How Immigration Became so Controversial

Immigration seems to be the most prominent wedge issue in America. Senate Republicans and Democrats shut down the federal government over the treatment of immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, also known as Dreamers. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump referred to U.S. immigration law as a “broken” system; one party clapped, the other scowled. This polarized reaction reflects a widening divide among voters, as Democrats are now twice as likely as Republicans to say immigrants strengthen the country.

These stories and others might make it seem like most Americans are anxious about the deleterious effects of immigration on America’s economy and culture. But along several dimensions, immigration has never been more popular in the history of public polling:

• The share of Americans calling for lower levels of immigration has fallen from a high of 65 percent in the mid-1990s to just 35 percent, near its record low.

• A 2017 Gallup poll found that fears that immigrants bring crime, take jobs from native-born families, or damage the budget and overall economy are all at all-time lows.

• In the same poll, the percentage of Americans saying immigrants “mostly help” the economy reached its highest point since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.

• A Pew Research poll asking if immigrants “strengthen [the] country with their hard work and talents” similarly found affirmative responses at an all-time high.

But immigration is not a monolithic issue; there is no one immigration question. There are more like three: How should the United States treat illegal immigrants, especially those brought to the country as children? Should overall immigration levels be reduced, increased, or neither? And how should the U.S. prioritize the various groups—refugees, family members, economic migrants, and skilled workers among them—seeking entry to the country? It’s possible that most voters don’t disentangle the issues this specifically, and don’t think too much about the answers to each question. After all, immigration ranks quite low on Americans’ policy priorities—it’s behind the deficit and tied with the influence of lobbyists—which makes responses shift along with the positions of presidential candidates, political rhetoric, or polling language. (You might, for example, get very different answers to questions emphasizing “law and order” versus the general value of “diversity.” )

On the most important immigration question—the “levels” question—it doesn’t seem quite right to say the issue of immigration divides America. It more clearly divides Republicans—both from the rest of the country, and from one another. Immigration isolates a nativist faction of the right in a country that is, overall, growing more tolerant of diversity. January’s government shutdown is a perfect example. Nearly 90 percent of Americans favor legal protections for Dreamers, but the GOP’s refusal to extend those protections outside of a larger deal led to the shutdown of the federal government, anyway.

What’s more, immigration pits Republicans against Republicans. On one side are the hard-line restrictionists, like White House aide Stephen Miller and—depending on the time and day—Donald Trump. This group favors a wall, rising arrests and deportations for undocumented workers, and a permanent cut in the number of immigrants that can enter the U.S., particularly (if you heed the president’s scatological commentary) from Latino or majority-black countries. Nativism runs deep among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Three-quarters of them say “building the wall” should be the highest priority of his presidency, while a majority of Americans say it shouldn’t be a priority at all.

But there is another side of the party, epitomized by its reliably pro-immigration donor class. In 2016, the Chamber of Commerce, a bastion of Reaganite conservatism, released a report concluding that immigrants “significantly benefit the U.S. economy by creating new jobs and complementing the skills of the U.S. native workforce.” The Koch Brothers and their influential political group Americans For Prosperity loudly decriedTrump’s immigration plans back in 2015. It wasn’t so long ago that this wing seemed to be the future of the party. The GOP’s “post-mortem” report on the 2012 election stated plainly, “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” and the presidential candidates with the most donor support in the 2016 election were Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, both of whom have supported high levels of immigration with something like amnesty for undocumented workers.

This tension within the Republican Party could be summarized as “ICE versus Inc.” In early January, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, raided nearly 100 7-Eleven stores across the country and made almost two dozen arrests. Along with the wall, these agent arrests, up more than 40 percent under Trump, are the clearest manifestation of the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But the Koch brothers, motivated by an interest in expanding the GOP coalition and providing corporations with cheap labor, have funded initiatives to attract Latino votes by helping undocumented workers with tax preparation, driver’s tests, and doctor’s visits. The modern GOP is an awkward political arrangement, in which pro-immigration corporate libertarians are subsidizing a virulent anti-immigrant movement.

* * *

The immigration issue was never easy. But it hasn’t always been this confusing.

For much of the 1990s, the two parties were essentially in lockstep on the issue of immigration. In 2005, Democratic and Republican voters were 5 percentage points apart in their favorability toward immigrants, according to Pew Research Center. But in the last 13 years, attitudes toward immigrants have forked dramatically between the two parties. Today, eight in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters say immigrants strengthen the country, twice the share of Republicans.

What happened in the mid-2000s to cleave the bipartisan consensus? In 2006, President George W. Bush pushed a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that failed in Congress. While the Senate draft created a path to legalize unauthorized immigrants, the House legislation emphasized border security and punishment for undocumented workers and their employers. The latter bill inspired a round of pro-naturalization protests across the country, which, in turn, caused a backlash among conservative voters. By the end of this maelstrom of bills and backlashes, comprehensive reform had failed and the parties had sharply split on the immigration issue. The latter is evident in the polling, which shows 2006 as the year when Democrats and Republicans split dramatically.

This split intensified under Obama, the 2016 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump’s presidency. After the Great Recession, white men without a college degree sharply soured on America’s future, and in polls conducted by Kellyanne Conway’s firm in 2014, many explicitly blamed illegal immigration for their economic plight, despite uneven evidence. Donald Trump harnessed this resentment of less educated whites from the start, using his first speech as a presidential candidate to accuse illegal immigrants of importing crime, drugs, and sexual assault.

But the above graph shows, it’s also the case that the Democratic Party has become much more accepting of immigrants—some might say even radically accepting, compared with recent history. There are several possible reasons. As the Hispanic population grew in the 2000s, labor unions that once feared the effect of cheap labor on their bargaining power came to see the naturalization of undocumented workers as a necessary step forward for labor relations. Meanwhile, as Hispanics became the fastest-growing ethnicity within the Democratic Party, Hispanic leaders lobbied for more pro-immigrant policies. Finally, as The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart has written, left-leaning tech leaders have pushed for expanding H-1B visas to let more high-skilled immigrants into the economy.

It’s possible that Democratic unity on immigration is just a proxy for unified opposition to Trump and that, in power, the party would face similar internecine fights over how to legislate on immigration. But this would be unfortunate, because the case for high levels of immigration remains quite strong.

The most common economic arguments against immigrants, particularly those that are low-skilled workers, are two-fold. First, there is the concern that new arrivals pull down wages for the low-income Americans with whom they compete. The evidence here is mixed and controversial, but a 2008 meta-analysis of more than 100 papers studying the effect of immigration on native-born wage growth characterized the impact on wages as “very small” and “more than half of the time statistically insignificant.” Second, there is a concern that immigrants are a drain on federal resources. It’s true that the first generation of low-skilled adults can receive more in health care, income support, and retirement benefits than they pay in taxes. But as their children grow up, find jobs, and pay taxes themselves, most immigrant families wind up being net contributors to the government over their decades-long residence in the U.S., according to a 2016 report from the National Academy of Sciences.

Too often lost in this discussion of wage and budget effect is the question of whether a rich country has a moral obligation to help poor families—particularly those in political distress—by admitting them as legal immigrants. The single most unambiguous, most uncontroversial fact about immigration is that it raises the living standards of poorer foreign-born workers. It is, essentially, the world’s most effective foreign-aid program on a per capita basis. But, more than mere charity, high levels of immigration seem to materially benefit the United States. America’s immigrant population is in many ways a model of the future of the country—more entrepreneurial, more likely to move toward opportunity, and all together more dynamic. To regard this community as something the United States should banish from the body politic is to mistake a vital organ for a cancer.

I have written that the current demographic and political makeup of the U.S. electorate (and other countries) makes it vulnerable to a race-baiting populist like Donald Trump, who can marshal the latent tribalism of a fading white majority to harass immigrants. But the United States’ demographic picture is changing quickly. The generation of Americans under 30 are the most diverse cohort in the U.S., the most fervently against the construction of any wall, and the most accepting of immigrants, even those that don’t speak fluent English.

The majority of children born in 2015 were non-white. That means even if the GOP hardliners managed to permanently end immigration this weekend, the United States’ white majority would decline into one of many non-majority pluralities within a few decades, anyway. No matter whether the future of the Republican Party is Stephen Miller or the Koch Brothers, multiracial nationalism is the future of the United States. No other nation is on the way. There is no other future to unite around.

The Politics of Immigration: Introduction to a Special Issue on US Immigration

1. Introduction

3While undocumented workers have always suffered wide-ranging exploitation—working dirty jobs at miserable pay, subjected to raids and arrests, deterred from organizing—their plight was exacerbated by the post-9/11 political climate in the United States. In a context characterized largely by fear, the war on terror quickly and easily morphed into a war on the foreigner. After the 2008 election, and the signals it sends, a new Congress will have to re-think its approach to border control.

4While undocumented workers have always been treated poorly, they were also welcomed (albeit implicitly) in a period characterized by economic expansion in the United States. As a commentator quoted in Benita Heiskanen’s contribution tells us, undocumented workers are often met by mixed signals: “[W]e have two signs posted at our borders. ‘Help Wanted’ and ‘Keep Out.’” The American economy was booming, and the domestic labor supply was insufficient to meet the growing demand. Immigrant labor filled the void.

6It is this radically new economic and political context that sets the stage for the new Congress, and its work on immigration reform. At the center of its deliberations will be three related issues: the costs of immigration; border control and the war on terror; and the growing influence of Latinos. This special issue takes aim at these three important subjects.

2. The Economics of Undocumented Immigration

8In most political contexts it is simply assumed that undocumented immigration constitutes a drain on national resources. But this assumption flies in the face of experience, and actually contradicts much scholarship on the subject. Unless costs and benefits are calculated in a ridiculously narrow (and economistic) fashion, communities mostly benefit from immigration—both documented and undocumented.

13Still, this sort of myopic argument about the economic costs of undocumented workers continues to dominate political discussion, as evidenced in different ways in each of the three contributions that follow.

3. Border Control and the War on Terror

16Of course, none of this has stopped politicians from linking Homeland Security and border control under the Bush administration. This connection is especially clear in Catherine Lejeune’s contribution, which examines how a new National Security State, borne of 11 September, has been used to intimidate immigrant workers. Lejeune’s examination is done by way of a detailed survey of recent immigration legislation in the US, and the sundry political motivations that lie behind them. The picture that Lejeune paints is a disturbing one, where the Bush administration’s War on Terror has slowly spread to a subsequent War on Immigrants.

17It is in light of this sort of detailed, and up-to-date, survey of recent immigration legislation that we can clearly see how rapidly the political ground was changing prior to the recent presidential election. Lejeune provides us with a fascinating glimpse of the complicated ways that US immigration policy is infused with party politics. There are few other political issues that create stranger political bedfellows in the United States—as is evidenced by the co-authorship of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (S. 1033), a bill proposed in May 2005 by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain. Indeed, there are few other issues that are better-suited to splitting today’s Republican Party (as witnessed early-on in the race for the Republican Party nomination). Immigration policy is the venue for Super Bowl Politics.

18It is because of the high-stakes nature of immigration policy that America finds it so difficult to secure the sort of considered and thoughtful legislation it deserves. It is also the reason that immigration policy lends itself so readily to political grandstanding. As Lejeune’s contribution hints (and as the contribution by Frederick Douzet examines in more detail), the result of this political stalemate has been a rise in local responses that borders on the vigilante. Border state residents have been encouraged to organize in armed groups that informally patrol the borders, wrapping themselves in patriotic sentiment while promising to compensate for what they see is an inadequate federal response at the borders.

20This observation reveals two puzzles worthy of further study. First, what is the motivation driving so many cities to protect these undocumented workers if they represent such a phenomenal drain on their resources? More importantly, why do some local authorities embrace and protect these undocumented workers, while others spend scarce local resources to hunt them down and throw them out? This second question lends itself to a promising comparative research project for some enterprising scholar.

4. The Growing Influence of Latinos

25This matters because much of the current debate about undocumented immigration in the United States concerns this underlying tension about how to interpret (and react to) the country’s changing identity. For those who draw on a pliable and reflexive notion of culture, there is no threat from a growing Latino presence in the US. Rather, the introduction of Latino voices offers new impetus and direction to the nation’s identity, which is understood as a collage, or imaginative blend, of the near (US) and the far (Latin America).

26Nowhere has this influence been more evident than at the “Day without Immigrants” march. It is this historic event that Benita Heiskanen uses to center her contribution to this special issue. On 1 May 2006 over a million immigrant supporters took to the streets to protest the sweeping provisions of the Sensebrenner Bill. Outraged by increasingly frequent attempts to paint immigrants as criminals and/or terrorists, these peaceful protestors rocked the political establishment with both their size and their message.

27Heiskanen begins her investigation with a fascinating discussion of the roots to the American national identity. Because US immigration law has always been tied to racial categories, race has always been—in effect—a policy matter. In Heiskanen’s discussion we learn of the role that race has played as a central premise for defining US citizenship, national identity and nationhood. This role remained important in the debates that followed the Day without Immigrants; debates that were largely about the nature of identity in a globalized world. In the one corner we find those, like Huntington, who see national identity as fixed in an idealized and ethnically homogenized past. For people in this corner, the growing Latino presence is a weed that needs to be plucked. In the other corner are those who understand American national identity to be fluid and constantly incorporating (and adopting) foreign influences.

28In Heiskanen’s portrayal of these political debates we see commentators on the left and the right struggle with how to interpret this important new and Latino voice in American politics, in the wake of the May Day protests. It is in these sundry reactions, and the political deals that will result from them, where I expect to find the seeds of any future American immigration policy. It is for this reason that Heiskanen’s article constitutes a very important and insightful contribution.

29This cultural and political tension is also very evident in the contribution by Frederick Douzet, which examines the rise of the Minutemen and recent anti-immigration attitudes in California. Drawing on her extensive field work along the Mexican-US border in California, Douzet is able to show how contemporary attitudes about undocumented immigrants are fueled by different concerns than those that drove earlier anti-immigrant sentiment in California.

30This field work reveals a number of related splinter groups, borne of the Minutemen, who have become so frustrated by the government’s apparent failure in responding to undocumented immigration, that they have taken to the border to stop what they see as a foreign invasion. While explicitly denying any racial motivation, they see the US engaged in a cultural war—it is being invaded by those who don’t respect its law, its language, or its (Anglo-Protestant) culture. The aims of this defensive and peaceful action are manifold: to man and protect the borders; to lobby the federal government and the larger political debate; to protest the employment of undocumented day labors; to litter the border with American flags and warning signs…

31What is interesting about the broader context of these protests, compared to the anti-immigrant sentiment revealed in the struggle over Proposition 187, is the fact that the local economy was in much better shape during the rise of the Minutemen. From Douzet’s depiction, one sees how their struggle is only partly about the economic effects of this immigration. Sure, there are obvious concerns about the effects of immigration on the quality of local public services. But in contrast to earlier anti-immigration rounds, these protests matured in a relatively stable economy. From this favorable economic climate rose a grass-roots revolt that aimed to influence a national dialogue over the heart and soul of the country, in the face of a perceived threat.

32The rise of the Minutemen, and like-minded organizations, illustrate the complicated mixture of motivations that animate the immigration issue in US political life. In Douzet’s depiction we see the clear influence of all three of the motivating factors described in this brief introduction: concerns about the economic effects of the immigrants, concerns about the national security context in the post-9/11 world, and concerns about how these workers challenge America’s cultural identity by living in ethnic enclaves, and refusing to integrate into the larger (white and English-speaking) melting pot that was once depicted on American TVs and in American history books.

5. Conclusion

33What follows are three contributions that examine the contentious nature of contemporary immigration policy in the United States. As we distance ourselves from the horrific events of September 2001, and once the Obama administration is able to clear its crowded desk of pressing problems, the United States will need to re-think its attitude about undocumented workers. There is much at stake, and many paths from which to choose. These three contributions, together, provide readers with the sort of information and background that will be necessary to understand the nature of the political struggle ahead.

The Political Debate over Immigration

Immigration has always been a political issue because government sets the numbers and rules for legal immigration. For a time during the 2008 presidential election, immigration was the most important issue for voters in several key agricultural states.

The first contests of any modern presidential election cycle are the caucuses in Iowa (early January) followed shortly by the primary in South Carolina (late January). Both states have absorbed large numbers of immigrants brought in to work in meatpacking plants. The candidates who win primaries in these states gain important momentum that can keep a campaign on track or derail it.

In 2008, a Pew Center poll showed that – nationally – immigration was the "most important issue" for only six percent of the voters. But in Iowa and South Carolina, the issue rose to the top, particularly for Republican voters.

This fact forced John McCain and other primary candidates to modify their positions on immigration. McCain had been one of the co-sponsors of an immigration bill that would have increased border patrols and enforcement while providing a path to citizenship for some of those immigrants already in the country illegally. He was forced to downplay the approach because key blocks of Republican voters hated it.

"It's the influx of illegals into places where they've never seen a Hispanic influence before," McCain told a reporter for The New Yorker. "You probably see more emotion in Iowa than you do in Arizona on this issue. I was in a town in Iowa, and 20 years ago there were no Hispanics in the town. Then a meatpacking facility was opened up. Now 20 percent of their population is Hispanic. There were senior citizens there who were – 'concerned' is not the word. They see this as an assault on their culture, what they view as an impact on what have been their traditions in Iowa, in the small towns in Iowa. So you get questions like, 'Why do I have to punch one for English?' 'Why can't they speak English?' It's become larger than just the fact that we need to enforce our borders."

Later, of course, the economy took over as the overwhelming issue everywhere for everyone. But for a time, immigration in rural states was influencing the choice of voters for presidential nominees.

Every administration since 1970 has had to formulate policy on several key questions –

• How many immigrants should be allowed in?
• Who should be allowed in and why?
• How do we enforce the laws already on the books?
• What do we do with those who are already here illegally and working in jobs that most native-born citizens don't seem to want, at least for the wages being paid?

Since 2000, the U.S. has legally admitted just over one million immigrants each year. It's estimated that there are a total of 37 million immigrants living in the U.S. now – of those, 12 million are illegal immigrants, 10 million are immigrants living here legally, and 15 million have become naturalized U.S. citizens. The number of illegal immigrants may have declined in 2008 and '09 because of the harsh economic slowdown.

In 2008, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) arrested and deported almost 350,000 immigrants in often highly publicized raids on meatpacking and food processing plants. At times, those raids separated illegal parents from their children who were born in the U.S. and thus became citizens.

Under current law, foreigners can legally enter the U.S. under certain conditions –

• if they have certain types of family members already here;
• if they are being adopted by a U.S. family;
• if they have a job with a U.S. company;
• if they are refugees or ask for political asylum under strict rules;
• if they are chosen in a "diversity lottery" for people from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.;
• or, if they have made substantial investments – in one program, $1 million – or have created jobs in the U.S.

In 2009, members of Congress and the Obama administration reopened the debate over immigration, but proposed limited reforms. The main effort, the DREAM Act, was introduced to help young people brought to the U.S. as undocumented immigrant children who have grown up here, stayed in school and kept out of trouble. If enacted, the proposed law would set up a way for these children to become legal residents when they graduate from high school.

Because of the grueling political battles of the past, supporters of immigration reform seemed unwilling in 2009 to pursue major reforms.

Lourdes Gouveia says that she has seen the wave of immigration slow down, as well. "This immigration stream has matured," she says. "Immigration is slowing down, as it always does. Immigration streams have a history – they are like a bell curve of sorts. They start out as a trickle, they grow as the network becomes denser and people bring their relatives whether they're in Italians or Polish or whatever, and then they begin to slow down – as the initial attractiveness is no longer there, as the networks that are already in place have sort of exhausted their ties and situations change."

Lourdes says we should strive to do the best job we can of welcoming and assimilating new immigrants. "We are an immigrant country today that has forgotten how to do integration well and has learned little from the lessons of the past because we have decided to distort the past rather than truly learn from it."

Written by Bill Ganzel, the Ganzel Group. First published in 2009. A partial bibliography of sources is here.