All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  143Ibid., 8.

  144Davis, City of Quartz, 136.

  145Cooper, Family Values, 8.

  146Mark Oppenheimer, “Review: ‘We Believe the Children,’ on Child Abuse Hysteria in the 1980s,” New York Times, August 6, 2015.

  147Associated Press, “California Sues U.S. Government over Costs Tied to Illegal Aliens,” New York Times, May 1, 1994; Tony Perry, “State’s Immigration Suit against U.S. Dismissed,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1995.

  148Patrick J. McDonnell and Virginia Ellis, “Wilson Acts to Bar Prenatal Care for Illegal Immigrants,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1996.

  149Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 277.

  150Jost, “Cracking Down on Immigration.”

  151David M. Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 134.

  152“Text of President Clinton’s Announcement on Welfare Legislation,” New York Times, August 1, 1996; Audrey Singer, “Welfare Reform and Immigrants: A Policy Review,” in Philip Kretsedemas and Ana Aparicio, eds., Immigrants, Welfare Reform, and the Poverty of Policy, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004, 21–34.

  153Motomura, Immigration outside the Law, 73.

  154Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 276.

  155Rebecca Trounson, “Perot Says Haiti Policy ‘Makes No Sense,’” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1994.

  156Roberto Suro, “California’s SOS on Immigration,” Washington Post, September 29, 1994.

  157Michael Lind, “Fatal Attraction,” slate.com, October 12, 1999.

  158Dan Balz, “Perot Decries Negative Tactics,” Washington Post, March 8, 1996.

  159Patrick Joseph Buchanan, “Culture War Speech: Address to the Republican National Convention,” voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu, August 17, 1992.

  160Robert Shogan, “Buchanan Attack Upstages Dole at Perot Conference,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1995.

  161Associated Press, “Buchanan, Perot Not Out of Political Picture Yet,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 21, 1996.

  162Robin Toner, “Reform Party Names Perot Its Presidential Candidate,” New York Times, August 18, 1996; Bob Davis and Hilary Stout, “New Reform Party Finds Enemies Inside and Out,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 1996.

  163Patrick J. Buchanan, “America First, NAFTA Never,” Washington Post, November 7, 1993.

  164Frank Guan, “End of the End of History, Redux,” nplusonemag.com.

  165Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009, 88.

  166Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 285–6.

  167Roper Center, “How Groups Voted in 1992,” ropercenter.cornell.edu.

  Chapter Two

  *Operation Intercept was run by Treasury Department senior advisor G. Gordon Liddy, who would go on to be convicted over the Watergate break-in. Remarkably, future Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio—an official once stationed in Mexico with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the DEA’s precursor—claims to have played a leading role too. (Joe Arpaio and Len Sherman, Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes on Illegal Immigration, Drugs and Everything Else That Threatens America, New York: Amacom, 2008, 45–47.)

  *Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator, $263 million in 1990 was equivalent to $506 million in 2015.

  *And ironically, given the nativist movement’s environmental pretexts, the construction of border barriers has caused immense ecological damage in part by blocking wildlife migration. (Stephanie Innes, “Beyond the Wall: Costly Answer in California Altering the Landscape,” Arizona Daily Star, July 11, 2006.)

  *I’m riffing off Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, which refers to the set of affective dispositions ordinary people must cruelly adopt to strive for an unobtainable good life under neoliberalism. (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.)

  1Janet Hook, “Clinton Moves to Speed Deportations,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1995.

  2Congressional Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, “U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest: The Final Report and Recommendations of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy with Supplemental Views by Commissioners,” March 1, 1981, 42.

  3William J. Clinton, “The President’s Radio Address,” May 6, 1995, presidency.ucsb.edu.

  4Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 36–37.

  5Carla N. Argueta, “Border Security: Immigration Enforcement between Ports of Entry,” Congressional Research Service, fas.org, April 19, 2016, 2.

  6Hernández, Migra!, 81, 89–91.

  7Ibid., 63, 70.

  8Ibid., 41, 46, 50, 55.

  9Ibid., 104–5.

  10Ibid., 116, 122.

  11L.A. Times Service, “Fences Separating Mexico, U.S. Little Barrier in Some Areas,” Hartford Courant, November 28, 1980.

  12John M. Crewdson, “In Sister Cities of El Paso and Juarez, 400 Years of History Erase a Border,” New York Times, July 18, 1981.

  13Charlie Hilinger, “Little Known Agency: The American Border Patrol,” Austin Statesman, June 24, 1967.

  14Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, 38(1), 2012, 1–29.

  15Robert Scheer, “Law Part of the Problem: Illegal Aliens’ Half-Life,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1979.

  16Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, 38(1), 2012, 1–29.

  17United States Border Patrol, “Southwest Border Sectors: Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions by Fiscal Year (Oct. 1st through Sept. 30th),” cbp.gov.

  18Raúl Delgado-Wise and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, “Migration and Development: Lessons from the Mexican Experience,” migrationpolicy.org, February 1, 2007.

  19Douglas Massey et al., Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003, 15.

  20Raúl Delgado-Wise and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, “The Reshaping of Mexican Labor Exports under NAFTA: Paradoxes and Challenges,” International Migration Review 41(3), 2007, 673–5.

  21Joseph A. Reaves, “Battle on the Border,” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1983.

  22Ibid.

  23Scheer, “Illegal Aliens’ Half-Life.”

  24Priscilla Alvarez, “What the Waiting List for Legal Residency Actually Looks Like,” Atlantic, September 21, 2017.

  25Clara Germani, “Desperate People and a Porous Border,” Christian Science Monitor, December 17, 1984.

  26Ivor Davis, “Checker Game on the U.S. Border with People as the Pieces,” Globe and Mail, March 31, 1984.

  27Germani, “Desperate People and a Porous Border.”

  28Jay Mathews, “Illegals from Mexico: As Hard to Count as to Stop,” Washington Post, June 27, 1986.

  29David Harris, “Zone of War: Struggle over Mexican Migrants” New York Times, February 17, 1980.

  30Patrick McDonnell, “All-Out Border War to Stem Alien Flow Is High-Tech Affair,” New York Times, April 13, 1986.

  31Ibid.

  32John M. Crewdson, “Violence, Often Unchecked, Pervades U.S. Border Patrol,” New York Times, January 14, 1980.

  33Daniel Gonzalez and Rafael Carranza, “Is the Term ‘Tronc’ an Acronym or a Derogatory Term for Migrants?,” azcentral.com, May 19, 2018.

  34Crewdson, “Violence, Often Unchecked, Pervades U.S. Border Patrol.”

  35Ibid.; Harris, “Zone of War.”

  36John M. Crewdson, “3 Agents of Border Patrol Charged With Beating 8,” New York Times, July 25, 1980.

  37John M. Crewdson, “2 in Border Patrol Are Found Guilty in First Case on Brutality to Aliens,” New York Times, January 30, 1980.

  38Hernández, Migra!, 207. />
  39Stephen Siff, “The Illegalization of Marijuana: A Brief History,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 7(8), 2014.

  40Patrick Timmons, “Trump’s Wall at Nixon’s Border,” NACLA Report on the Americas 49(1), 15–24.

  41Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102(1), 2015, 140.

  42Matthew D. Lassiter, “Pushers, Victims, and the Lost Innocence of White Suburbia: California’s War on Narcotics during the 1950s,” Journal of Urban History 41(5), 2015, 791.

  43Kate Doyle, “Operation Intercept: The Perils of Unilateralism,” National Security Archive, April 13, 2003.

  44Michael Agar and Heather Schacht Reisinger, “A Tale of Two Policies: The French Connection, Methadone, and Heroin Epidemics,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 26(3), 371–96; Nicholas C. Chriss, “Heroin Traffic Takes On Latin Accent: ‘Mexican Connection’ Hard to Crack, U. S. Agents Find,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1976.

  45Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing Executive Order 12368, Concerning Federal Drug Abuse Policy Functions,” June 24, 1982, available at reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/62482b.

  46Keith B. Richburg, “Reagan Order Defines Drug Trade as Security Threat, Widens Military Role,” Washington Post, June 8, 1986.

  47Scott Stewart, “Mexico’s Cartels and the Economics of Cocaine,” Stratfor, January 3, 2013.

  48Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012, 43.

  49Ibid., 79; “DEA’s Strategies and Operations in the 1990s,” United States General Accounting Office, July 1999, 72; Chris Woodyard and Dan Weikel, “5,000 Pounds of Cocaine Seized in 2nd Largest Bust,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1989.

  50Dean Nelson, “The US Border Agents’ Challenge,” Boston Globe, April 28, 1985.

  51“ACLU Releases Crack Cocaine Report: Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 Deepened Racial Inequity in Sentencing,” aclu.org, May 26, 2006; Andreas, Border Games, 48.

  52William A. Kandel, “Interior Immigration Enforcement: Criminal Alien Programs,” Congressional Research Service, fas.org, September 8, 2016, 23.

  53Ibid., Summary; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), “TRAC Immigration: Aggravated Felonies and Deportation,” trac.syr.edu, June 9, 2006.

  54Doug Keller, “Re-thinking Illegal Entry and Re-entry,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 44, 2012, 12.

  55César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, “Defining Crimmigration Law: Part 1,” Crimmigration.com, September 17, 2015.

  56McDonnell, “All-Out Border War.”

  57Ibid.; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), “Graphical Highlights, Immigration: National Trends in Apprehensions and Staffing,” trac.syr.edu, 2006.

  58Nelson, “The US Border Agents’ Challenge.”

  59James Brock, “San Ysidro Border Patrol: A Battle of Technology vs. Superior Numbers,” Baltimore Sun, February 3, 1985.

  60John Dillin, “Illegal Immigration Surges in ’89,” Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1989.

  61George Ramos, “For Some on INS Bus to Tijuana, It’s a Round Trip,” New York Times, January 1, 1990.

  62Dillin, “Illegal Immigration Surges in ’89.”

  63Greg Henderson, “Clinton Administration Defends Bush Haiti Policy,” UPI, March 2, 1993; Elaine Sciolino, “Clinton Says U.S. Will Continue Ban on Haitian Exodus,” New York Times, January 15, 1993.

  64Brandt Goldstein, “Clinton’s Guantanamo,” Slate.com, December 21, 2005; Mary B.W. Tabor, “Judge Orders the Release of Haitians,” New York Times, June 9, 1993.

  65“Asylum Seekers Slip through JFK Airport’s Strained Security,” Orlando Sentinel, April 4, 1993.

  66Tim Weiner, “Pleas for Asylum Inundate System for Migration,” New York Times, April 25, 1993.

  67Maura Ewing, “20 Years Ago, Asylum Seekers Were Not Automatically Put in Immigration Detention,” pri.org, December 15, 2016; “Federation for American Immigration Reform,” splcenter.org.

  68Weiner, “Pleas for Asylum Inundate System for Migration.”

  69Carly Goodman, “Angry That ICE Is Ripping Families Apart? Don’t Just Blame Trump. Blame Clinton, Bush and Obama, Too,” Washington Post, June 11, 2018.

  70Patrick McDonnell, “INS Ponders Border Barricades near San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1987.

  71Scott Harrison, “Light Up the Border Protests,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1990.

  72Blas Nuñez-Neto and Michael John Garcia, “Border Security: The San Diego Fence,” Congressional Research Service, fas.org, May 23, 2007, 2.

  73James Gerstenzang, “Senate Approves NAFTA on 61–38 Vote,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1993; James Gerstenzang and Michael Ross, “House Passes NAFTA, 234–200,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1993.

  74James Bornemeier, “El Paso Plan Deters Illegal Immigrants,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1994; Andreas, Border Games, 92.

  75Joel Brinkley, “A Rare Success at the Border Brought Scant Official Praise,” New York Times, September 14, 1994.

  76Andreas, Border Games, 92–93.

  77Kenneth Jost, “Cracking Down on Immigration,” CQ Researcher, February 3, 1995.

  78Andreas, Border Games, 87–88.

  79Brendan O’Connor, “The Eugenicist Doctor and the Vast Fortune behind Trump’s Immigration Regime,” splinternews.com, July 5, 2018; Center for Immigration Studies, “Our 2020 Border Tour Will Be Announced This Fall,” cis.org; Center for New Community, “Blurring Borders: Collusion between Anti-Immigrant Groups and Immigration Enforcement Agents,” newcomm.org, June 30, 2015.

  80Quoted in David M. Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 80.

  81Ronald Brownstein, “Buchanan Links L.A. Riot to Immigration Problems,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1992.

  82Maria Newman, “After the Riots,” New York Times, May 11, 1992.

  83Shereen Marisol Meraji, “As Los Angeles Burned, The Border Patrol Swooped In,” All Things Considered, npr.org, April 27, 2017.

  84Leslie Berger, “Police-INS Actions to Be Probed,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1992; Civil Disorder: What Do We Know? How Should We Prepare, Police Foundation National Conference, April 1994, 41.

  85Garrett Hardin to Cordelia Scaife May, June 4 1992, Garrett Hardin papers, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.

  86Robert Shogan, “’92 Republican Convention: Platform in Clear Contrast to Rival Democrats’ Policies,” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 1992.

  87The Vision Shared: The Republican Platform, Uniting Our Family, Our Country, Our World, American Presidency Project, 1992, available at presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1992.

  88U.S. Border Patrol, “Border Patrol Strategic Plan, 1994 and Beyond,” hsdl.org, August 8, 1994, 7.

  89Chad C. Haddal et al., “Border Security: Barriers along the U.S. International Border,” Congressional Research Service, March 16, 2009, 3; United States Border Patrol, “Border Patrol Agent Nationwide Staffing by Fiscal Year,” cbp.gov, October 1, 2016, 3.

  90Andreas, Border Games, 93.

  91Andreas, Border Games, 160–1.

  92“Reyes Has Rallied El Pasoans to a New Level of Confidence,” El Paso Times, October 27, 1996.

  93Robert A. Jones, “It’s Quiet—Too Quiet,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1998.

  94Rahm Emanuel, “Memorandum to the President,” November 12, 1996.

  95Nathan Gardels, “Salinas’ Vision: After NAFTA, the World,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1993.

  96U.S. Border Patrol, “Border Patrol Strategic Plan,” 3.

  97Gregory Ross, “NAFTA Can Ease Border Woe,” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 8, 1993.

  98James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, “NAFTA’s Economic Impact,” cfr.org, October 1, 2018.

  99Matthew Sanderson and Rebecca Utz, “The Globalization of Econ
omic Production and International Migration,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50(2), 2009, 137–54.

  100Delgado-Wise and Covarrubias, “The Reshaping of Mexican Labor Exports under NAFTA.”

  101Carlos Marichal, “The Vicious Cycles of Mexican Debt,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 31(3), 1997, 28.

  102R. Jeffrey Smith and Clay Chandler, “Peso Crisis Caught U.S. by Surprise,” Washington Post, February 13, 1995; Gladys Lopez-Acevedo and Jaime Saavedra, “Mexico: Income Generation and Social Protection for the Poor,” documents.worldbank.org, January 1, 2005.

  103Rahm Emanuel, “Memorandum to the President,” November 12, 1996.

  104Douglas S. Massey et al., “Border Enforcement and Return Migration by Documented and Undocumented Mexicans,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(7), 2015, 1015–40.

  105Andreas, Border Games, 74–75.

  106June S. Beittel, “Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations,” Congressional Research Service, fas.org, April 25, 2017, 8.

  107Andreas, Border Games, 59–60; Paul Gootenberg, “Cocaine’s Long March North, 1900–2010,” Latin American Politics and Society 54(1), 2012, 159–80.

  108Beittel, “Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations,” 9.

  109Laura Y. Calderón et al., “Organized Crime and Violence in Mexico,” Justice in Mexico, April 2019, 38.

  110Andreas, Border Games, 78, 80–81.

  111Ibid., 57–60.

  112Ibid., 8.

  113Dylan Riley, “American Brumaire?,” New Left Review, 103, 2017.

  114Randy Capps et al., “Delegation and Divergence: A Study of 287(g) State and Local Immigration Enforcement,” migrationpolicy.org, January 2011, 8; Haddal et al., “Border Security: Barriers along the U.S. International Border,” 1, 3.

  115Rahm Emanuel, “Memorandum to the President,” November 12, 1996.

  116Alexandra Filindra et al., “20 Years On, Here’s How Welfare Reform Held Back Immigrants’ Children—in Some States,” Washington Post, August 22, 2016.

  117Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 2.

  118Daniel Denvir, “How Centrists Failed Immigrants,” jacobinmag.com, November 4, 2016.