Anti-Immigration Groups React to Obama Victory - Part One

While pro-immigration groups are hailing the Obama victory and the Latino turnout as a victory for liberal immigration reform, immigration restrictionists are reshaping their messaging for the Obama era. Given how successfully the restrictionist institutes in Washington have tweaked their anti-immigration message in the Bush era to reflect new citizen concerns about national security and the "rule of law," it would behoove immigrant advocates and other supporters of liberal immigration policies to pay more attention to what the leading restrictionists are now saying.

Post-Election Reaction of the Center for Immigration Studies

Not as close to either grassroots restrictionism or Capitol Hill as his colleagues at FAIR and NumbersUSA, Mark Krikorian, director of the restrictionist think tank Center for Immigration Studies reacted bitterly to Obama’s election while pointing to the restrictionist victories in Arizona as cause for hope. “Even if The One's minions gut immigration enforcement, it's still alive at the state level,” wrote Krikorian in his blog, “Arizona voters rejected the mendacious attempt by the business community to gut the state's toughest-in-the-nation immigration law. But unlike his counterparts at the other DC restrictionist institutes, Krikorian acknowledged that the anti-immigration forces may have a messaging problem. Noting that there is too much “bile” in the restrictionist movement, CIS’s president, author of the The New Case Against Immigration Both Legal and Illegal, observed in a post-election analysis that “too much of even the legitimate, non-bilious concern of immigration is based on the idea that today’s immigrants are somehow inferior to your grandma from Sciliy or your grampa from Lithuania.” Moving forward toward legislation restricting immigration, Krikorian recommends that restrictionists adopt a new framing of the issue. Rather than demonizing immigrants, as many restrictionists do to build their movement, Krikorian advocates a more cerebral, conceptual approach to immigration policy reform: “This is why I think there's political utility (as well as substantive truth) to the central point of my book: Today's immigrants are very similar to those of the past, but we have changed, our society so profoundly different because of modernization that mass immigration of any kind is no longer appropriate. This removes the onus from the foreigners and also allows us to place illegal immigration into a larger context rather than just gripe about lawbreaking (as bad as that is).” “A pro-immigrant policy of low immigration” is what Krikorian recommends as the new framing for restrictionists. Recognizing that many Latinos support a liberal immigration policy that supports more immigration, the CIS president observes that his framing probably won’t “attract most immigrants, or most Hispanics, or most Hispanic immigrants, but it will attract some and cause others to be less intense in their support for the other side and, perhaps most importantly, reassure native-born voters that their concerns about immigration don’t make them bad people.”

See TransBorder Profiles:

NumbersUSA

Center for Immigration Studies

Immigration Reform Caucus

Immigration Reform Law Institute

Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus

Immigration Challenge for Obama

During his tenure as homeland security secretary, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff has overseen a dramatic buildup in border security and immigration enforcement. As part of this crackdown on illegal immigrants, Chertoff has launched such new programs as Operation Community Shield (going after immigrant gang members), Operation Streamline (arresting and detaining illegal border crosses), and the Secure Border Initiative (which includes the 670-mile fence and the virtual fence).

Today, DHS deploys nearly 18,000 border patrol agents and has 30,000 prison beds dedicated to immigrants. In pursuing the immigrant crackdown, Chertoff has won broad bipartisan support for large annual increases in ICE and CBP budgets and for his initiatives that merge federal enforcement with local and state policing. What is more, many local and state governments have passed new laws aimed at driving unauthorized immigrants out of their communities.

Chertoff has set in motion a well-coordinated and unremitting immigrant dragnet in motion. The law-and-order immigration apparatus directed by DHS is certainly demonstrating results. But with its emphasis on law enforcement and its disregard for justice it is destroying millions of lives while splitting communities and families.

“Whether you like what we are doing or not,” said Chertoff in his "State of Immigration" speech on Oct. 23, “it would be hard to argue we were conducting business as usual in the last year and 18 months (since his appointment).”

Now that the infrastructure, funding, rationale, and strategy for a wide-ranging enforcement regime are in place, a new “business as usual” immigration policy is being passed on to the Obama administration. Despite declarations as a candidate that he would pursue comprehensive immigration reform in his first term, Obama will be hard put to back away from Chertoff’s strategy to enforce immigration law “as it currently exists.”

Any retreat from Chertoff’s hard-line position on enforcement will be met with an upsurge of angry anti-immigration organizing. And any Chertoff-like proposal for an expanded temporary workers program will likely be opposed, as FAIR signals, as a de facto legalization initiative. As the economy stagnates, active support for immigrant rights and legalization is likely to decline, making yet more difficult for the Obama administration to summon the political will to fight back against the enforcement-first measures that Chertoff and the restrictionists have set in motion.

The Obama administration and the new Democratic Congress will soon face the challenge of addressing the immigration crisis. The path of least resistance may be to accept the “State of Immigration” as shaped and defined by Chertoff and the Republicans.

But the bolder path is to stand on reason and principle in backing a new comprehensive reform bill, which meets valid citizen concerns about effective border control and sustainable immigration flows while also ensuring that immigrant workers and their families are treated with justice and fairness.

Hispanic Alliance Echos McCain's Charges Against Obama

The Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute (HAPI), sponsor of the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity, is a self-identified conservative public policy and advocacy organization “focusing on issues of importance to the Hispanic Community.” HAPI gained national attention in September 2008 with the release of a statement criticizing Senator Barack Obama over his role in the immigration policy debate and complimenting Senator John McCain. The Sept. 16 release, titled “Setting the Record Straight on the Candidates’ Immigration Positions,” asserted that, “amid countercharges” about the candidates’ positions, HAPI would “recite the FACTS.” HAPI echoed earlier charges by the McCain campaign in a Spanish-language television ad (titled “Hicieron Fracasar La Reforma”) that Senator Barack Obama helped kill the comprehensive immigration reform bill in June 2007. According to HAPI, “Barack Obama, despite his promises of support, was absent from much of the debate on the compromise, then turned his back on the proposal, siding instead with organized labor on a series of ‘poison pill’ amendments that even his supporter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, opposed. Among the proposals Obama supported were amendments that would have cut the number of Guest Worker Visas in half, and would ultimately have killed the program after just five years.” HAPI concluded: “In the heat of the campaign, overheated rhetoric and campaign promises should never eclipse the truth – and when it comes to comprehensive immigration reform, the truth is that Sen. McCain has shown courage and leadership, while Sen. Obama, despite his promises, ultimately sided with those who oppose comprehensive reform.” HAPI got it right that Obama did support a failed motion to cut in half the Bush administration’s proposal for a 400,000 guestworker program, and he did support a successful amendment that would have ended the proposed guestworker program after five years. It is also true that Obama was not a major presence in the 2007 immigration debate. But he didn’t turn his back on the bill, as HAPI stated. Along with McCain, Obama voted to move forward with the compromise bill. Conservatives have for the past two years been trying to pin blame on candidate Obama for the failure of the comprehensive immigration reform bill despite the fact that, as they attest, he was not a major mover in the immigration policy debate in the Senate. The HAPI release (and the McCain ad) followed the lead of an erroneous report by Brit Hume of Fox News during the heat of the immigration debate in 2007.

As a report on the Media Matters website observed: “On the June 7 [2007] edition of Fox News' Special Report, host Brit Hume claimed that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) ‘managed to get’ an amendment to the comprehensive immigration reform bill ‘passed,’ and that it ‘may be the killer amendment that ... ends this bill.’ In fact, Obama's amendment, which would have required the bill's merit-based evaluation system for new visas to expire after five years, failed by a vote of 42-55 -- making it impossible for the measure to have ‘end[ed]’ the immigration bill.”

Obama did, however, support – along with 48 other senators – the amendment to sunset the controversial guestworker program after five years. While this amendment angered the business community that had been lobbying for an expanded temporary worker program, it did not kill the reform bill, as HAPI claimed. Despite increased enforcement provisions and onerous requirements for legalization, the Republicans – with the exception of John McCain – voted against the final bill largely because of mounting pressure from restrictionist groups and their constituencies

Finding America's Voice

Tom Barry, August 25, 2008

At a time when immigration restrictionists have succeeded in reframing the immigration debate, immigration advocates can count on a new organization.

America’s Voice, headed by veteran immigration-policy advocate Frank Sharry, is the executive director of this new organization that aims to form a communications and media “war room” to reverse the direction of the immigration policy debate.

Sharry, who is perhaps the most respected voice (and certainly the most frequently quoted) from the nongovernmental community, resigned from the National Immigration Forum to lead America’s Voice. Its slogan is: “The Power to Win Common Sense Immigration Reform.”

America’s Voice aims to counter the grassroots and political success of the restrictionists with “an unprecedented voter mobilization campaign targeting immigrant voters” and “a campaign-style communications and rapid-response war room.”

If it is to resonate beyond the small immigrant-rights community, America’s Voice will need to craft a message that departs from the traditional language of the pro-immigration community, which its critics, with some justification, describe as an “open borders lobby.”

Thus far, it is attempting to bridge the messaging gap with ts call for “smart” and “tough” immigration reform, and with its assertion that “America can be both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws” – which is now candidate Obama’s message, too.

Formed in March 2008, Sharry has his work cut out for him. He promises to lead a campaign “dedicated to winning broad immigration reform in the first term of the next president” – something that Obama and the draft Democratic Platform also promise but which seems exceedingly optimistic.

Despite election promises, it is hard to imagine that either Republican or Democratic candidate will as president spend what little political capital he will have on this highly contentious issue. More likely, as Bush has done, there will be more rhetoric for comprehensive reform than any real action.

Sharry says that America’s Voice will be working closely with the We are America Alliance, another immigrant advocacy organization, "to mobilize a million new voters in 13 states running in the lead up to November 4th. We believe that the combination of an historic turnout of immigrant voters for whom immigration reform is a defining issue and the failure of illegal immigration as a wedge issue will help create more political space for reform.”

Back in March, Sharry predicted that “candidates will attempt to use illegal immigration as a wedge issue like never before.” However, as Democratic Party candidates increasingly adopt – or fail to oppose – the administration’s “enforcement only” campaign, there may not be much of a wedge to drive between candidates. What’s more, it’s unlikely that many voters would make a decision in the presidential campaign on immigration issues, given that McCain, for all of his tough talk lately, is known as McAmnesty among the restrictionists.

But Sharry is one of the most well-informed actors in the immigration debate, and it’s likely that he and America’s Online will continue to be opinion leaders on immigration. For more on Sharry and the likely approach of America’s Voice, see a fascinating interview with him posted on Immigration Daily.

Sharry said:

“So the Republicans are committing a mistake of historic proportions, and the Democrats are divided over whether to hide behind their desks or to play offense. And so the Democrats could blow this if they continue to spout a Republican Lite line. They actually are going to have to unite in favor of a solution, stick their chins out, stick their necks out, and win the argument. And if they don't, we won't have reform, and I suspect it will hurt Democrats not only with Latino immigrant voters but with swing voters as well.”

Let’s hope that Sharry and America’s Voice can really identify an authentic progressive voice of America on this divisive issue, and not just echo the now badly marginalized voice of liberal immigration advocates.

America's Voice

1050 17th Street, NW, Suite 490

Washington, DC 20036

(202) 463-8602