Roberto Lovato is a New York-based writer with New America Media.
Congresswoman Grace Napolitano hopes the new Democratic leadership can finally answer a question the outgoing Republican majority has failed to answer: “What do Mexican immigrants trying to feed their families have to do with terrorism and national security?”
While the question posed by the outgoing head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sounds like a lead-in to a joke from one of the several Latino-themed comedies on TV, like the blockbuster “Ugly Betty,” the intention and feeling behind it is serious.
Napolitano’s answer to her rhetorical question was a stoic “not much.”
“I don’t believe that mixing terrorism with migration from Latin America is very productive,” the California congresswoman told me from her Washington office. “That’s not going to be as much of an issue under Democratic leadership.”
Reversing the ongoing al-Qaida-ization of immigrants and immigration policy ultimately depends on whether the immigrant rights movement can convince incoming House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the new cadre of “pragmatic,” “populist” Democrats of the need to move beyond the cartoonish and deadly policies of the previous era. Nothing less than a sustained and intrepid immigrant rights movement, combined with saner policy proposals, can wean the country of the more militarized immigration policies that began with a previous pragmatic and popular Democrat—Bill Clinton.
It was President Clinton who launched Operation Gatekeeper, the border enforcement policy that pushed, and still pushes, thousands of immigrants to their deaths in the most desolate parts of the Southwestern desert beginning in 1993. Now that the Democrats are back in power in Congress, we need to remember that Republicans and the “war on terror” have only intensified and worsened what began with some Democrats using the “war on drugs” to justify their own fatal immigration policies.
Viewed from that historical perspective, securing “comprehensive immigration reform” that results in full legalization for the more than 12 million immigrants living among us is but a first step towards serious immigration policy. As important to rational immigration policy is the need to end the influence of the multibillion-dollar industry that has grown like desert weed from the fusion of immigration policy with national security.
One of the Republican’s few major innovations in immigration policy was to fashion and monetize migration policy in the same way that drug war policy benefited and still benefits the Corrections Corporation of America, Bell Helicopter Textron and other military-industrial, security and prison construction firms. Because these same companies are now making money hand-and-gun-over-fist in the “war on immigrants,” a true test of a new approach to immigration policy will be whether the Democrats are willing to take on these and a slew of other companies—like Halliburton and Boeing—which just secured a multibillion dollar contract to build a virtual wall and other “defensive infrastructure” at the border.
Napolitano’s approach to immigration reform couples legalization with some technology and infrastructure enhancements (but without the war frame). She will be working to inject reason into policies that have not made us safer, but have enabled an expensive addiction to national security pork and demonized millions. In contrast with the approach taken at a recent GOP-led “immigration field hearing” sponsored by the House International Relations Committee and that she attended as a member of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, Napolitano brings a different kind of international approach to the very global issue of immigration. “The solution is not a fence. It’s working in collaboration with officials on both sides of the border,” she says. “What we need to do is sit down with (Mexican) President-elect Calderon and figure out how to better regulate things.”
But the development of a broader, more sophisticated and realistic immigration policy, one that’s in tune with the multiple economic, security and exigencies of the global moment, could end up dying at the border of Democratic leadership. Recent strident statements calling for a more punitive, simplistic national security-focused approach to immigration by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head Rahm Emmanuel, and the silence on immigration when Senate Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer announced the party’s priorities add a disconcerting tone to the positive possibilities of the post-election moment.
There are encouraging signs that key Democrats and Republicans, and a weakened President Bush, are interested in taking the next step towards legalization proposals stalled since 9/11. But enthusiasm should be tempered by caution informed by recent history—and by action. Otherwise, we risk an immigration policy debate locked perpetually in the deadly grip of nationalism and the cottage industry of national security.
