Jeff Faux makes a plea for Democrats to duck-and-cover on immigration

Jeff Faux's article Breaking Out of the Democrats’ Paralysis on Immigration American Prospect 08/14/2019 is worth reading, both for its strenths and its weaknesses.

Immigration makes a lot of people crazy, and not only in the United States. And, of course, different countries have distinct problems and issues with it. With respect to the American case in particular, I understand the dynamic, because it's a phenomenon I've followed with attention for most of my adult life (which goes back a few decades). But there is still part of me that wants to shake my head and say, why are they reacting that way?

One thing that polls show in the US, as well as in countries like Germany and Austria, is that hostility towards and fear of immigrants is highest in areas that have lower immigration. Part of that tracks to the urban/rural divide. But we shouldn't make too much of that division. In Austria, the experience has been that "integration" (assimilation) of immigrants tends to proceed more quickly in smaller communities than in larger cities. Which is not consistent with this atmospheric, hypothetical point that Faux makes that reads like the endless major media stories making anthropological expeditions to diners in the "heartland" to try to understand exotic Trump voters.

Thus, for example, the non-Hispanic worker (white or black) holding life together in a minimum-wage job in a restaurant, supermarket, or landscaping company, who finds herself increasingly isolated — and the job threatened—because she can’t keep up with her team who communicate with each other in Spanish, or because desperate immigrants will work for less and the boss takes advantage by battering down prevailing wages. This is fertile soil for Trump, as these stories get retold and matched by others in circles of family and friends.

Odd, then, that people in areas that have more contact to and interaction with immigrants are less hostile to immigrants. Almost as strange as how those communities on the Mexican border to the US most exposed to the "invasion" that Trump and his supporters have been warning us about tend to oppose the Trump Wall.

But there is no real mystery about what a meaningful "solution" of the immigration problems (real and fantasized) would be. The goal of "comprehensive immigration reform" has been actively discussed for years. A version of it almost passed during the Cheney-Bush Administration. But it was blocked by the "Tea Party" rightwing faction of the Republican Party. Obama made a nominal effort to pass a version, as well: Obama Says ‘Now Is the Time’ for Comprehensive Immigration Reform PBS Newshour 01/29/2013. This fact sheet shows Obama's version of the plan as of January 2013. Jeet Herr notes (Stephen Miller Is a Perfectly Mainstream Republican The Nation 08/19/2019):

The GOP has long been internally divided on immigration, with the party elite and the business class supportive of policies that bring in cheap labor while many in the party’s grassroots nurture racist fears that America is losing its white “identity.” The nativist wing of the party has been on the rise since 9/11, with the Global War on Terrorism helping legitimize xenophobia. Partisanship also influenced the shift: Republicans increasingly fear that they can’t win future elections unless they keep the nonwhite vote down. The same impulses that led Republicans to support gerrymandering also fuel their increasing opposition to immigration.

Briefly put, the basis of a reasonable, decent version of immigration reform would include some basic elements. First would be to normalize the status of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants and are integral parts of America's economy and society. Expelling all those "illegals" would be devastating to the American economy. Anyone who would argue with that is plainly not serious about immigration policy.

It would establish practical immigration quotas for people who are coming to take jobs that there are just not enough Americans to do. Farm work is the best known, but not the only one. Many Republicans, notably including big growers in California, would prefer the de facto current system where they employ undocumented immigrants because they are more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds.

Basically no one argues with the need to have immigration controls and regulations, not even all the few people who advocated "open borders." But it needs to be done sanely, not with crackpot proposals like the Trump Wall. And it also needs to be done by responsible law-enforcement institutions. That means not by an organization like ICE that now more resembles a criminal gang and is indulging in criminal practices. It needs to be broken up and the personnel who haven't committed crimes assigned to new agencies with responsible leadership who take enforcing the law seriously, who don't treat abusing of immigrants and Latino citizens as their job.

Unfortunately, Jeff Faux's article is focused on advocating the chronic Democratic approach of duck-and-cover: "All this will require that pro-immigration activists — understandably suspicious of anything that might define the issue as anti-immigrant — give the Democrats space to break out of their paralysis and meet the coming Trump blitzkrieg on immigration designed to once again tip into his column the electoral votes he needs."

Maybe we should call it the "Bert the Turtle Strategy":

Faux highlights the genuinely constructive part of the Democrats' position:

Against this, Democrats have the moral high ground—arguing for compassion and history; the country after all was built by immigrants. And they have a reasonable set of policies to deal with the humanitarian side of the issue, including rules to ensure humane treatment of detainees, mobilizing federal resources to erase the backlog of applications for refugee status, and leniency for long-term undocumented residents.

The public is with them—to a point. Americans are repelled by Trump’s racist and xenophobic rants, and the brutality toward families and children. They favor a path to citizenship for the undocumented who came here as children. Trump’s wall is not popular.

He frames the Bert-the-Turtle arguments, which is his central point, this way:

[Trump] is backed by a huge war chest and a thuggish Republican attack apparatus with a successful track record in dirty politics—think Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” trope in 1980; George H.W. Bush’s smear of Michael Dukakis over the prison furlough of convicted murderer Willie Horton in 1988; the GOP’s shameless assault on the war record of John Kerry in 2004 to win a second term for Bush’s draft-dodger son. ...

It is a mistake to dismiss the anxiety about uncontrolled immigration as just a product of Trump-inspired racism. In the Harvard-Harris poll, 52 percent of Latinos shared the majority view. All over the world, when immigration surges, tolerance erodes. The shift to the right in Europe was driven by reaction to an immigrant surge well before Trump came on the scene.

Let's all sing along: "Duck, and cover/Duck, and cover". This strategy does not work to get any kind of progressive Democratic priorities enacted. (See: American history, 1981-2019) Bank deregulation, yes. If the Democrats just adopt the Republican position, then they get that Democratic priority enacted. Well, sometimes. When Obama wanted to pass a national version of RomneyCare, he had to fight the Republicans tooth-and-nail and then barely got it passed.

And, let's be real, Faux blames brown people for what he sees as the Democrats' insufficient willingness to surrender to Republicans on immigration and human rights: "Their policy paralysis is rooted in the politics of the 2020 election. The mobilization of the Latino vote depends on the enthusiastic support of Latino leaders ..."

This at a time when polls are clearly indicating that Trump is vulnerable even in Texas, which I understand has a few Latinos among their voting population.

I count this as one of those head-shaking moments on the immigration issue. Does Jeff Faux or anyone else who's not a TV political pundit think that the Democrats become stronger electorally when they cravenly refuse to fight for their own party program? And look at this particular article. He argues that it's brilliant, almost unbeatable strategy, for Trump and the Republicans to mobilize their base using xenophobic bigotry and performative cruelty against immigrants. But for the Democrats to mobilize their base by fighting against Republican bigotry, no, no, that obviously could never work. That will go over well on a TV pundit panel or at a Third Way meeting. I hope the Democratic Presidential nominee isn't fool enough to be conned by the kind of pitch Faux is making.

Faux's argument for another actually decent liberal policy, promoting stability and development in Mexico and Central America. This is a good thing to advocate. But I've learned to be exceptionally wary of its use in immigration debates. Because your proverbial drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who's raving about Mexicans rapist and murderers and MS-13 is not going to be persuaded that he's demented on immigration by arguments for developmental aid.

In fact, xenophobes actually use the promoting development article as a rhetorical diversionary tactic "We cain't have all these furringers comin' in to Amurca. We need to get them to develop their own countries." In fact, it's a natural argument for duck-and-cover Democrats to hold out as a way to claim a "compromise" from Republicans. Yeah, lets all agree that someday somehow we'll promote development in Mexico and Central America.

Some things to remember about this idea. One is that encouraging development is challenging, and current US policies to promote it are neoliberal policies whose primary beneficiaries are multinational corporations whose interest aren't necessarily the same as poorer countries needed to develop their domestic economies, especially the hard dogma against national capital controls. Notice I just said "capital controls," which already takes it out of normal bar talk, at least outside of downtown metropolitan financial centers. (I worked in banking in downtown San Francisco for 20 years, and stuff like that actually does sometimes come up in bar talk in such places.)

"Foreign aid" is also chronically unpopular among conservatives. And the United States doesn't actually do much of it now. A huge proportion of actual US foreign aid goes to Israel and Egypt where it helps stabilize relations between the two in an area that the US treats as especially important in US policy.

It also worth remembering that reducing illicit immigration from Mexico was one of the prominent public arguments that the Clinton Administration made for NAFTA, which had been negotiated under the Cheney-Bush government. It was supposed to encourage development in Mexico that would reduce the number of people wanting to emigrate to the US. It failed, in no small part because US policy didn't provide legal access for the number of immigrants required by the US economy (agriculture, construction, home services, food processing, etc.). The industrial development in the maquiladora zones was short-lived. And it also devastated parts of Mexican agriculture, creating a new imperative for emigration for large numbers of Mexican farm workers (Simon Schatzberg, A Plan to Rebuild Rural Mexico Could Shake Up U.S. Corn Markets The Progressive 10/18/2018):

When Mexico, the United States, and Canada signed NAFTA in 1994, U.S. grains began to flow into Mexico at prices below the cost of production, and small Mexican farmers struggled to compete. Around the same time, the Mexican government phased out price supports, surplus buying programs, and other support for agriculture. Those two factors created a massive disruption across rural Mexico, according to Tim Wise, a researcher at the Small Planet Institute.

A final consideration. Successful development doesn't necessarily lead to less emigration to wealthier countries. On the contrary, in many cases, economic improvement gives more people a capability to emigrate to countries where they can find greater opportunity. And, in any case, the effects of a long-term development program require more than two-year Congressional election cycles to have visible long-term effects.