The environment faded as a core nativist issue. It would reemerge three decades later, however, as climate change spurred not only new migrations but also a still-nascent right-wing response, a politics of eco-apartheid that envisioned walls and military force to safeguard hoarded resources in a warming world.
Inventing “illegal immigration”
Not only did immigration increase, but Mexicans began to travel further afield in search of work as the mechanization of agriculture decreased demand for farm labor, and neoliberal economic restructuring increased demand for low-wage labor everywhere. At first, it was more a curious phenomenon than a crisis. A 1969 Associated Press article reported that “the prosperity Dallas and Fort Worth have experienced” had brought with it the “new problem” of large numbers of “wetbacks” to the area. But it also noted that the INS was assisting the undocumented migrant “in obtaining a visa so he can stay with his family.”65
The “problem” of illegal immigration had not yet been fully developed as such. That changed after economic crisis took hold in the 1970s. The anti-immigrant movement that emerged in response was distinct from those of prior eras. Immigration had long elicited opposition. But in the past opposition had nakedly targeted racial others. After 1965, immigration law was formally race-neutral but de facto discriminatory—against Mexicans, who became the face of the “colorblind” era’s problem of “illegal immigration.”
Civil rights and labor figures, including representatives of the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the AFL-CIO unified behind a solution: sanctions on employers who hired unauthorized workers. Yet liberal anti-immigrant sentiment tended to avoid overt racism. Many blamed bosses for hiring immigrants, and government for failing to stop them from doing so, rather than immigrants themselves.66 Organized labor, often simplistically caricatured as forever stalwart restrictionists, played a complicated role. The AFL-CIO had helped to bring an end to both the abusive Bracero program and then, thanks in part to the progressive influence of the CIO over the restrictionist AFL and allegiance to Cold War liberal foreign policy aims, the racist national origins quotas. They believed that “illegal immigration,” like the Bracero program, abused imported labor to the detriment of domestic workers.67
In 1971, California governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first law penalizing employers for hiring undocumented immigrants (ultimately blocked in court) amid recession and in response to a powerful farmworker boycott of grapes.68 Soon after, the House of Representatives, led by Representative Peter Rodino, a New Jersey Democrat and labor ally, passed legislation to impose employer sanctions only to be blocked by agriculture-aligned interests in the Senate.
Unlike today, the major opposition was not to the legalization of undocumented immigrants but rather to cracking down on the bosses who employed them. Specifically, advocates of employer sanctions struggled to find their way past Senator James Eastland, a Dixiecrat from Mississippi, where he owned a 5,800-acre cotton plantation.
Eastland opposed employer sanctions, though not because he supported civil or immigrant rights. Indeed, he had helped lead the fight against repealing the racist national origins quotas in the 1960s.69 Eastland was an arch-segregationist senator who had defended Jim Crow on the grounds that it forestalled the “mongrelization” of the black and white races.70 But he was a tenacious champion of agricultural interests. In 1972, a call from his office shut down an INS raid of Mississippi cotton gins in its tracks.71
Rodino’s continued push for employer sanctions, however, prompted growing resistance from the left as well. Established Hispanic organizations had shifted from their longtime opposition to undocumented immigrants. In part, that’s because Chicano radicalism had re-envisioned Mexican immigrants as compatriots exploited by a racist and capitalist order rather than as competitors who threatened Mexican American wages and white ethnic assimilation.72
The Chicano movement was substantially nationalist in orientation. But the leading left-wing Mexican American organization, the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo-Hermandad General de Trabajadores—led by legendary radical Bert Corona—emphasized solidarity with immigrants as a matter of class struggle under the motto Somos un pueblo sin fronteras (We are one people without borders). This transnational inclusivity began to win out. By the mid-1970s, the UFW and mainline organizations like LULAC reversed their historic position and demanded rights for the immigrants they had long opposed.73
Meanwhile, many whites shifted right. In 1970s New York City, the population of Latin American immigrants—people not from Mexico but from Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic and South American ones like Colombia—was growing in white neighborhoods where longtime residents had begun to relocate to the suburbs amid a fiscal crisis that elites used to impose deep austerity.74 Black people were moving in, too. Both groups were met with intense resistance. A New York Board of Education spokesperson announced that some schools were turning away students who could not provide a green card. The NYPD reported that it dutifully notified the INS when an immigrant was arrested. In 1950, the Queens where Donald Trump grew up had been 96.5 percent white; it became known everywhere as the home of Archie Bunker, TV’s reactionary white working-class icon. By 1970, roughly 13 percent of the borough was black and 8 percent Hispanic, with a growing Asian population. The president of the civic association in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights called “illegal aliens” “an unbearable burden” and “an American tragedy.”75
In Elmhurst, a crowd of three hundred jammed a community board meeting. “Get these illegals out of this country,” one man demanded. “It’s time to protect the Americans,” stated another, overwhelming one woman’s plea not to make “illegal aliens,” as the reporter referred to them, a “scapegoat, like in Nazi Germany.” South Americans were blamed for overcrowded schools and job competition.76 Advocates responded that they were being made “scapegoats” for poor city services and the bad economy. Residents attending the meeting called by the Community Board for Corona and Elmhurst wailed about “illegal aliens,” though most of the Latin American immigrants were in fact documented.77 In the same neighborhood, whites quickly moved out of the massive, 4,600-unit Lefrak City apartment complex after a federal housing-discrimination lawsuit fully opened the complex to black renters smeared as “welfare” tenants.78
“The crisis saw a group of almost universally white elites remake life in a city that was becoming increasingly black and brown,” writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein. “The collapse of the postwar social compact in New York happened at the very moment when it was losing its white middle-class population, when more and more of those using city services were low-income minorities. Many of the elites at the time blamed those impoverished African Americans and Latinos (and the public sector workers who served them) for New York’s financial problems.”79
But it wasn’t just elites who scapegoated black and brown people. Across the city, the Great Migration and new international migration led to conflict. In Brooklyn, Crown Heights had undergone a massive and conflictive transition with the arrival of West Indians and Hasidic Jews and the exodus of former residents. Its Taxpayers and Civic Association encouraged members to report migrants to the authorities. “Thousands of illegal aliens here are sending their children to public schools,” a lengthy 1974 New York Times story warned, “using municipal hospitals and receiving welfare benefits while often paying minimal taxes and sending large amounts of money abroad.”80 The Times warned that “illegal aliens have mounted what immigration authorities call a ‘silent invasion’ of New York and northern New Jersey.”81
Immigrants might have valid reasons for migrating, but, the argument went, the United States was too hard pressed to make room for them. For many, the problem was clear. Or at least it was clear that there was a problem. The INS and the Border Patrol responded with workplace and community raids and deportations.82 But potential policy solutions and the political coalitions that might either pursue or o
ppose them were still in the earliest stage of formation.
Nixon’s hyperbolic and hard-line INS commissioner Leonard Chapman said that the situation had become “hopelessly out of control.”83 His successor under Jimmy Carter, Leonel Castillo, the agency’s first Hispanic leader, praised unauthorized immigrants’ “drive and ambition.”84 A Los Angeles Times story summed up the prevalent ambivalence: “Many are exploited and become, at once, pathetic victims and victimizers of the social system.”85
In 1977, President Carter proposed that Congress increase the size of the Border Patrol, legalize unauthorized immigrants, and (following in the footsteps of President Gerald Ford’s “illegal immigration” committee) sanction wayward employers.86 Carter also affirmed the culture of scarcity and the loss of liberal faith in the power of government that was nurturing budding nativist sentiment. Beginning in 1979, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker resolved the economy’s troubles in favor of the wealthy with a spectacular interest rate hike that precipitated widespread deindustrialization, crushed worker power, and pushed ordinary people into unemployment.87
No wonder that Ronald Reagan’s vision of “Morning in America”—from the man who had insisted that “the American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves”—would resonate so powerfully.88 And no wonder that a country where citizens no longer believed that they had the power to rule would come to so aggressively defend the boundaries of citizenship against outsiders. Narrowly defining the contours of “the American people,” for many, would protect its value: an exception, for liberals and conservatives alike, drawn in contrast to a world of lesser peoples and nations.
Yet even as anti-immigrant sentiment intensified, it had yet to take powerful institutional form: right-wing conservatism of the era was so untouched by the nascent nativist movement that Reagan launched his campaign by calling for a North America “in which the peoples and commerce of its three strong countries flow more freely across their present borders than they do today.”89 Free markets, militant anti-communism, and a commitment to the transformative power of unbridled presidential optimism carried the day.
Reagan’s right-wing breakthrough in 1980 changed the conservative movement forever—but the basic approach to immigration reform remained the same. In 1978, legislation backed by Senator Ted Kennedy had created the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP), chaired by Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, the president of the University of Notre Dame and an acclaimed Catholic liberal. In 1981, the Hesburgh Commission proposed employer sanctions and a national identification card, measures to deal with the root causes of migration, increased Border Patrol funding, a modest increase in legal immigration, and amnesty for unauthorized immigrants. And importantly, it separated the issue of “illegal” from legal immigration, contending that Washington had to “shut the back door” to the former and “open the front door” to the latter. This basic policy framework would guide the next three decades of mainstream immigration reform efforts.90
While celebrating immigrants’ general contribution to the economy, SCRIP asserted that undocumented workers harmed “some U.S. citizens and resident aliens who can least afford it … hurt by competition for jobs and housing and a reduction of wages and standards at the workplace.” Since labor demand drove migration, “some form of employer sanctions is necessary if illegal migration is to be curtailed.” Legalization was also necessary, however, because “legalized aliens would no longer contribute to the depression of U.S. labor standards and wages.”91
Economic anxiety didn’t by itself make the immigration “problem” a reality. But it powerfully shaped its contours. In 1982, the INS launched a series of nationwide raids dubbed Operation Jobs, which rounded up thousands of unauthorized immigrants at workplaces nationwide, including at a Denver meatpacker, Trinity Valley Steelworks in Fort Worth, and an auto parts business near Chicago.92 That same year, two white men in Detroit, including a Chrysler plant supervisor, beat Chinese American Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat during his bachelor party. They did so under the apparent and false belief that he was Japanese and so, by racist logic, culpable for the auto industry’s decline.93
Most economic-based antipathy wasn’t expressed directly through vigilante street violence. But Walter Mondale’s warning that Americans would one day be relegated to “sweep[ing] up around the Japanese computers” seemed all too plausible.94
Opening the front door
Democratic representative Romano Mazzoli and Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming led a bipartisan effort to legislate Hesburgh’s “solution” to “illegal immigration” into law.
The Reagan administration was divided between law-and-order forces hostile to undocumented immigration and business opposition to employer sanctions, including from growers in the president’s home state.95 And though Reagan terrorized Central American refugees as part of his dirty war against communism, he certainly was no nativist: “You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations,” he said.96 Meanwhile, the liberal left was split on the question. The AFL-CIO backed sanctions.97 But Hispanic leaders of a movement that was taking institutional form in Washington, alongside the American Civil Liberties Union, contended that sanctions would incentivize discrimination against people who looked or sounded like they might be from somewhere else. As is often the case in immigration politics, there were motley coalitions on all sides of the debate.
In 1986, after years of conflict and negotiation, Reagan signed the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). It ultimately legalized an estimated 2.7 million immigrants, authorized a 50 percent increase in funding for the Border Patrol and included what was billed as tough fines against employers who hired unauthorized immigrants.98 It made the targeting of immigrants convicted of criminal offenses a deportation priority. It also created the first iteration of what became the Diversity Visa program, which was intended to benefit Irish immigrants but ultimately provided a plurality of visas to Africans—and was thus maligned a few decades later by President Trump for bringing migrants from “shithole” (or maybe, according to some meeting attendees, “shithouse”) countries.99 IRCA also created the little-remembered Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to research economic policies that would reduce migration. They endorsed free trade with Mexico as a solution.100
IRCA is today generally considered to be an immigrant rights victory because it legalized a massive number of undocumented people. At the time, however, FAIR supported IRCA over considerable internal dissent, opposing its legalization provisions but hopeful that employer sanctions might work to choke off undocumented immigration. Even before IRCA became law, however, they were rightfully nervous it would not turn out that way. “In order to get the employer sanctions to turn off the job magnet that draws illegal aliens here, we had to drag along the baggage of a general amnesty,” FAIR’s Gerry Mackie lamented as the legislation headed to Reagan for his signature. “No one knows if there will be a new surge of illegal immigrants, but if the INS doesn’t have the money it needs to defend the borders, there could be some real problems.”101
Just as today, establishment politicians believed that enforcement paired with legalization would solve the immigration “problem.” Ultimately, however, the law didn’t work as advertised. It successfully legalized a large swath of undocumented residents, thanks in part to aggressive litigation challenging a restrictive INS process. The employer sanctions, however, had been watered down during negotiations, were easily evaded with fraudulent documents, and only lightly enforced.102 Four years in, the number of unauthorized crossings, having once dropped to as low as 50 percent of 1986 levels, were creeping back up to those record highs, and the number of Mexicans sponsored for visas by their newly legalized relatives grew.103 According to Otis Graham, a historian a
nd a key figure in FAIR founder Tanton’s network, restrictionists and pro-immigrant forces alike overestimated sanctions’ impact.104 Either way, IRCA was a provisional solution that could never have resolved the underlying contradictions. The United States and Mexico together formed an integrated binational economy, albeit an unequal one. Mexicans would continue to migrate regardless of whether there was a legal avenue for them to do so.
And they did. Migration was pulled by US labor demand and pushed by Mexico’s economic crisis: the flood of petrodollars recycled by Wall Street into loans to Latin America was squeezed off by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hike. In 1982, Mexico defaulted, deepening the power of international banks and financial institutions, and precipitating market-liberalizing structural adjustments. Then, declining oil prices hit Mexico’s fiscal base hard, further growing its public debt.105
Two decades later, reform politics would be flipped on its head. A bipartisan establishment alliance emerged again to push reform legislation under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. These later efforts, however, won support from business and many civil rights organizations—the same coalition that had initially resisted IRCA—alongside organized labor, which had backed employer sanctions. Nativists who had supported IRCA came to reject any new proposals to legalize unauthorized immigrants no matter how much border and interior enforcement was included.
In the 1980s, hard-core anti-Mexican nativism, let alone civilizational Islamophobia, had not yet become a decisive force in national immigration politics—far from it. If it had, IRCA would never have passed with such broad legalization provisions. The business wing maintained the upper hand, and Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush, signed legislation passed by a Democratic Congress that dramatically expanded authorized immigration through the Immigration Act of 1990, which raised the global ceiling for annual admissions to 700,000 until 1994 and 675,000 after that, a cap from which immediate relatives of American citizens remained exempt.
All-American Nativism Page 4
