The Trump administration’s brutal treatment of Latin American asylum seekers this summer and its underwhelming consequences, namely the negligible impact on his overall approval rating, should have proven that moral shaming simply does not sway public opinion when it comes to immigration writ large. The media outcry, which included comparisons to scenes from the Civil War and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ description of detention centers as “concentration camps” also fell flat (or at least, on deaf ears). The reality is that Republicans own Democrats on this issue. But how has the right so successfully exploited immigration to its political benefit, and become nearly bulletproof in the process? We have to look back to decades of leftist and Democrat immigration policy to understand where we are today. Luckily, the current struggle over the direction of the Democratic Party could finally deny Republicans the moral high ground they have enjoyed for so long.
The media and the populist wave
Anti-immigrant populism has always vexed the American media and political establishment. Mainstream analysis in newspapers and think tanks tends to be so steeped in a naïve trust in macro-economic indicators such as GDP and unemployment that it consistently overlooks the economic basis of populist success (this Brookings Institute primer on European populism is a perfect example). Journalists and even some economists assume that a few years of economic growth can dull the effects of globalization – including the plague of inequality, the loss of job stability, and the reign of austerity politics which are by now fixtures of American politics. Convinced that we are the midst of a truly “strong economy,” the media leans on two theories to make sense of the right’s successful exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment.
The first is the validation of the rightwing notion of a rampant immigration crisis, despite the lack of evidence that an influx of cheap labor (legal or illegal) is responsible for the declining economic welfare of the American working and middle classes. A recent example is the line of questioning during CNN’s Democratic debate in late July, where moderators repeatedly used alarmist language about open borders, releasing detained migrants into the American public, and the dangers of free healthcare and education as magnets for illegal immigrants. But a second argument has also become popular wisdom: We are told that we are in the midst of a deep cultural shift towards nationalism and xenophobia. These tendencies, journalists and pundits bemoan, are encoded in our DNA. Supposed experts have opined on how Trump is a Confederate president, and that all roads eventually return to the core question of “who is considered fully human” in America. The legacies of Slavery and settler colonialism in the US, like that of European Fascism, are simply rearing their stubborn ugly heads.
Now, let’s be clear. Racist prejudice has become a common mode of political expression in the populist wave. But it is purely circular thinking to attribute populist political gains to racism, which is something like arguing that racialized hatred exists because it always has. To understand how the American right has potently weaponized immigration while also serving as the proud haven for corporate power since the 1980s, we have to examine the broader transformation in the politics of the left over the past fifty years. Labor unions and other political groups in favor of worker protections and a stronger welfare state, including Democratic politicians, slowly surrendered the rhetorical tools for the current populist anti-immigrant wave.
Looking back – How the left came to defend immigration
In her 2018 book, Undocumented lives: the untold story of Mexican migration, Stanford professor Ana Minian examines the history of Mexico-US immigration between 1965 and 1986 from the perspective of the migrants, and argues that American political debate during this period was deeply out of touch with the forces shaping migrants’ decisions. You’re probably already familiar with how this story played out on the right, with anti-immigration Republicans peddling free-trade policies which fueled the influx of southern labor they so ardently opposed. But Minian also points to a less obvious but just as relevant contradiction on the left, which was its gradual adoption of a “pro-immigration” stance which did little for migrant communities and which would fatally weaken the Democrats’ pro-labor message.
In the early 1970s, when northward immigration first entered the American political agenda, labor groups such as the AFL-CIO actually tended to take a strong anti-immigration position. They argued that cheap labor from Mexico deprived Americans of jobs and depleted the resources of the welfare state. Pro-union Democratic politicians were some of the first to introduce bills imposing sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegal workers (Minian, 186-7). But this early posture of labor and its allies was curiously short-lived, and they began to reverse course after mid-decade and increasingly sought to protect immigrants.
What explains this shift? Minian suggests that one reason was the declining influence of unions, some of which began enrolling undocumented workers to boost their numbers. Just as important, though, was the rise of Mexican-American advocacy groups, such as the National Council of the La Raza (now UnidosUS) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), who opposed anti-immigration measures on the grounds that they were racist, and argued that Mexican workers filled an important and neglected niche in the US economy (Minian, 188-90). By the mid-80s, institutionalized labor and its advocates tended to be pro-immigration, and this too was the stance adopted by Democrats who opposed Reagon-era immigration policies, despite acknowledging the “crisis at the border.”
Curiously, big businesses that employed immigrants underwent an opposite and parallel shift during the same period. Originally openly in favor of cheap migrant labor in the 70s, during the following decade the Chamber of Commerce began taking an anti-immigration stance to align itself with the Republican lawmakers with which it sought to curry favor (Minian, 195-6). These employers now professed to be against labor-flows (although still content to employ illegal workers when they found them) and in favor of free trade, and they would support the Reagan and Clinton-era reforms (GATT and NAFTA) which ultimately impoverished the Mexican countryside and repeatedly increased northward migration. In the span of just over a decade, labor and business had switched their stated positions on immigration, and Democrats and Republicans followed suit.
Rodney Benson, professor of Media, Communication, and Culture at NYU, argues that the structure and history of the American news media is key to understanding this shift in the immigration debate on the left. In his important 2013 book, Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison, Benson showed that a narrative-driven “humanitarian” perspective became the dominant frame for American press coverage of immigration over the same period that Minian examines, as well as later into the 2000s. Some of this tendency was built in; Benson argues that American journalistic culture is particularly fact-driven and investigative, and was pre-disposed to adopt the humanitarian frame from the ascendant immigration advocacy groups of the 70s and 80s (Benson, 87-88). Newspapers also became more profit-driven in the 80s and further pursued the human-interest lens to increase circulation, and then again during the 2000s to increase their readership on the internet (Benson, 47-50).
As the humanitarian approach came to dominate the nation’s most circulated publications, a labor and jobs-based approach to immigration was conspicuously absent. Benson attributes this to the lack of large America publications which openly challenge business power, perhaps owing to the historically private ownership of the press and its self-consciously fact-driven rather than ideological sway (Benson, 32). Labor reporting was also declining in the 70s and 80s, as unions in the news media sector weakened and the profit motive drove reporters, themselves typically from privileged urban backgrounds, to target high-income audiences in their stories. Labor’s decline shifted the frame for the debate, and “immigration, once considered an essential part of the labor beat, was progressively reconceived as a story of race and culture” (Benson, 76). The media narrative converged with that of the overall Democratic platform and reinforced it, probably owing to an overlap in class and coastal geography, a proximity which is important to understanding the modern rightwing charge of bias in the “liberal media.”
The anti-immigration right easily inhabited the left’s abandoned economic framework and framed itself as more pro-worker than the left. Meanwhile, in a pattern that continues today, the left and the Democrats began to avoid the economic frame of jobs in relation to immigration, and instead embraced what Benson calls the neoliberal “good worker” frame. In this schema, (illegal) immigrants make exclusively positive contributions to the American economy but are discriminated against because of their race. This Democratic refrain actually echoes the bygone narratives of big business which defended its use of illegal labor by claiming that Americans were unwilling to take the jobs – the Arizona Cattle Growers Association said this in the 1980s, for example (Minian, 192). Today, Republicans are instead able to shamelessly parrot the old union talking point that Americans will work any job that pays enough. As Benson says, this is sensible argument which one rarely finds in the mainstream media today (Benson, 72).
The irony of politicians on the left neglecting the basic issues of labor – wages, exploitation, and worker protections – and yet supporting the plight of illegal immigrants remains a point of glaring inconsistency in the platform of Democrats and advocacy groups today. Minian writes, for example, that Mexican Advocacy groups supported family unification but ignored how migration split families (Minian, 205). There is a similar discourse now about the horrendous ICE raids that split families apart – when Donald Trump tweeted that he would delay the raids in June of this year, Nancy Pelosi tweeted her thanks and declared that “Families belong together.” The irony being that these families have already been split by migration.
By now we are familiar with the maddening media and political cycle: Republicans use an economic frame to justify their brutal treatment of illegal immigrants, and Democrats double down on their ineffective humanitarian frame in response. As Matt Taibbi argues in his recent book, Hate Inc.: Why today’s media makes us despise one another, the logic of the corporate media revolves around demonizing political opponents at all costs, even that of journalistic integrity or ideological consistency. This trend has become more pronounced during the Trump presidency, and while networks and newspapers rake in the profits our political discourse becomes increasingly impoverished.
Today, immigration is one of the reasons that the Republicans can keep up the fiction of fighting for the working-class, despite their pro-corporate policies. Their rhetorical use of labor discourse has been instrumental, not only in Trump’s electoral victory but also for the elections of George W. Bush (Trump’s innovation was mixing in a critique of globalization, to absurdly contradictory effect). It is striking that the party of business interests has co-opted the rhetoric of the ordinary citizen, but this is well-documented, as Thomas Frank showed in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). In the case of immigration, the left’s surrender of economic rhetoric has been fundamental.
The weakness of the left opens racist doors on the right. The final and critical ingredient to the rightwing populist model is the characterization of an external population as invasive and dangerous. The credibility of racist demagogues tends to be irrelevant, as long as their critique of the establishment resonates with voters. Trump’s description of Mexican rapists comes to mind, but we find the same scapegoating in European politics. Take the case of Italy, for instance, where the poll-topping League party was long known for its xenophobic hatred of southern Italians. After the collapse of the country’s center left, the League made immigrants its new primary target, and in 2019 has become the country’s most popular party and has even begun to garner a small portion of the southern vote. As in the United States, what continues to make the false rightwing promise of national solidarity attractve is widespread mistrust of a weak and de-legitimized pro-corporate left.
Reimagining leftist immigration discourse
The story of American immigration politics illustrates the strategic weaknesses and moral inconsistencies which have plagued Democrats since the Reagan years, since which time they have hesitated to frame their constituency as an economic coalition and instead preferred a diversity-oriented “big tent” of wealthy and educated urban dwellers together with racial minorities. On immigration, they have allowed conservatives to claim the moral ground about jobs and themselves taken to mimicking business narratives about good immigrant workers and their cheap labor niche, overlaying their free-market argument with a humanitarian stance which never satisfies the (often misdirected) economic anxiety of voters.
The left should by all means protest the mistreatment of immigrants and the racist portrayal of them as an invasive horde; but a purely humanitarian focus on their plight does migrants more harm than good. This vulnerable population has become the battleground for a range of unrelated economic problems, and the center of an absurd culture war. The classic defense, “We are a nation of immigrants,” comes across as intellectually dishonest – we can hardly propose a second go of the settler colonialism that built this country over the past several centuries. Worse, the right portrays this line of thinking as the view of out-of-touch urbanites. Democrats who take the bait and praise the cultural impact of immigration (and honestly, who doesn’t love Mexican food?), further the myth that it actually matters how good or interesting immigrants are, rather than debating the merits of an economy built on cheap illegal labor in the first place.
There is good news, though. The populist Republican right’s bald rhetoric of economic nationalism just barely manages to hold together its key constituencies of the white working class and the donor class, while thinly veiling its anti-worker policies. In other words, they can be beaten. The current tensions in the Democratic Party show that some are already re-inventing the rhetoric of the left to take the wind out of the sails of the populist right. The Bernie Sanders wing of the party has been strident in its pro-labor message in a way which disarms immigration alarmism across the political spectrum. Sanders’ condemnation of global trade deals such as NAFTA and the TPP and his socialist credentials actually earn him the trust of his working-class base, who are themselves multi-ethnic, often first-time voters, and not impressed with internationalist discourses. Working class values are more nationalist than cosmopolitan, though, and have not found an easy home in the wealthy, educated, and socially “liberal” American Democratic base.
If Democrats want to maintain credibility among the working class and win elections, they have to remember what they’re fighting for: a decent quality of life for ordinary Americans which is not subservient to the demands of corporate power. Using a national frame to identify the economic structures which have destroyed job security is also achievable without pitting the working poor against immigrants. Debunking the myth of an immigration crisis and ditching the neoliberal humanitarian approach may also be, surprisingly, the swiftest and most effective way to end the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants at our southern border.
Ali Karamustafa will complete his PhD in history at Stanford University in January 2020. He focuses on the history of early modern Eurasian Empires, in particular the Ottoman, Safavid, and Russian Empires. He is also a political junkie who seeks to better understand American and Middle Eastern politics from economic and historical perspectives.
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