Why should Dreamers trust Democrats?
A response for the December presidential debate
Under Obama, deportations reached record highs; during his two terms in office, 2.8 million immigrants were deported — an average of nearly 1,000 people a day, every day, for 8 years.
At the last presidential debate in December, the moderators posed an interesting question: Why should Dreamers trust Democrats? It’s a good question, and one that is near to my own heart; my earliest activism was with Dreamers, and here we are more than a decade later, and immigration reform is, well, still a dream.
I want to provide a little history for those who think Democrats are the party for immigrants. That might be true if we’re only comparing Democrats to Republicans, but the cruelty of U.S. immigration policy is a bipartisan affair. Trump inherited a well oiled machinery of immigrant criminalization and death started by Democrats. President Clinton in particular authored four anti-immigrant policies still in place today.
- Operation Gatekeeper
- “Tough on Crime” Bill
- IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act)
- NAFTA
Operation Gatekeeper
The “prevention through deterrence” policy has been nothing less than a death sentence for migrants — a very unpleasant death, too. Corpses recovered in the desert have to be rehydrated before their fingerprints are identifiable. Fully 40% of migrant remains have never been identified. They are sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, each one a human being loved by someone who will wonder, forever, where their loved one lay down for the last time.
The militarized border brought into being by Operation Gatekeeper has done little to deter migrants, instead it made the journey riskier for people who were already escaping terrible danger to their lives.
Tough on crime bill
Clinton’s “tough on crime” bill set the stage for an expanded deportation apparatus. Under the aegis of this bill, over-policing of black and brown communities became normalized, instead of addressing structural causes of crime. Bottom line, the way Clinton stoked white racial resentment for electoral gain (“no one can say I’m soft on crime”) is an echo of Trump’s similar declarations.
IIRIRA
President Bill Clinton passed the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” (IIRIRA). This is why undocumented immigrants today don’t have a reasonable pathway to citizenship. It requires undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to leave the country for ten years before they can apply for legal status, pushing them to the back of the line.
NAFTA
When NAFTA passed, poverty in Mexico skyrocketed as the competition from the highly subsidized U.S. agricultural industry contributed to the loss of an estimated two million agricultural jobs in Mexico. Migrants entering the US for these jobs were caught between a rock and a hard place — a deep recession in Mexico, or low wages in the US, where employers levy the threat of deportation to keep wages down.
Even before the Clinton administration, U.S. intervention in Latin America created many of the conditions of poverty and violence that forced millions of people to migrate north. As the immigrant adage goes, “We are here because you (the United States) were there.”
From “Yes, we can” to deporter in chief
There is real irony that President Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes we can” was inspired by activist Dolores Huerta, who made “si se puede” the rallying cry of migrant farmworkers organizing for their rights.
Immigration enforcement funding reached $18 billion in 2012; that’s way more than the combined spending on the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, and ATF. Under Obama, deportations reached record highs; during his two terms in office, 2.8 million immigrants were deported — an average of nearly 1,000 people a day, every day, for 8 years.
What then must we do?
A better response to right-wing populism and anti-immigrant pushback is not to curb immigration but rather to champion a progressive platform that addresses the economic concerns of the poor — a platform like mine that focuses urgently on a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, affordable housing, a living wage, and policies like universal basic income that prepare us for the coming age of automation and artificial intelligence, a time when futurists like Ray Kurzweil predict the decimation of jobs and work as we currently know it.
If you’d like to learn more on this topic, I recommend the book Abolish ICE by Natascha Elena Uhlmann, and Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas.
