien” programs at both DHS and DOJ. The large numbers of the immigrants labeled as “criminal aliens”  it deports each year reinforces currents of public opinion that conflate immigrants and criminals as public safety threats.

Most immigrants categorized as criminal aliens have criminal records only because of new government policies that create criminal consequences (jail and prison time) as well as immigration consequences for illegal entry or reentry.

But many are indeed criminals in the more traditional sense, having violated federal or state laws. Of these crime-committing criminal aliens, however, only a small number have been convicted of major crimes that do threaten public safety. It shouldn’t be a surprise that many immigrants, like tens of millions of U.S. citizens, are involved in the illegal drug market, mostly as consumers but also as smalltime dealers.

There is a difference, though, a major difference between immigrants and citizens. According to changes in the immigration statutes instituted under Republican congressional leadership in the mid-1990s, drug control violations are considered felonies under immigration law and result in deportations – not just for immigrants here illegally but for legal immigrant residents as well.

In DOJ’s immigration courts, streams of immigrants, legal and illegal, come before immigration judges with records of drug possession or minor cases of drug dealing. As the crackdown ensues, the U.S. justice and immigration systems are tracking down these cases – and immigrants, usually in their twenties and thirties, are being ordered removed, often to countries they barely remember, where they have no remaining relatives, and where the language is now foreign.

Purging Criminal Aliens

Attempting to demonstrate that it is focusing on ridding the country of “criminal aliens,” the Obama administration had ramped up programs such as Secure Communities and others that target immigrants with a criminal record and those who have been arrested but not convicted. In doing so, it can count on widespread public support on the assumption that few Americans, even among immigration reform supporters, would object to removing criminal immigrants from the country.

Nowhere is the intersection and overlap between immigration enforcement and drug control so pronounced as along the border. Illegal border crossers and illegal drugs have long been the central concerns of the Border Patrol.

However, as the Mexican government’s drug war has escalated (counting on increased support by the Obama administration) and as border security hawks have stoked fears of spillover violence, the border security buildup under this administration has led to an unprecedented merger of drug control, border control, and drug control.

Drug-sniffing canine teams at Border Patrol now routinely check travelers in the U.S. borderlands. Only rarely are illegal border crossers now caught at these checkpoints. Instead, drugs are the main focus, and the main victims are U.S. citizens and legal residents caught with small stashes of drugs for personal use.

As the drug war intensifies and the border becomes more fortified, drug gangs and cartels are exploiting, extorting, and terrorizing immigrants heading to the United States.

No doubt that the U.S.-Mexico drug trade, Mexico-U.S. immigration flows, and the U.S.-Mexico border have all become more violent. All have become the province and territory of criminal organizations and gangs.

Absent the deeply flawed legal and policy frameworks for immigration and drugs, these traditional patterns of human behavior are nonviolent and victimless activities. Yet, bad laws and the righteous enforcement of these laws have bred the violence and transnational crime that the Obama administration so tragically battles.

Three Years, and How Many More?

During the past three years, the immigration and drug issues have become increasingly interrelated.  As the 2012 general election approaches, the Obama administration offers us this dismal policy panorama:

• Immigration incarcerations, detentions, and deportations have risen to record highs in recent history.
• Border security operations and infrastructure buildup continue to expand.
• The post-9/11 escalation of border control measures (now under the policy framework of border “security”), which was initially driven by a determination to stop illegal immigrant flows (based at first on fears of foreign terrorists), is now more focused on drug interdiction.
• Apprehensions of illegal border crossers have steadily declined, and population of unauthorized immigrants is also declining.
• Fewer immigrants are illegal crossing the border, but illegal drug flows continue to meet rising U.S. demands despite the billions of dollars spent on border security and drug war assistance to Mexico.
• The administration’s policy of targeting “criminal aliens” for imprisonment and deportation has put immigrants with drug violations increasingly at risk of both immigration and criminal enforcement.
• With respect to policy reform, the prospects for immigration reform have steadily diminished, given the hostile political climate and the failure of the Obama administration to articulate a persuasive new vision of immigration and border policies.
• With respect to drug reform, the administration has routinely defended drug prohibition, rejected legality of medical marijuana sales, and under the new policy framework of combatting transnational criminal organizations has beefed up the drug crackdown on the border and in Mexico.

Overall, when measured by apprehensions, removals, and population counts, the crackdown on immigrants (with immigration or criminal violations) is making steady progress.

Strictly considered without normative considerations, this new enforcement regimen could correctly be assessed as a success – with regard to upholding the “rule of law” and to restoring respect for the much-criticized ability of the government to enforce immigration law and control the border.

In contrast, the combat against transnational organized crime and illegal drugs, when measured by levels of drug consumption, drug prices, and drug flows, has utterly failed, at least thus far. Arrests and drug seizures are higher, yet the U.S. drug market is thriving. Drug production in Mexico is increasing, and drug flows through and from Mexico have also increased despite the escalation of combats and wars on both sides of the border.

Never before have so many Americans consumed marijuana, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. Meanwhile, drug-related crimes have declined, paralleling the general decreased in crime rates.

Any evaluation of the administration’s drug combat strategy must also include its contribution to the horror of drug-war related murders in Mexico. Failing to summon up the courage and conviction to call an end to drug prohibition, the Obama administration bears direct responsibility for this continuing scourge.

Nearly three years into his administration, President Obama would be hard put to explain how the immigration-enforcement, border-security, and drug-control operations of his administration differ substantively from those of the Bush administration.

Obama can rightly say he has ended the “war on drugs” since he declared it over. But instead we get a combat against transnational crime that is just as militaristic across the border and just as intolerant and punitive at home.

Obama can also correctly observe that he has ended workplace immigration raids and allowed immigration authorities to weigh humanitarian impacts in making deportation decisions. Yet more immigrants than ever are being deported, and the administration has extended its immigration enforcement apparatus into most communities through the Secure Communities program — all in the name of homeland security.

Going into the electoral season, the immigration and drug policy crises have worsened. As in the past, the Obama administration has justified these flawed and counterproductive policies by citing the threats to border security, homeland security, and even national security.

Tom Barry is the author of Border Wars (Boston Review Books). He directs the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com.

Join Border Wars Policy Group to follow/discuss border security, immigrant imprisonment, and drug policy issues at: 

http://groups.google.com/group/border-wars

Immigrant Gulag Larger Than Homeland Security's Detention Centers

The Obama administration is trying to wiggle its way out of the immigration crisis created by the Bush administration without taking any decisive steps to distance itself from its predecessor’s immigration policies and enforcement practices. The recent announcements by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and officials from the department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency about reforms in ICE’s rapidly expanding immigrant detention system highlighted a tragic part of the back-end mess created by the ICE-led crackdown on immigrants. But rather than facing the crisis head-one, the Obama administration has opted for some administrative tinkering to remedy some of the worst features of ICE’s enormously expensive and shameful detention and removal operations (DRO). Immediately after Sept. 11 the Bush administration, counting on Democratic support, began beefing up immigration enforcement. As part of the process of creating the Department of Homeland Security, the administration mandated a more aggressive and comprehensive immigration enforcement regimen—which was charted out in the Operation Endgame strategy document produced by DRO. Published in 2003, Operation Endgame set out a ten-year strategy plan to: “Promote the public safety and national security by ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens through the fair and effective enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.” With the endgame clearly stated—removing all removable aliens—all that obstructed the implementation of the strategy was funding and enforcement mechanisms. With strong bipartisan support—which has continued into the Obama administration—DHS has been raking in ever-increasing congressional authorizations for enforcement funding and DHS has responded with a never-ending stream of new enforcement initiatives such as Return to Sender, Operation Streamline, and Secure Communities. Congress has also proved quite willing to authorize the creation of new immigrant “beds” for captured immigrants remanded for detention and removal. Detention beds for immigrants have tripled since the mid-1990s—up to 33,000 for a projected 440,000 immigrants who will be processed for deportation in 2009. With all the money it can handle—$1.8 billion for detention this year—and congressional exuberance for enforcement, DHS has been steadily expanding detention space for immigrants, even opening new detention center for arrested immigrant families. But rather than directly taking on the responsibility for the mass detention of immigrants picked up by its Operation Endgame’s commitment to remove all removable immigrants, ICE has outsourced this responsibility to a complex patchwork of public/private detention centers. Typically, detained immigrants are now sent to privately operated prison-like detention centers that are oftentimes owned by local governments intent on padding budgets with detention per diems paid from the seemingly bottomless ICE coffers. Technically, these immigrants are under ICE custody, but the detained immigrants rarely if ever see ICE officials. In theory, at least, immigrant outsourcing could work if there was proper oversight and control of the private prison industry and the sponsoring local governments. In practice, though, ICE exercises little oversight, leaving the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of Operation Endgame immigrants in the hands of the so-called privates and of the prison towns, both of which see immigrants in terms of increased immigrant streams. However, even within the half-dozen ICE owned and operated immigrant detention centers most of the custodial care is outsourced to private operators. Operation Endgame focused on what it would take to remove all removable immigrants by 2012. Left out of the strategy was a plan to ensure that DRO would be properly and humanely managed. Rather than charting out a civil detention system, “removable aliens” have been routinely treated as criminal detainees and channeled into privately run prisons where they are treated as criminals. In prisons in remote rural locations—mostly along the Southwest border—these immigrants are systematically cut off from legal support, family contact, and proper medical care. Horror stories of unnecessary deaths in detention—104 immigrants have died in these temporary detention facilities (where the average stay is 31 days) since 2003—have resulted in a wave of shocking investigative and policy reports as well as class action lawsuits. All the bad publicity and the rising costs of maintaining a badly flawed system forced the new administration to act. Recognizing the detention center mess its enforcement programs and Endgame strategy have created, the Obama administration now promises to create a “truly civil detention system” that will come under strict ICE oversight. ICE has said that over the next five years its new Office of Detention Policy and Planning will overhaul its detention complex and locate new ICE detention centers near major cities to ensure better oversight and family/legal support. The promised reforms in ICE detention are certainly welcome and long overdue. But in the administration’s failure to call a halt to the Operation Endgame strategy and the ensuing immigration enforcement programs, the administration has highlighted the essential continuity in Bush administration immigration policy and practices. In fairness, neither President Obama nor DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ever promised an entirely new direction in immigration policy. By couching immigration enforcement within “a nation of laws” policy framework, Obama administration officials have repeatedly signaled a strong commitment to law enforcement along with a much weaker commitment to policy reform and a change in laws that categorize otherwise law-abiding immigrants as criminal aliens. Instead, it has stepped up immigration enforcement through a phalanx of criminal alien and border security programs in the name of enforcing the rule of law. It comes as no surprise, then, that both ICE director John Morton, a career prosecutor, and DHS Secretary Napolitano predict that the number of immigrants processed by DRO will not diminish under their tenure. As recently reported in the Miami Herald, Napolitano admitted that detention reforms by no means imply fewer immigrant arrests. “We accept that we are going to continue to have and increase, potentially, the number of detainees,'' Napolitano said. Even more striking, perhaps, than the continuing DHS commitment to massive detention and removal has been its bureaucratic blindness to the full extent of the back-end detention mess. Its failure to heed the lessons of recent policy history is equally startling. In the late 1990s Congress and the Clinton White House reacted to the rapidly expanding (although at much lower levels than currently) detention system managed by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Increased immigration flows and harsh new laws that targeted both legal and illegal immigrants resulted in a badly managed, largely unaccountable patchwork detention system. In a half-hearted although welcome initiative, Congress authorized the creation of an Office of Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT) in an attempt to systematize, rationalize, and regulate the detention systems run by the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (both DOJ agencies). The Justice Department’s OFDT opened in September 2001 but was never able to function as the coordinating office envisioned by reformers. The creation of DHS took the major component of federal detention out of DOJ hands, and the pre-Sept. 11 concerns about unregulated, uncoordinated detention centers faded in the post-Sept. 11 policy environment. All immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol and ICE eventually pass through ICE-sponsored detention centers. But for an ever-increasing percentage of immigrants being processed for removal, these centers are only the last stop before deportation. As many as a third spend time in USMS detention centers and Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities before being remanded to ICE. As part the Operation Endgame strategy, DHS laid the policy framework for imprisonment not just detention. Prior to detention a deterrence strategy would kick in—sending a message to future unauthorized immigrants that they would be treated as criminals before deportation. According to the strategy, DHS “promotes a balanced and integrated enforcement strategy, which ensures that the probability of apprehension and the impact of the consequences are sufficient to deter future illegal activity….We will create consequences for and deterrence to illegal immigration. DRO’s service and enforcement partners work diligently to identify, locate, apprehend, process, and remove aliens who violate this nation’s immigration laws.” ICE Director Morton’s promise to create a “truly civil detention center” is at best disingenuous and at worst deceptive. Morton oversees an aggressive enforcement apparatus that sends hundreds of thousands of illegal and legal immigrants into the core of the country’s criminal justice system where they are treated as criminals in a mushrooming array of USMS detention centers and BOP prisons along the border. Both BOP and USMS rely on the same patchwork system of private operators and county-owned prisons that ICE depends on—mostly privately operated and locally owned prisons for profit. The two Justice Department agencies have created an array of separate but not-equal prisons for “criminal aliens”—most of whom are criminals only because of ICE’s new enforcement practices and abusive deterrence strategy. Like the ICE detention centers, these immigrant prisons and centers (for pre-sentenced immigrants) are characterized by their lack of transparency, lack of accountability, outsourced responsibility, and abysmal medical care. Since the mid-1990s and especially in the past several years, as the immigrant crackdown has hardened, BOP and USMS have been frantically searching for new private and public partners to provide lockups for the masses of immigrants sent their way by ICE. Because of their designated criminal alien identity, the abusive conditions of these immigrants under Justice Department care have failed to attract the same kind of media, nongovernmental, and legal attention that led to the recently promised ICE reforms. Exercising more oversight over the ICE detention system is certainly a necessary part of immigration reform. But even as it promises welcome upgrades and changes in its own detention system, ICE continues to steamroll ahead with its Operation Endgame enforcement and incarceration strategies that have resulted in a veritable gulag of immigrant inmates. Photo/Tom Barry: Advertising for immigrant prison guards in Pecos, Texas

Finessing the Immigrant Crackdown

Like Michael Chertoff, her predecessor as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano doesn’t have the power to change immigration law. She’s there to administer the department, enforce the law, and keep the homeland secure. Like Chertoff, Napolitano knows that strict law enforcement alone will not solve the nation’s immigration crisis. The outgoing secretary repeatedly said that the immigration crisis would persist until Congress passes a comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). Chertoff made that case that he was “restoring integrity” to immigration law enforcement and border control. Once Americans were assured that the border was secure and that the government was truly enforcing immigration law, he argued, there would then be more political space for CIR, especially expanded temporary worker programs. With the enforcement-first approach in firmly place at DHS, the new secretary is now signaling her commitment to iron out the wrinkles of the enforcement-first approach, including detention standards and the efficiencies of federal-local collaboration. In a Jan. 20 directive on immigration and border control, Napolitano says: “Smart, resolute enforcement by the department can keep Americans safe, foster legal immigration to America, protect legitimate commerce, and lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive reform.” It is the last in an initial series of 11 directives issued by Napolitano. In this new directive, she poses a series of questions to departmental officials responsible for immigration law enforcement and border security and expects reports back to her by Feb. 20. The questions indicate a shift away from Chertoff’s hard-line approach, which often seemed devoid of any humanity or concern about the social, economic, and environmental consequences of the department’s immigrant crackdown.

Those who were expecting the former border governor and federal prosecutor to call a halt to the immigrant crackdown and to the post-Sept. 11 border build-up will be sorely disappointed. There will likely be some changes around the edges, such as improved detention standards and monitoring, but no rethinking of immigration enforcement and border security will likely come from Napolitano. No questions or concerns about the multitude of issues and problems that resulted from the security-driven campaign to fortify the border and round up suspect immigrants – the value of the border wall, the central role of private prisons in immigrant detention, the wisdom of U.S. drug policy with respect to border drug-related violence, the decreased attention to political asylum and refugee policy, the consequences of workplace raids, etc. A professional bureaucrat and politician, Napolitano is busy organizing, systematizing, and improving the crackdown that Chertoff so zealously spearheaded.

Read entire TransBorder Dispatch

New Border Policy Report -- More Politics Than Policy

Effective Border Policy: Security, Responsibility and Human Rights at the U.S.-Mexico Border” November 2008, Washington, D.C. A new policy report by three U.S. border human rights groups in collaboration with the Washington, DC-based National Immigration Forum is full of important concerns and good intentions, but falls woefully short as a policy document. Those who support a liberal immigration policy that includes legalization and ends the terrorizing raids on communities and workplaces badly need expert analysis and policy recommendations based on grounded perspectives of what’s happening at the border. This report, however, is driven more by a set of progressive politics and dogmas than by timely, informed analysis. What’s truly stunning about the report, which purports to convey the view of borderlands residents about the “dynamic” border, is its one-sidedness. You wouldn’t know from reading the report that on the other side of these interconnected borderlands is complete mayhem. Despite noting the important cross-border ties that exist, it’s as if the problems of “security,” issues of “responsibility,” and abuses of “human rights” – the report’s three focus areas -- stop at the line. The report warns, for example, about the dangers of the “militarization” of U.S. border control. Yet on the other side of the border militarization isn’t an exaggeration but is all too real as the Mexican military, drug cartels, armed street bandits wage what verges on civil war.

See entire TransBorder Analysis

Immigration Doesn't Explain Losses of Dole and Barletta

Immigrant advocates are declaring that the anti-immigrant forces are on the run, pointing to the unpredicted electoral losses suffered by Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and Hazelton, Pennsylvania’s immigrant-bashing mayor Lou Barletta.

Clearly, anti-immigrant politics is no sure path to electoral victory, especially if it is the central message -- a lesson that the Republicans should have learned from their 2006 losses. But neither was it the case that the victories of Dole’s and Barletta’s opponents were primarily due to their pro-immigrant, pro-immigration positions.

In North Carolina, Dole’s loss was mainly due to surge in those who voted straight-ticket Democratic. According to post-election analysis by Dr. Michael Bitzer, associate professor of political science at Catawba College in North Carolina, the 52-44% victory of state senator Kay Hagan over incumbent Dole would have been a 51-49% victory for Dole without the straight ticket votes. Also, the heavy early voting, central to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's grassroots effort to get people registered and to the polls, heavily favored Hagan in the state.

According to Bitzer, Hagan led among these one-stop absentee voters by a 57-43% spread. On election day, Hagan outpolled Dole by only 52% to 48%.

In the end, Dole lost her seat mostly because of "the Obama factor" and his campaign's "tidal wave of organization," which helped other Democratic candidates in statewide races, Bitzer said. Bitzer said exit polls showed that 61% of N.C. voters identified the economy as their biggest issue or concern.

Illegal immigration – the centerpiece of Dole’s immigrant-bashing campaign – “didn’t even make the list,” said Bitzer.

Clearly, the defeat of Dole was a major victory for Democrats, who will now occupy a seat that the Republicans have occupied since the first electoral victory of Jesse Helms in 1972.

According to analysis by the Swing State Project, Dole chose to run on what she regarded as a popular social issue, namely ending illegal immigration, but with the onset of the financial and economic crises and newspapers started pointing to Dole’s carpetbagger status, polls showed her dropping fast in the last weeks of the campaign.

Hagan’s immigration platform was not as well-defined as that of Dole, whose first television ad featured fear mongering about Latino immigrants by county sherrifs. But Hagan did say that she supported stronger border security and employer sanctions, and she offered qualified support for the 287(g) program of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which enlists local police and deputies in enforcing immigration law. Hagan said that the program should be fully funded by ICE, saying that local governments are now paying for part of the federal-local enforcement program.

While Dole charted out a strong anti-“amnesty” position, Hagan, while not promoting a strong comprehensive reform position, did say that she supported bringing illegal immigrants “out of the shadow economy” and advocate reforms in guestworker programs.

Dole, given an “A” on her “immigration report card” by the anti-immigration NumbersUSA, won’t be missed by immigration advocates, but Hagan probably cannot be counted on to back a reform bill that includes legalization. The backlash against immigration in North Carolina, one of the largest per capita recipients of immigrants in the last eight years, is just too strong and widespread for Hagan to ignore.

The defeat of Hazelton mayor Lou Barletta by incumbent Paul Kanjorski for Pennsylvania’s 11th congressional district is being widely hailed by pro-immigration groups as a signal that immigration restrictionism is on the wane. Barletta, a restrictionist hero for his drive to rid Hazelton of illegal immigrants, was polling 5-10 points ahead of Kanjorski until the final weeks of the campaign, when Kanjorski started to erode Barletta’s lead as the economy became more of an issue.

Barletta had berated Kanjorski for his support for comprehensive immigration reform and legalization. However, Kanjorski started to move to the right on immigration issues as the race progressed. He bucked Democratic leadership, signing the discharge petition for the tough immigration enforcement bill pushed by Republicans, the SAVE Act, and started taking a tougher position on the campaign trail against immigration. Late in the campaign, the Scranton Times ran an election report headlined "Kanjorski, Barletta see immigration similarly."

Kanjorski campaign manager Ed Mitchell said campaign’s polls showed the importance of Barletta’s immigration stance waned as the election neared due to the souring economy. “People had other things on their minds,” he said. “In October and November it was the economy, the economy, the economy.”

Photo: Sen. Elizabeth Dole

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.

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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.”

State of Immigration, According to Chertoff

Citing “record-breaking” numbers of “removals,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last week, in his “State of Immigration” address, said that DHS has “laid out” the path and the tools of immigration. It’s up to the next administration, he said, to “continue the job of securing the borders and get it done.”

Named DHS chief in 2005 by President Bush, Chertoff has vigorously pursued the post-Sept. 11 immigration crackdown with a $15 billion annual budget dedicated to immigration enforcement.

In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization and new worker programs, Chertoff has implemented an enforcement-only immigration policy that has won the support of immigration restrictionists. He has put immigrants on call that their papers best be in order or that risk imprisonment and deportation.

Despite a wave of lawsuits, investigative reports criticizing DHS detention practices, and protests by immigrant advocates, Chertoff has forged ahead with the controversial border fence, the large-scale jailing of illegal immigrants, and programs to enforce immigration law at the workplace.

But unlike immigration restrictionists who are cheer-leading the immigrant crackdown, Chertoff says that the enforcement-only policy is not sufficient and unsustainable. As he has in the past, Chertoff used the State of Immigration address to call for the introduction of a new temporary workers program.

Chertoff is a conservative jurist associated with the right-wing Federalist Society who was the chief counterterrorism prosecutor under former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Michelle Malkin, a crusader against immigrant rights and author of Invasion: How America Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores and In Defense of Internment, enthusiastically greeted the appointment of Chertoff as DHS chief in 2005, writing: “A look at Chertoff’s strong, aggressive record and statements on homeland security shows that Chertoff supports the kind of hard-headed, threat-profiling measures and immigration enforcement opposed by the anti-profiling zealots.”

Immigration Drops by 40%

A new study by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF) estimates that migration by undocumented Mexicans has dropped by 40% along the border because of the economic downturn in the United States. In a news report about the study, El Diario in Juárez noted that the investigators found that migration through the Juárez region has dropped by 50%. Apparently, U.S. border security measures in the urban area dissuade many Mexicans from trying to cross in the urban area. COLEF investigator Rodolfo Rubio Salas said that an estimated 700,000 Mexican tried to cross the border illegally in 2007, dropping to 500,000 in 2008. According to Rubio, declining migration has been evident for more than a year but the decrease has been dramatic in the past few months.

Reversing South-North Immigration

It’s time to look south when thinking about immigration. It’s likely that in the coming couple of years more Mexican immigrants will be heading south, not north. That’s because the number of deportations is steadily increasing. What’s more, many Mexicans (and Central Americans) are themselves deciding to return home. The deteriorating U.S. economy and the ongoing immigrant crackdown are wearing down the determination of many immigrants to make their permanent homes in the United States. As yet, there are few hard numbers on this reverse flow of immigrants. And it is unknown whether it’s the economy or the crackdown that is causing most of the returning immigrants to abandon the United States. Estimates vary greatly for the projected number of returning immigrants. The UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, or CEPAL in Spanish) warned this week of the likely return of 2-3 million immigrants in the next few years. ECLA’s executive secretary Alicia Bárcena explained that the agency’s projection was based on conclusions about the U.S. economy, particularly the hard-hit construction industry. “We are facing a very uncertain situation,” she said, “With respect to the return of immigrants, these numbers of between two and three million is because the calculation was done from the United States,” noting how difficult it is to study illegal immigrants. Luz María de la Mora, head of the economic relations department of Mexico’s ministry of foreign relations, called ECLA’s estimates “reasonable numbers.” Mexican government estimates, however, run much lower. Mexico’s labor secretary Javier Lozano estimates that 200,000 Mexican immigrants will return to Mexico, and the government of Mexico City recently projected that 20,000-30,000 will return to the city in the coming year. Senator Silvano Aureoles predicts that Mexico can expect 800,000 returning immigrants between this November and February 2009. In a new study the Pew Hispanic Center reports that the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States appears to have declined. It estimates that the population dropped from 12.4 million in 2007 to 11.9 million in April 2008. Furthermore, it estimates that inflows of unauthorized immigrants averaged 800,000 a year from 2000 to 2004, but fell to 500,000 a year from 2005 to 2008 with a decreasing year-to-year trend. While immigration flows traditionally respond to economic trends, the new politics of the immigration crackdown since 2001 have made it increasingly difficult to cross illegally into the United States and increasingly difficult to live here. Forced returns have risen dramatically since 2005 when the immigrant crackdown began in earnest. DHS repatriated 349,041 immigrants in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That’s a 20% jump over the previous year. This increase occurs at a time when apprehensions of illegal border crossers has dropped dramatically – about 18% down from last year, and 39% from 2005. In 2005, immigration authorities arrested 1.2 million immigrants while 724,000 were arrested in fiscal 2008. A decline in apprehensions indicates that fewer immigrants are attempting to cross illegally into the United States. If immigration flows over the past several years were equal, one would expect a higher rate of arrests in the past couple of years given increased border security, including several thousand more agents patrolling the border. Tough times in the United States do not, of course, mean that illegal immigrants will automatically return home. As economic conditions worsen in the United States, they are also eroding south of the U.S. border. In the past, illegal immigrants crossed back and forth into the United States to work temporary jobs and to return to Mexico to visit family. But with increased border enforcement, crossing illegally has become more difficult and much more expensive. As a result, unauthorized immigrants who cross back into Mexico probably know that they are going back for good. Only when the U.S. economy picks up will we get a good indication of how effective new U.S. border control efforts really are. Meanwhile, DHS chief Michael Chertoff hopes that the new administration continues on the enforcement regimen that he has started. When asked by a reporter about declining immigration flows related to the stagnating economy, Chertoff said:

“We can make real good use of this time to continue to build the border protection that we need and the enforcement that we need. Each year, assuming we continue along the path we have charted, it is going to be harder and harder and harder for people to cross the border.

“I think we can actually lock in the progress that we have made, if we continue to keep the pace up over the next year or two, so that if economic conditions change down the road, although the incentives to come in may increase somewhat, the deterrents will have really increased because we will have more fence, more border patrol, more technology, more enforcement...”

Hispanic Grassroots Organization Shill for Corporate America

The vision of the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity for America is what it and other Republican institutes call an “Ownership Society” – a code for a society shaped solely by free-market economics. As HAPI notes, one of its leading goals is to “impact legislation on issues of importance such as: Trade, Financial Literacy, Education, Immigration, and other issues falling under the ‘Ownership Society’ umbrella.”

HAPI says that “supports ownership society tenets vital for asset creation, and ensuring access to affordable housing. Research validates the connection between housing stability as a cornerstone to family stability.” According to HAPI, “Free and Fair trade and believes it fosters economic benefits to U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers.” HAPI says it was “a key advocate and major player supporting and voicing the Pro-Business and Hispanic Pro- CAFTA positions and a leading advocate for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement currently pending before Congress. Other than its Sept. 16, 2008 media release, “Setting the Record Straight on the Candidates’ Immigration Positions,” HAPI has little to say about immigration on its website. Its “Immigration Policy Paper” has been removed from its website. As part of its summary of its policy position, HAPI has one paragraph that includes a mention of immigration: “HAPI supports strong national security measures without jeopardizing the U.S. economy. HAPI advocates for a balance that will accommodate both critical interests. A vital component of legislation should include a guest worker program that is realistic to deploy.” To guide it toward its goal of creating an ownership society, HAPI counts on its corporate board, whose members are: Bank of America,BellSouth, Ford, AT&T, AIG (American International Group), Information Technology Industry Council. Goldman, Sachs & Co., Altria Group, Inc., American Petroleum Institute, IBC Bank, Case New Holland, DCI Group, Coca-Cola Companies, R.J. Reynolds, National Association of Manufacturers, and National Association of Realtors. (As the financial sector crumbles and the U.S. Treasury intervenes, HAPI may find it still more difficult in convincing Latinos of the virtues of the “ownership society,” especially with the likes of the now largely government-owned AIG on board.) HAPI is part of BIPAC network. Formed in 1963, the Business-Industrial Political Action Committee is a corporate political action committee focused on electing Republicans. HAPI’s web pages for policy issues and action alerts are actually web pages maintained by Bipac. According to Bipac, “THE PROSPERITY PROJECT drives your organization’s grassroots strategy. You will use your Prosperity Project Web site to educate your employees and/or members about candidates, workplace issues and elections, and help them register to vote, find their polling place, and communicate with their elected officials about issues that matter to them, and your industry.” Bipac’s Prosperity Project, which has been described as a coalition of 170 corporations (The Hill, August 6, 2003), formed during the 2000 election cycle to counter the Democratic Party’s voter-mobilization efforts. As described on the Democracy 21 website, the Prosperity Project helps corporations and business associations focus on their own “stock-owning, non-unionized business employees” and also on shareholders to support free-market and ownership society candidates. Companies, for example, may include information about business-friendly candidates with paychecks in the months before the 2004 election (Roll Call, July 9, 2003). According to the National Journal, “The BIPAC Prosperity Project has been both creative and effective in using the Internet to enable its member companies and trade associations to get their pro-business message to millions. The eight-year-old Prosperity Project and its 27 state affiliates give BIPAC (the Business Industry Political Action Committee) members and their partners the technology to create their own grassroots action Web sites that employees can use to get politically involved.” HAPI used the Bipac model “grassroots strategy” to spread is own message of prosperity politics to Latinos, using Bipac’s web platform and mimicking its prosperity framing. Using prosperity to frame free-market political agendas is common among conservative organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, which like Bipac serves as a model for HAPI. According to former labor secretary Robert R. Reich, “The radcons' [radical conservatives] arguments are organized around three themes: morality, prosperity, and patriotism.”

Writing in the May 2004 issue of the American Prospect magazine, Reich stated: “The radcon version of prosperity rewards the rich, gives almost nothing to the middle class, and penalizes the poor. It is based on a market-fundamentalist faith that has deep roots in American history.”

See TransBorder Profile -- Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute