Crimmigration
The war on illegal immigration did more than transform the border. It also drastically changed, and merged with, a metastasizing carceral state. During his 1996 reelection campaign, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, or IIRIRA, which called for a thousand new Border Patrol agents to be hired annually for five years; barred deportees from lawfully entering for three or ten years; empowered the attorney general to construct border barriers and authorized construction of a layer of secondary fencing in San Diego; and, critically, operationalized the criminal justice system to facilitate deportations.114
In a November 1996 memo to Clinton, written a few months after IIRIRA was signed into law and a week after the president had won reelection, Emanuel advised the president that “illegal immigration legislation provides that same opportunity” to perform a tough-guy co-optation of Republican politics as the 1994 crime bill had. It was important, he said, that Clinton could “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” Like welfare and crime, immigration was an opportunity for vintage Clinton triangulation: “By incorporating the opposition’s rhetoric, you remove their policy claims.”115
Yet that strategy also, of course, advances their policy aims. So-called welfare “reform” was a case in point. It not only targeted poor mothers generally but also immigrant women specifically, denying many permanent residents access to the program.116 As the government cut back on welfare, it both grew the penal system and subjected poor people to government surveillance and control as a condition of receiving public benefits. Poor women’s child birthing and rearing were framed as triply perverse: excessive in quantity; requiring taxpayer aid as a substitute for a man’s wage; and producing dangerous men from whom the citizenry required the repressive “daddy state’s” protection.
As historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann argues, these were “policies [that] actively degraded the social, economic, and political status of already stigmatized categories of Americans.”117 The state didn’t shrink but rather changed, deploying its repressive powers to safeguard the law-abiding, taxpaying citizen from those who broke the citizenship contract through criminality or through receiving stigmatized forms of state aid. The very category of “American” excluded undocumented immigrants, so they were seen as fundamentally unworthy. These politics created characters like “drug pushers, welfare queens, and criminals”—and they helped create the figure of the “illegal immigrant” too.
IIRIRA incorporated the war on immigrants into the core of the war on crime, which made it easier to deport immigrants (undocumented and permanent residents alike) for a growing number of criminal offenses, made those individuals’ detentions mandatory, and foreclosed most opportunities for administrative relief. It also included a statute called 287(g), which would under the Bush administration allow the federal government to deputize local law enforcement and jails to enforce immigration law.
“There certainly were things that the administration did not like in the bill,” Doris Meissner, INS commissioner under Bill Clinton and currently a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “But [Clinton] was not about to be vetoing an immigration enforcement bill in ’96 given the law enforcement agenda that he was pursuing, of which immigration enforcement was a part.”118
But what’s perhaps least understood about IIRIRA was that its demonization of “illegal immigrants” served to protect legal immigration, a template for mainstream immigration politics ever since. At the time, restricting legal immigration still had powerful supporters not only on the right but also among black liberals, including former representative Barbara Jordan, who warned against competition for poor US workers whom “reform” had pushed off welfare and into the low-wage labor market.119 Not long before signing IIRIRA, Clinton had endorsed the deep cuts to authorized immigration recommended by Jordan’s Commission on Immigration Reform, including the elimination of visa preferences for siblings of citizens.120
But the original vision—to achieve a crackdown on “illegal immigration” and deep cuts to legal immigration—was dropped. Immigration moderates, in a bid to defend legal immigration, successfully fought to split the bill: though the law made it easier to deport legal permanent residents convicted of crimes, relatively high levels of legal immigration were protected. It was “illegal immigrants”—who now found it extremely difficult to gain legal status and were subjected to three or ten years of banishment from the country—alongside “criminal aliens” that bore the brunt of the crackdown.121 The move was led by Frank Sharry, a leading establishment advocate and executive director of the National Immigration Forum, and denounced by advocates for undocumented people.122 Repression of “illegal immigrants” received support from across much of the political spectrum. By contrast, legal immigration was fiercely protected by a strange-bedfellows coalition encompassing advocacy groups, business interests, and religious organizations that held sway in both parties. As Clinton had put it in 1993: “We must say no to illegal immigration so we can continue to say yes to legal immigration.”123
On the right, lining up to support legal immigration were Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial board, and Godfather’s Pizza chain and National Restaurant Association head Herman Cain—later a right-wing presidential candidate. Legal immigration was, House Speaker Newt Gingrich proclaimed, what “has given America many of its most dynamic and creative citizens.”124 Republican House majority leader Dick Armey, a Texas free marketer, called Jordan’s proposals “a misguided attempt to make legal immigrants the scapegoats for America’s problems.” Republicans and New Democrats agreed to make “illegal immigrants” the scapegoats instead.
In 1996, Clinton signed a second piece of legislation that deepened the emphasis on “illegal immigration” by further embedding it in the country’s expanding criminal justice system. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, like IIRIRA, required mandatory detention for many immigration offenders and expanded the number of crimes defined as “aggravated felonies,” crimes for which a conviction made it virtually impossible for a non-citizen to fight deportation.125 It also further tied immigration to the politics of terrorism—a linkage that would become inextricable after the September 11 attacks.
Clinton did criticize the bill’s immigration provisions. But he signed the legislation anyway, and did so on the one-year anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.126 It was an attack that was carried out by native-born US citizens, including Timothy McVeigh, a far-right member of the white power movement that raged against the New World Order—a movement, incidentally, that also embraced the racist conspiracy that Jews plotted to destroy the white race through mass immigration.127 But immigrants and criminal defendants would suffer the consequences. After the two 1996 laws, deportations skyrocketed.128
That same year, Clinton signed a budget that increased INS funding from $2.1 to $2.6 billion, most of which was slated for border enforcement and deportations.129 Altogether, the INS budget nearly tripled between 1993 and 1999, reaching $4.2 billion.130 In 1995, ICE had a detention capacity of fewer than 7,500 beds.131 That nearly doubled to 14,000 in 1998.132
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors dusted off an old, little used statute that made it a felony for someone to cross the border illegally if they had already been deported. Janet Reno’s Justice Department implemented a “fast track” program that pressed migrants to quickly plead guilty in exchange for a shorter sentence. As a result, the number of illegal reentry prosecutions doubled between 1993 and 1996.133
Simultaneously, the INS Violent Gang Task Force was working with local police to target immigrant gang members for deportation—including members of the Salvadoran-American gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, which had formed in Los Angeles among refugees who had fled Reagan’s dirty war.134 Ultimately, Clinton and his successors’ policies of deporting “criminal aliens”
would export American-made gangs into a region with governments and societies ill-equipped to respond. These policies ultimately stoked another wave of refugees that President Trump would expertly weaponize toward nativist ends.
Who’s tougher
The Clinton administration declared victory ahead of his 1996 reelection campaign. “After years of neglect, we are finally restoring the rule of law, locking down the Southwest border,” said Emanuel.135 Republicans nonetheless continued to try to use nativism against a Democratic president who had all but outflanked them. California governor Wilson announced his anti-immigrant presidential candidacy before the Statue of Liberty, declaring that “illegal immigration is not the American way.”136
Wilson dropped out before any actual voting amid fundraising shortfalls and damaging reports that he had once hired an undocumented maid.137 But immigration didn’t disappear from the campaign. Pat Buchanan made a second run for office, decrying illegal immigration and hoping to woo would-be Wilson voters into his camp.138 “I will stop this massive illegal immigration cold. Period. Paragraph,” said Buchanan at one campaign event. In another, he made it clear how he would do this: “I’ll build that security fence, and we’ll close it, and we’ll say, ‘Listen Jose, you’re not coming in!’”139 Buchanan sounded extreme. He was. But his right-wing agenda successfully prodded his conservative and liberal opponents to embrace lite versions of it.
Senator Bob Dole, the establishment standard-bearer who won the Republican primary, made strident nativism a centerpiece of his campaign, going so far as to support a proposal that would allow states to deny undocumented children access to public schools.140 He accused Clinton of making it so that “illegal aliens afflicted with AIDS cannot be denied taxpayer-funded medical treatment, no matter how high the cost.”141
One fearmongering Dole attack ad slammed Clinton for opposing California’s Prop 187 and accused him of giving “citizenship to aliens with criminal records” against a stark backdrop of prisoners and young, apparently Chicano men walking down the street. “Twenty thousand in our prisons; four hundred thousand crowd our schools. Every year they cost us $3 billion tax dollars,” the narrator intoned. “We pay the taxes. We are the victims. Our children get shortchanged. If Clinton wins, we lose.”142
Clinton responded to the attacks with an ad that boasted his signing of “a tough anti-illegal immigration law protecting US workers.”143 Another ad, from the Democratic National Committee, turned heads by explicitly linking immigrants to crime and suggesting that Clinton would fight both by putting more cops on the street.144 “The most striking feature of the ads is that they reveal no ideological or policy differences between Dole and Clinton on the issue,” a report in the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “The only point of contention is which one has been tougher on illegal immigrants.”145
That year, a victorious Clinton won California, including Orange County, where Prop 187 had been launched. As Andreas notes, “The images of a chaotic border that were so masterfully exploited by Governor Wilson in 1994 were unavailable for Bob Dole in 1996.”146 The Democratic Party’s 1996 platform heaped praise upon Clinton, asserting that before he took office “our borders might as well not have existed … President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and illegal immigration are turned away.”147 Top Clinton strategist Mark Penn reportedly explained the campaign strategy in a presentation to the cabinet: “We did this by co-opting the Republicans on all their issues—getting tough on welfare, tough on crime, balancing the budget, and cracking down on illegal immigration.”148
The more powerful the bipartisan coalition defending neoliberal economics and authorized immigration grew, the more border militarization and measures targeting criminal “illegal immigrants” became a point of broad consensus. What’s more, draconian Republican proposals made Clinton’s crackdowns seem reasonable by comparison.
Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, then and now Washington’s most powerful Latino organization (since renamed UnidosUS), called Clinton’s border militarization “sound policy … because the most effective, most humane method of reducing undocumented immigration is enforcement at the point of entry, including the Southwestern U.S. border. It is good politics because I.N.S. efforts in this area stand in sharp contrast to some of the high-profile, irresponsible and draconian proposals currently being debated in Congress.”149
But Clinton’s program was plenty draconian: it laid the groundwork for a deportation pipeline that operationalized a rapidly growing criminal justice system for deportation, militarized the border, and nurtured a paranoiac far-right narrative about a criminal alien invasion. This was all an attempt to outflank Republicans. “Law enforcement,” Meissner told me, was “as an issue that [Clinton] wanted Democrats to take back from Republicans.”150 And the war on “illegal immigration” was core to that. But to what end? Clinton capitulated to nativist demands that would only escalate in response. The parameters of the 1990s debate over “illegal immigration” and a broader security politics agenda were set by conservatives and amplified by New Democrats.
Clinton didn’t concede that illicit drugs would make their way to the United States as long as Americans wanted to buy them. Instead, he promised that “new border patrol agents and … the most sophisticated available new technologies” would “help close the door on drugs at our borders.”151 Rather than countering the nativist argument that immigrants posed a criminal threat, Clinton promised to crack down on immigrants whose criminality was rooted in their very existence. Ultimately, all sides of the mainstream debate accepted the premise that border insecurity, “illegal immigration,” and drug trafficking were problems that a repressive government response would solve.
By the new millennium, the border and “illegal immigration” receded from the spotlight. The economy was booming. Illegal crossings in San Diego had been effectively obstructed, pushing migrant routes east, toward Arizona. Although border-wide apprehensions remained in the seven figures, the border no longer resembled the one that Clinton had inherited. The xenophobic fever had broken. “The daily chaos which reigned along the San Diego border has, at long last, been replaced by scenes of control and order,” the Border Patrol declared in 1999.152
As Andreas noted at the time, “Although the escalation of policing has largely failed as a deterrent and has generated perverse and counterproductive consequences that reinforce calls for further escalation, it has been strikingly successful in projecting the appearance of a more secure and orderly border.”153 The problem had seemingly been solved.
“A couple of years ago people were advocating to build a wall around the country,” Senator Spencer Abraham, a Michigan Republican and immigration moderate, said in 1998. “That’s no longer the case. Before, we had heard only one side of the immigration issue. Now, we get to talk about some of the positive contributions immigrants have made.”154
A push to legalize unauthorized immigrants, who numbered an estimated 8.6 million in 2000, took shape.155 That year, the AFL-CIO, with more progressive leadership in power, announced a historic shift to embrace legalizing the undocumented workers whom the labor movement had often viewed as a threat.156 The move was spearheaded by labor leaders in California, a microcosm of an increasingly diverse working class whose major victories at a time of union decline were often immigrant-led.157 Labor activists were also increasingly outraged at employers using immigration law against workers, including in 1999 when undocumented workers organizing at a Minneapolis Holiday Inn Express were detained after their manager called INS.158
But in national politics, the subject faded into the background. A New York Times story on presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush’s aggressive courtship of the Hispanic vote only mentioned immigrants once in passing and the subject of immigration not at all.159 Unemployment was down and, remarkably, immigration was not discussed in a single presidential debate. On the fringes, Buchanan had broken from the Repub
lican Party and mounted a successful takeover of what had been Ross Perot’s Reform Party. New York real estate icon Donald Trump flirted with a run for the nomination, calling Buchanan a seeming “racist” with a “prehistoric” agenda who appealed only to the “really staunch right wacko vote.”160 Buchanan bombed, and establishment conservatives secured the presidency.
The scene, however, was just scenery. The solution was inevitably provisional because the underlying political, social, and economic dynamics fueling immigration were ignored. As the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2009 report, the Border Patrol “made 1.2 million apprehensions in 1992 and again in 2004, suggesting that the increased enforcement in the San Diego sector has had little impact on overall apprehensions.”161
As apprehensions plummeted in targeted urban zones, huge numbers began to cross through remote areas, particularly the lethal Arizona desert.162 Ultimately, this would precipitate more immigrant deaths and calls for yet more enforcement. In 2005, according to one count, the number of migrants who died crossing the border hit 472, up from 241 in 1999.163 The long-running border crackdown has also systematically exposed migrant women and children to sexual assault by criminal actors and state agents alike.164 Meanwhile, those who made it across were more likely to stay put once they arrived and few resources were committed to detecting the large number of immigrants who become undocumented after entering legally and overstaying a visa. The supply-side approach also left business unscathed, with INS investigations of employers plummeting from 15,000 in 1989 to roughly 6,000 in 1995.165 Fines against employers fell throughout the 1990s.166
The nativist right didn’t win the White House in the 1990s. But it did decisively make the decade’s politics, shaping a bipartisan consensus of commonsense xenophobia while incubating the ideological germ of an ascendant far right. Over the next two decades, this dynamic would push the mainstream consensus so far to the right that it encapsulated the furthest fringes. As one headline later put it, “Trump is Pat Buchanan with better timing.”167
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