Six days later, progress in the debate on illegal immigration expired in the fires of September 11, 2001.
After the terror attacks the national focus on preventing future attacks locked on the question of how the 9/11 terrorists got into the country. The answer was not a simple one. The nineteen hijackers had come in legally. Some of their visa applications contained false information and some of their passports had been doctored, but they had been granted legitimate visas by the U.S. government. A Gallup poll the year after the attacks found that the percentage of Americans who felt immigration was a “bad thing” had jumped ten points higher than before 9/11 to 42 percent of the nation. And in Washington the discussion of immigration took on a singular focus—stopping any more terrorists from getting into the country. That meant tightening border security and imposing more requirements on anyone applying for a visa. The George W. Bush administration increased funding for border security by 60 percent. And the Immigration and Naturalization Service was restructured and integrated into the new Department of Homeland Security with a new sense of purpose, namely searching for any potential terrorist hiding in the country.
The immediate result was a reduction in the number of legal immigrants arriving in the United States. About two million fewer immigrants gained admission, dropping from 7.6 million in 2001 to 5.7 million in 2002. There is no reliable measure of the number of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, but with increased security it is likely that number also fell.
By 2004 the ongoing fears of illegal immigration, drug activity and violence from Mexico, and terrorism led a former Marine and retired accountant named Jim Gilchrist to found the Minutemen, a group in southeastern Arizona, to defend the “state against an overwhelming siege by drug and human-trafficking cartels.” Hundreds of people signed up. Most sat along the border with walkie-talkies, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, looking for any sign of people walking across the border. Some amateur pilots took to the sky to search for illegal immigrants. President Bush called the group “vigilantes.” When Gilchrist was invited to speak at Columbia University in New York, students stormed the stage in protest. Another presentation at Harvard was canceled because of protests. Gilchrist complained that students were violating his right to free speech. Again, conservative groups picked up the cause and talk radio trumpeted the message that left-wing radicals who wanted open borders did not want to hear about the threat it would pose to national security. Fake videos began to circulate of an illegal immigrant being killed by two people identified on the video as members of the Minutemen. The video was tied to two members of the group who said they made it because “we’re old men and we’re bored.” But xenophobes and bigots began flocking to the Minutemen movement. In May 2009 two people in a Washington State Minutemen splinter group participated in the real murder of an immigrant and the man’s daughter in a robbery.
Even before those murders, Gilchrist told an interviewer he was “very, very sad, very disappointed” with what had become of his movement. “I have to say some of the people who have gotten into this movement have sinister intentions.… I very well may have been fighting for people with less character and less integrity than the ‘open border fanatics’ I have been fighting against. And that is a phenomenal indictment of something I have created.”
It is hard to understand the Minutemen as anything but a desperate plea for the federal government to face down hysterical voices and political threats to get ahold of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system. At their best the Minutemen simply wanted to protect the borders against an indisputably large number of illegal immigrants. The group’s creation was an outburst by people who feel powerless and ignored, people whose emotions are played on with scare tactics instead of serious debate. It was an expression of frustration with the failed leadership at all levels of American politics. This is what we get when leaders are so easily intimidated and refuse to engage one another constructively in order to find some consensus and solution.
The aggravation over inaction combined with heightened fear of immigrants and concern over the threat to national security also played a role in the 2004 presidential campaign. The overall campaign between President Bush and Democrat John Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, boiled down to competing claims about which party could better protect the country from terrorist invaders. Historically, polls have shown Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on national security. And President Bush’s reelection team, predictably, hammered Senator Kerry as weak on defense. Part of the president’s antiterrorism message was a hard line on immigration. But Republicans did not want to alienate naturalized immigrants who had the right to vote. At the GOP convention, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denounced Democrats as “girlie men” on the issue of national defense but told his own life story of an immigrant who achieved his dreams by legally coming to America.
After winning reelection, the president held the first-ever prime-time presidential address to the nation on the issue of immigration. He pledged to tighten border security but also to open the nation’s doors to immigrants willing to work. The key to this two-step policy would be getting the base of his own Republican Party to agree to a “path to citizenship” for people already in the country illegally.
The “path” required paying fines, paying back taxes, learning English, and going to the back of the line, waiting behind people outside the United States who had applied earlier for immigration papers. To some illegal immigrants the requirements seemed onerous. Well-organized protest rallies by Hispanics calling for immigration reform became regular events. On one memorable day, April 10, 2006, a coalition called the We Are America Alliance mobilized over two million people for marches in major cities. But the legal and illegal immigrants calling for reform to deal with the more than ten million people already in the country—a group of people attending schools, going to work daily, contributing to the American economy—were met by a fierce outcry from conservatives and conservative talk-show hosts. Once again, conflict and not compromise, pitched battle and not progress, were what both sides seemed to crave.
The right-wing media became enraged at the sight of Mexican flags at some of the marches. They cited these as evidence of disloyalty to the United States. Some called for immigration authorities to wade into the marches and demand visas and passports. They latched onto any report of violence, even a car accident involving an illegal immigrant, as evidence that the country was under siege by illegal immigrants. Coverage of drug cartel violence and kidnappings on both sides of the border took on hysterical tones. One talk-show host, incredibly, suggested the illegal immigrants might pose a health risk by bringing leprosy into the country. The fear extended to scenarios in which Middle Eastern terrorists followed the path of Mexicans crossing the southern border illegally.
The frenzied media made honest debate on immigration difficult—some might say impossible. President Bush made several speeches calling for fellow conservatives to support his relatively balanced immigration plan. He went so far as to support construction of a wall along sectors of the border that included a patchwork of physical walls and the use of sensors and cameras to create “virtual fences.” The White House got Senator McCain and Democratic senator Barack Obama to sign on as supporters of a billion-dollar appropriation to build and maintain the wall. That bill passed and was signed into law, but there was no follow-up to deal with the need for overall immigration reform.
One proposal to win over conservative critics and allow reform to go forward came in 2010 from Senators Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. The idea was to issue a national identification card. The card, as proposed, is a tamper-proof plastic device that has the citizen’s fingerprints as well as bio-metric scans of eyes and facial characteristics. Some private companies now issue similar cards to frequent travelers who want to speed through airport screenings. But the Schumer-Graham proposal drew cries of “big brother” from ci
vil-liberty groups, which suggested the government could begin to track people, including critics, and violate constitutional protections of individual rights and privacy. The idea stalled as Graham and Schumer failed to effectively respond to these fears.
President Bush and his top political aides appealed for Republicans to wise up to the potential of the growing Hispanic population as potential future members of the Republican Party. They highlighted all the added money in the bill for security, including funds to put new high-tech surveillance technology on the border. But the conservative talk-show universe gave a bullhorn to every congressman opposing the larger immigration bill. In the end, the Republican majority in the Senate did not pass the bill.
The immigration problem, both legal and illegal, continued apace after President Bush left office. His successor, President Obama, promised during his campaign to deal with the issue during his first year in office but never brought the political attention to what remained of Bush’s proposals or any other. In the lame-duck session of 2010, President Obama did try to get Congress to approve the DREAM Act, which had been hanging around in the legislature since 2001 and had been included in Bush’s attempted compromise. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act allows children brought into the United States illegally to gain citizenship if they serve in the military for two years or finish two years of college. The bill had support from a range of Democrats and Republicans. But even with President Obama’s last-minute support, the DREAM Act failed to pass in the final days of a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
In response to the failure of the DREAM Act and the broader immigration reform bill, several state governments began to issue their own laws. Most of the laws played to the same angry, extreme voices, the “populism” described by President Bush, which made it politically impossible for national politicians to resolve the issue. In Arizona, for example, Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. The bill made it a crime for anyone in the state not to have proof of citizenship when asked for it by a police officer. Opponents said the law invited racial profiling because the people most likely to draw suspicion as illegal immigrants are sure to be brown-skinned people with a Spanish accent. Several police chiefs spoke against it because they feared that illegal immigrants would stop cooperating with crime investigations and even become violent when approached by police if they feared deportation. President Obama opposed the bill. President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, also opposed the bill: “I think there is going to be some constitutional problems with the bill.… I wished they hadn’t passed it.”
But the proposal and the law proved a boon to Governor Brewer, who became a champion of the talk-radio, anti-immigration crowd and easily won a reelection fight in which she had previously been an underdog. Her success has prompted other states, including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas, to consider similar legislation.
Another group of state lawmakers, State Legislators for Legal Immigration, proposed changing the constitutional standard, expressed in the Fourteenth Amendment, that grants citizenship to all children born in the United States. Under the new proposal a child must have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident in order to qualify to become an American citizen. The law fit with concerns previously expressed by extremists and anti-immigrant critics about “anchor babies,” and probably “terror babies” too, for that matter.
The radical threat to the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born in the United States is another consequence of the federal government’s failure to deal with immigration for the last decade. As I am writing, there is no evidence of anything but continued posturing, political stagnation, and finger-pointing on this critical issue. The Obama administration does not have a record of fighting the good fight to get the debate under way. Its strategy is to work around the edges. It has put money into eliminating the FBI backlog on background checks for people applying for legal immigration and has also put more money into border security to try to defuse concern about terrorism risks posed by lax security. But basically the country remains adrift on immigration, legal and illegal.
“In the end,” President Obama has said, “our broken immigration system affects more than a single community; it affects our entire country. And as we continue to strengthen our economy and jump-start job creation, we need to do so with an immigration system that works, not the broken system we have now.”
President Obama is echoing President Bush on this issue. Left and Right agree at the highest levels of government that something has to be done. But the years continue to pass without politicians taking the risk of tackling the problem. We are locked into a game of political checkers where no one is going to move for fear of getting jumped.
Midway through the twenty-first century, about 20 percent of the U.S. population will be made up of people born in other countries. Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group, now make up 15 percent of the population. About a quarter of the Hispanic population is made up of illegal immigrants. Polls show Hispanics oppose most of the stringent enforcement plans intended to cut down on illegal immigration. They are almost perfectly aligned in opposition to the anti-immigrant crowd on the Right. Yet within that larger group, native-born Hispanics have the same opinions as the general American population about the need for better border enforcement.
What the polls tell us is that there is a large, unexplored middle ground on immigration. That it is not the divisive issue that political extremists tell us it is. Most Americans, whatever their backgrounds, believe we are a unique nation of immigrants and yet care about our laws of citizenship and national security in an age of terrorist threats. They understand the importance of opening doors for both low-wage workers who do many critical jobs in the United States and highly skilled workers who are key to the continued growth of the U.S. economy.
Why is no one talking to them?
CHAPTER 7
THE ABORTION WARS
AMERICA LONG AGO reached the point where there is no productive way to discuss abortion. It is the issue that best exemplifies the difficulty of having an honest conversation in America. Ranting and vituperative slander erupt regularly in any public discussion of abortion. Extremists insist there is no middle ground—only their way. That’s why even an admission of uncertainty leads to condemnation from those who are either proabortion or antiabortion. Debate degenerates into arguments over abortion that are so personal and hurtful. To escape harsh judgment from those who would ostracize them, many women who have had abortions withhold the truth from parents, husbands, and children. They carry it as a private burden, and an increasing number of doctors do not even learn how to perform abortions, so they can avoid the harassment and arguments that would result from doing the procedure.
Political leaders, both for and against abortion, stick to politically correct scripts for fear of losing ground to another politician who is willing to take an absolutist stance. Even politicians who speak out of sincere belief on abortion knowingly overstate their ability to end abortion or protect women who want an abortion.
It is difficult to discuss any social issue that has strong ties to the volcanic topics of sexual behavior and religious beliefs. But in 1972 abortion went into another dimension, beyond homosexuality and pornography. That year President Nixon captured 60 percent of Catholic voters, previously a reliable Democratic constituency. He won those Catholic voters after announcing his opposition to “unrestricted abortion.” However, the next year, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was protected by the Constitution. Suddenly, abortion became the number one polarizing issue in the nation. Forty years later it remains the champion wedge issue to divide the American people and the major political parties. Nothing matches its powerful, highly combustible political mixture of sex, death, women’s liberation, and religion.
That is why abortion is the ep
itome of fixed, intractable, polarized American politics.
Every presidential candidate is compelled to support abortion rights if they are Democratic, or stand against abortion rights if they are a Republican.
Every Supreme Court nominee is scrutinized for any indication of how they will vote on abortion.
Catholic leaders threaten to deny politicians the right to communion if they disagree with the church hierarchy, without acknowledging that there is a major divide on the issue of abortion among the most faithful Catholics.
People who call themselves liberals can be intolerant when it comes to abortion. Teddy Kennedy famously said of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions.” Faye Wattleton, the former head of Planned Parenthood, a group that provides abortions, once charged abortion opponents with modern-day “McCarthyism.” Abortion supporters have made a hideous trademark of a twisted coat hanger as a reminder of the back-alley alternative to legal, supervised medical abortions.
Juan Williams Page 16
