The War on Immigrants
Get ready for a Republican assault -- their opportunity
for election-year demagogy.
By Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect
Web Exclusive: 12.31.05
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?
section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10789
The conventional wisdom is still unpersuaded that the
Republican Party is about to mount a full-force attack
on American's undocumented immigrants -- of whom, by
some counts, there are 11 million. After all, the
Republicans are the party of employers -- large
(agribusiness), medium (construction companies), and
small (restaurateurs) -- who have long depended on
immigrants for cheap labor. The cheap labor sectors of
American capitalism are a huge source of donations for
the GOP. How could the Republicans turn their back on
them?
But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Republicans are
coming up on a midterm election in which their control
of both houses of Congress is very much at stake. Their
advantage in foreign and military policy has been
diminished by the president's stunningly inept handling
of the war in Iraq. And on the domestic and economic
fronts, they have nothing to offer at all -- save only
a greater zeal than the Democrats possess to "do
something about immigration." With control of Capitol
Hill very much in the balance, they will beg the
forbearance of their longtime friends at the building
contractor, big agra, and restaurant lobbies, and go
after the immigrants tooth and nail.
And no wonder. Fear and resentment of the effects of an
open border -- primarily the economic effects, and only
secondarily the cultural ones -- are rampant throughout
the American working class. That is clear from all
available polling, and to any journalist who writes
about the economy and gets responses from his or her
readers. That's certainly been the case with my own
column in the Washington Post. Whenever I write about
wages and incomes, characteristically in columns that
take the side of unions and question the benefits of
globalization, I always get dozens (at least) of e-
mails from readers sympathetic to my viewpoint and to
liberal politics generally, but who want to impress on
me that the other huge problem is all those immigrants
who are taking jobs away from the native-born and
driving down wages across the land.
There is a response to this argument that is popular
among both employers and pro-immigrant liberals: that
immigrants take jobs that no native-born workers would
want. Among affluent liberal professionals, comfortably
cocooned, it is almost possible to see how this
illusion could be sustained: immigrants mow the lawns
and take care of the kids, something nobody else in the
neighborhood would do. But this belief is utterly
wrong, and pro-immigrant liberals who invoke it are
doing their cause, and themselves, no favor.
For there are all manner of jobs in which the immigrant
labor force has supplanted the native-born one,
uncomfortable as it may be for the champions of
immigration to acknowledge. In most major American
cities, for instance, hotel housekeepers used to be
overwhelmingly black. Then hotels let those workers go
and replaced them with immigrants -- a grim reality
that the hotel workers union, HERE (before it merged to
become UNITE HERE), recognized at its 2000 convention
by resolving to pressure management in negotiations to
begin rehiring African Americans. (Every four years,
when I cover the New Hampshire primary, I even
rediscover hotel housekeepers who are white.)
As anyone who's followed the efforts to clear away the
damage from Katrina and rebuild the Gulf Coast can
plainly see, the contractors who have received our tax
dollars are using them to hire a largely undocumented
immigrant work force (though some of them have now been
constrained by the reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act
that was forced on the president by Congress). What's
gone on in the Gulf is emblematic of the far greater
shift in construction in America, in which immigrants
are the preferred work force for non-union jobs (and
almost all construction in the Sunbelt, and all
residential construction everywhere, is non-union).
Since the late 1980s, the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) has done a brilliant and
heroic job unionizing the largely immigrant janitors
who work in the downtown high-rises of the nation's
major cities outside the South (and now, with the
recent success in Houston, inside the South as well).
But in the 80s and 90s that immigrant work force
largely supplanted a native-born, often heavily
African-American work force. In Los Angeles, the flood
of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in the
mid-80s was exploited by janitorial contractors, who
discharged their unionized black employees (the union
was notably weak in those days) and hired the
immigrants at a pay rate that was a little under half
of what the unionized workers had been getting. Small
wonder that when Pete Wilson's appalling Proposition
187 -- which would have denied all public services,
such as the right to attend K-12 school, to
undocumented immigrants and their children -- appeared
on the 1994 ballot, the African American precincts of
Los Angeles joined the most conservative white
neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley in supporting
it. (Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly, though a
court subsequently struck down almost all of its
provisions.)
A lot of the industries that disproportionately hire
immigrants -- agriculture and slaughterhouses, for
instance -- do indeed offer the dirtiest, most
dangerous and thankless jobs in the nation. But
unionized packinghouse workers at least made a decent
wage (and still do, in the dwindling number of
factories that are still unionized). And unionized
construction workers, in cities such as Las Vegas where
projects are plentiful, make a good living. It is folly
to deny that immigrants take jobs that might otherwise
be taken by the native born.
None of this is to deny that the reasons for the broad
stagnation of working-class incomes in this country
since the late 1970s -- and their steady decline even
amid the recovery of the past nearly four years -- are
many and varied. American employers' very successful
war on unions is a primary culprit. So is automation.
So is the process by which previously American
manufactures, retailers, and now even service providers
have been able to shift their production abroad, a
cosmic shift greatly abetted by trade laws promoted by
investment institutions. But if globalization offers
one plausible explanation for the decline in incomes
during this recovery, and for the paradox of a
declining unemployment rate absent any significant job
creation (that is, people are dropping out of the labor
force), so does immigration. Anyone who follows the
declining ranking over the past 40 years of the Los
Angeles metropolitan area (the mega city most impacted
by the immigration of the past quarter-century), when
the median income of cities is compared, would be hard
pressed to argue that immigration, combined with
deunionization and all the rest, isn't a factor.
It should come as no surprise that tens of millions of
Americans are sorely vexed by the changes in the
economy and the elimination of vast numbers of decent
paying jobs. When it comes to the causes of this
stagnation, Americans have three distinct reactions. By
the evidence of polling, an increasing number --
clearly a majority now -- recognize the importance of
unions, though fewer and fewer have any firsthand
contact with unions or an understanding of what they
do. This is, however, something of an opinion in vacuo
-- the number of Americans who understand how labor law
reform could revive the union movement is miniscule.
Secondly, as any number of focus groups have made
clear, globalization to most Americans seems an
inevitable process, as unstoppable and even natural as
the movement of the tides. That it is a system both
constructed and gamed by the investment community and
large corporations may be partly understood, but that
hardly means anybody but a few progressive trade and
union economists has the slightest idea, or
inclination, as to how to alter its terms.
Which brings us to immigration, on which public opinion
is becoming as active as it is passive toward
globalization. We may not be able to keep Wal-Mart
production here, but we should be able to patrol our
own borders -- this is a credo that wins broad support.
The desire to punish those undocumenteds currently here
is a more narrowly held belief, but it's still
widespread, and growing. It is growing particularly
within the white working class, which since Nixon has
been an important part of the Republican coalition. Up
to now, it's a group that Republicans have appealed to
on issues of military toughness, cultural
traditionalism, and here and there, when electorally
necessary, good old-fashioned racism. Until recent
years, the economy has performed just well enough, and
mass immigration hasn't been so obvious a fact, that
the Republicans haven't been forced to appeal to this
constituency with an all-out war on immigrants.
Individual Republicans facing imminent defeat have done
this, most notably Pete Wilson, who salvaged his
floundering re-election campaign in 1994 by backing
Proposition 187. But Wilson's campaign cost the
California Republicans the support of Latino voters
(the fastest-growing group in the state, and national,
electorate) in subsequent elections, and Wilson quickly
became a pariah in his own party.
This year, however, dozens of Congressional Republicans
will likely find themselves in the kind of bind Wilson
was in just before he endorsed Proposition 187. And
their response, no matter what the National Restaurant
Association wants, will likely be to wage a Wilson-like
campaign.
Against this, liberals will have plenty of their own
themes to run on. And when the subject turns to
immigration, we are right to insist, as a matter of
human rights, on the legalization and naturalization of
the undocumenteds among us. As the dominant power in
the United States of NAFTA, we need to provide the
funds for the economic development of Mexico -- likely
the only way to stop the flood of immigrants here. We
need to support smarter border security as well, though
the idea of the militarization of the border runs
counter not just to liberal values, but to the very
essence of America. And we are right to insist on labor
law reform and on a negotiated change in the global
economic order that makes worker rights and labor
standards the prerequisites for doing business in the
world market.
But the grim fact is that outside the creation of
massive public works projects, the left, like the
center and right, has no real idea how to bring back
millions of decent-paying jobs to the United States in
an era of globalized work. And until we do, the
Republican solution to the great stagnation will be to
beat up on immigrants. It may only work for them in a
relative handful of races, but it is their chief
opportunity for election-year demagogy, and we must
prudently assume they will take it.
[Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American
Prospect.]
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.
