Although I didn’t buy anything on May 1st, and generally supported the pro-immigration marches around the country, I have always been somewhat fearful that maybe the marches were counter productive to the immigration cause. I realize that this is counterintuitive to many. After all, how could such a large force, such a large united demonstration of political voting power, actually weaken the cause of immigration instead of helping it?
Here are some of the reasons why I worry.
1. History
In 1994 California was considering whether to pass prop 187, a bill that would restrict illegal immigrant access to schools and public services. The bill was met with large protests, much like the ones against HR4337, and the result was the exact opposite of what many had expected: Prop 187 passed with a 60% California voter approval. This occurred in one of the most liberal states in the union!
Bill Bradley, a former Democratic Party official who now writes for the LA Weekly, wrote:
During that campaign, there was a moment in which support for Prop 187 faltered and slipped. The giant rally in L.A. against it mobilized the pro-illegal immigrant community but also had the effect of stimulating a reaction against their cause from the far larger community of American citizens who want people to respect the law.
2. United States citizens generally do not support protests
Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute writes:
But American history is not one in which change has occurred in the streets.
General strikes are not a U.S. tradition, as in many other countries in Latin America and Europe.
While Mexico and European countries may settle many of their disputes by protesting, that has not been an American tradition, and in fact, like my prop 187 example above shows, has tended to work against the cause, not for it.
3. Public opinion
Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute writes:
Now, there is not a lot of polling data on how the past protests have influenced public opinion.
The best available at this point is a Florida poll this month by Quinnipiac University that asked voters whether the earlier demonstrations made them more or less sympathetic to the immigrants’ cause.
Of course, it is only one state, but the answers are worth considering given Florida’s status as the nation’s premier political battleground.
Twice as many voters, 38 percent, said the previous protests had made them less sympathetic to the immigrants’ cause, while 17 percent said made them more likely to support such goals. The rest said the marches had no effect on their views.
It would be instructive to remember the political history of divisive social/racial matters such as immigration. The same is true about black political candidates:
They tend to do better in public opinion polls than they do at the ballot box.
The assumption is that some voters say what they consider to be the politically correct thing to pollsters, but vote differently when they get into the booth, either out of fear, resentment, or honest policy differences that they are reluctant to discuss with a stranger soliciting their opinion on the telephone.
New York Post columnist John Podhoretz writes:
Americans in both parties are now paying far more attention to the issue, and polling shows they just don’t like the idea that the laws of the United States are being violated with impunity.
Being soft on illegal immigration is beginning to look like the new millennium’s version of being soft on crime. In truth, it’s considerably more complicated than that. But the Democratic Party went down the soft-on-crime road once before, with disastrous results.
I have long counseled Republicans and conservatives to resist the temptation that anti-immigration policy represents, both morally and politically. I still think it is profoundly ironic that many on the Right are talking about the terrible costs presented by illegal aliens at a time when the economy is growing at a rate near 5 percent, personal incomes are up, manufacturing is skyrocketing and unemployment is near historic lows.
But if I were a paid political consultant right now, I’d be hard-pressed to talk any Republican into taking an expansive view of the benefits of large-scale immigration. Instead, I would be trying to figure out just how to capitalize on the Democratic Party’s embrace of the most irresponsible and reckless liberal rhetoric on the subject of immigration ever heard in this country….
The only people participating in the political debate at the present moment who were overjoyed by yesterday’s despicable rallies were anti-illegal activists like Reps. Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher and behind-the-scenes Washington guys like Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Thanks for the boycott!” wrote a jubilant Krikorian. Jubilant he should be. The debate is moving in his direction at the speed of light.
4. Voter distaste
Many otherwise sympathetic voters have articulated serious reservations about the protests. For example, Glenn Reynolds, a typically very pro-immigration libertarian wrote at the end of March:
I’VE GENERALLY FAVORED OPEN IMMIGRATION, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one.
Illegal immigrants as individuals just trying to make a better life are sympathetic. Illegal immigrants as a mass movement making demands on the polity are considerably less so.
I’m not the only one to get this impression, as Mickey Kaus’s report on the rallies in Los Angeles indicates. I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.
Or take California Senator Barbara Boxer, someone who you would expect to be a strong supporter of the marches, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Boxer said that although she supports anyone’s right to free speech — or even to skip work — a boycott at this point just isn’t strategically smart.
“If people don’t show up for work in emergency services, or hospitals or nursing homes, it’s just not going to go over very well,” she said.
The same goes for kids, too: “Taking students out of school when they should be learning isn’t going sit well either, even among people who support immigration reform.”
“The demonstrations have worked — they stopped what was a very onerous House bill. If they want to have rallies, then do it on a Saturday with their families.”
5. The marches were not necessary
Bill Bradley, asks, “Was this rally necessary to defeat a bill that George W. Bush does not support?”. His question is a very valid one; after all, the bill had very little support in congress, and would have never passed with President Bush in office.
This is an election year, and in election years it is not unusual for congressmen to propose bills that they know will not pass. They do this to have something to talk about in their congressional districts, to look as if they are fighting hard for the issues their congressional district care about most. Even though they know the bills are very unlikely to get passed, it is, many times, an advantageous political strategy.
Furthermore, Tancredo - one of the most anti-immigration congressmen in the House - is an outcast to the White House. Newsday reports:
Outside Madison Square Garden, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who chairs the House Immigration Reform Caucus and vigorously opposes Bush’s plan, did have something to say about the issue. At a sparsely attended news conference, Tancredo renounced the party for failing to revamp the platform’s position on immigration.
“The immigration plank in the party platform is full of platitudes, promises and pandering,” he said. Tancredo said he and Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, got into a screaming match over the issue two years ago after the congressman was quoted saying that if the nation suffered another attack at the hands of terrorists able to skirt immigration laws, “the blood of the people killed” would be on the president’s and Congress’s hands.
“Rove, of course, was quite upset about it and I asked him, I said, ‘Karl, let me ask you something: If it happens the way I just said it, who do you think people should blame? The Elks Club,’ ” Tancredo said. Rove called the congressman “a traitor to the party,” “a traitor to the president” and warned him to never “darken the doorstep of the White House,” he said.(emphasis added)
So if this march wasn’t really necessary, if the bill wasn’t going to pass, why was the march encouraged? The answer is very simple: Politics.
Republicans were tireless in search of comprehensive, and bipartisan, reform….
Too bad you can’t say the same for Democratic leader Harry Reid, who was the villain in this drama.
Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin-American Citizens, told me that he tried to impress upon Reid’s office that it was important to get immigration reform done.
“Apparently, it fell on deaf ears,” Flores said.
Reid claims it was GOP hard-liners who killed reform by running roughshod over Frist.
Baloney. The hard-liners had – by all accounts – no more than 30 votes, including those of conservative Democrats. On the other side, you had – according to McCain – as many as 70 votes.
A deal was at hand that would have offered legal status to some illegal immigrants. It would have made the GOP seem more Latino-friendly, but it would also have infuriated organized labor, which opposes something that was in the mix: guest workers.
After the Senate Judiciary Committee put out a guest-worker bill, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued a statement saying: “Guest-workers programs are a bad idea and harm all workers.”
That did it. Senate Democrats sided with labor and sold out Latinos. The deal came undone because Reid refused to allow the legislation to go through the amendment process. Republicans had come up with as many as 400 amendments but whittled the list to 20. Reid agreed to proceed with debate on just three.
It was a masterstroke by Democrats. Labor is happy. And while Latinos are angry, there’s always the chance that Democrats can fool them into channeling that anger toward Republicans.
With Latinos voting upwards of 40% for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, Democrats needed something to bring Latinos back into the fold, and immigration was the perfect issue (count this as yet one more example of Democrats placing party interest above Latino interest). What better way to unify Latinos behind the Democratic Party and at the same time vilify Republicans than by supporting marches against HR4337? Even though the bill is very unlikely to pass, the political rewards are gigantic. The problem is, immigration, especially the kind advocated by the marches, is at odds with union interests, and so, Democrats needed a way to - like John Kerry in 2004 - be for immigration at the same time they vote against it.
So while these marches may have brought back many Latinos to the Democratic fold, I fear that in the process, we may have all been fooled - yes, including myself - into supporting something that, in the end, will have only harmed the immigration cause, not helped it.
For more articles on the points above, read this, this, and this. Ruben Navarette’s article can be found here.
Tom Sowell wrote (paraphrasing here): “Ethnic chauvinism tends to produce counter ethnic chauvinism.”
Sounds about right to me.
you’re definitely an “hispanic” pundit. YOu are thoroughly unfamiliar with how social movements actually work. Middle class politicians of course minimize marches.
Of course, thanks for putting me in my place Gilberto!
6. Many Americans are racist assholes and these marches and the “ethnic chauvinism” evidenced in them now gives them a handy-dandy excuse to openly hate on Mexicans and everyone else who “jumped the line” to get their share of the abundance. This is all bullshit. The kingdom of GOD is among you.
Do people want to be Mexican or do they want to be American?
In a sense, you can be both. It depends on context and what you are talking about. In terms of nationality I’m American and I’m loyal to no other nation, but who I am is influenced by my family, and they are illegal immigrants. I don’t use the term “undocumented workers” because it appears to be a manipulation of language and it doesn’t answer the question of what people want to be and where they stand (besides in the country).
I don’t think that many protesters were so sure in the first protest where you saw many more Mexican flags than at the May 1 protest. At the May 1 protest I saw many more American flags. And flags are powerful symbols.
Maybe I’m wrong, but my interpretation of the marcha was that people were saying, “I want to be American. I want to be part of the American dream. That is why I’m here” as if in realization and appreciation of what America is. They get it. They are not America-haters, in fact, many of them are more American than many native-born ingrates and we would be better off with some kind of citizen-exchange program of those who want to change horrible imperialist capitalist America and those who want to be a part of her family.
For me the march was moving, you can understand the words “I want to be an American” in any language. So I believe that amnesty would be appropriate. But you can’t have amnesty without stopping illegal immigration. That is why the US needs to gradually put the military and a fence on its borders, like Mexico, which has a much stricter immigration policy, does. That is the way to stop 90% of illegal immigration and thus bringing order back into the equation. Otherwise unrest, confusion and misunderstandings mount. And because I don’t like those things, I’m a conservative, not an anarchist.
Obviously, poverty and corruption are still major problems in Mexico, that is what has caused the economic refugees and the illegal immigration which bothers those of us who believe in law and order and those of us who are disturbed by alot of the unfairness and disfunction that exists in this world. If there are any good historical and economic studies/investigations of the situation in Mexico I would appreciate if someone mentioned them. I don’t know of any because that is not something that I’ve focused on. I do know that some 70 years of “Partido Revolucionario” has kept Mexico in economic retardation and that it is going to take much more than NAFTA to get the country up to speed.
The fact that that country’s economy is largely sustained by exporting workers is also a critical factor. A sudden stop in the flow would be a terrible shock to Mexico’s economy. That is why Mexico has promoted illegal immigration. And I’m gonna be candid, regardless of the feelings I might hurt or the anger that I might generate from saying so, but I believe the left is hampering Mexico’s economic development.
Their ideas about economics just don’t work. Otherwise nobody would be wearing a t-shirt which features a Stalinist (Yes, I mean CHE), academics wouldn’t need to support dictatorship (eg Cuba) and manipulation (a mainstay of the lib media) to support of their wrongheaded ideological views of “progress” and how to achieve it. This problem goes deeper and further back than Marx’s misconceptions.
If I had to take a guess as to what is behind the continued economic confusion and political propaganda that fuels much of the antipathy on America’s campuses for free-market economics and judeo-christian values, I would have to point to the attempted intellectual justification for sin leading to the conscious and subconscious desire to abolish the laws of economics and any basis for any kind of law whatsoever. See C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
To me it keeps coming back to that. Quoting George Reisman, just like in my last post, when the topic was the environmentalism:
“Whether global warming comes or not, it is certain that nature itself will sooner or later produce major changes in the climate. To deal with those changes and virtually all other changes arising from whatever cause, man absolutely requires individual freedom, science, and technology.”
No shit, Sherlock. Man must devise the tools to fix the machine he knowingly and arrogantly destroys. Stop trying to be so smart about being a hater.
With self-appointed educated leaders who employ such incredibly ill-defined phrases, such as “hate on Mexicans,” who needs “racists assholes” to thwart the objectives of those who support amnesty undocumented immigrants?
Idiotic sound bites and creating straw men arguments that fail to address legitimate questions and concerns of the opposition do far more to harm our cause than racist element with our society.
Observer,
I’m just frustrated that the “legitimate questions and concerns of the opposition” can so easily be hijacked by racists, that’s all. Where I live, this fake “debate” has highlighted a serious cultural rift in the community. Mostly, the grievances against immigrants are esthetic and petty (and stupidly racist). I hope you know what I mean. I am not a “self-appointed educated leader”, either, just a dude who likes to “stir the shitstorm” and this is my perspective. There is a neverending stream of “idiotic sound bites and straw men arguments” coming from the other side, too, don’t you think? I don’t think the motivations of the opposition are entirely noble, no matter how lofty their rhetoric sounds.
That racist people can also realize or think their goals can be realized their goals if they attach themselves to the anti-illegal immigration political whim of the moment shouldn’t dictate how responsible opponents of anti-amnesty/anti-Latino immigrant sect conduct themselves. People who respond in kind, in effect, allow those unsavory persons to dictate their public behavior. In other words, not only should we not stoop to their level, we shouldn’t stoop at all.
We must realize that this is a political battle and that if it is to be won or if we are to have a favorable outcome, a wise political tract must be taken. That of course, precludes calling anyone a racist simply because they raise questions about the southern border of the US. It is obvious we need political allies if our ideas are to have a substantial impact on national policy, and insulting people who raise legitimate concerns is counter to that objective and end the ends hurts our paramount goal.
The debate is far from “fake,” it is real and cannot be and should not be so easily dismissed as such. If there is a cultural rift each side might benefit from analyzing its own actions that may have helped create the rift. Does waving a foreign flag at a political protest politically help or hurt the cause? Do ethnic politics tend to help create “cultural rifts?” As you mention some on the “other side” also engage in behavior that is less than diplomatic; however, what good does it do to follow suit? One, two, or even a hundred Minutemen do not speak for an entire nation. However, if people (Latinos) respond with instances of ethnic chauvinism they may very well end up speaking for a good portion of so-called Americans.
I agree that within the legitimate concerns of many lies the not so well hidden prejudices and bigotry of a few, but if we are to effectively counter their political attack we must be politically smarter than we have been. We must cajole those who are not so easily swayed by bigotry within there own group. To some this is tantamount to “bootlicking” or “Uncle Tom[ing] it, but it is the way of the world, and responsible “leaders” should try to impart that reality to the younger more emotionally driven element within our gente. Instead, political leaders and Chicano Studies professors often use (unwittingly in some cases) ethnic politics to secure their place in political office and academia at the expense of their constituency. A David like victory is highly unlikely to occur and tends only to happen in folklore and it will be the masses that pay the price for ethnic grandstanding of our leaders.
Marches did not hurt the immigration cause.
It helped it. Kennedy was forced to react because of public outcry and the marches during his era. As such, this year’s marches have put the issue at the forefront during an election year.
The tendency by some to compare the current display of ethnic politics to the Civil Right’s marches of the 1960s is yet another fine example of what is so troubling about many of those people who supported and cheered the marches: they incorrectly equate what is currently going on to the marches of 1960s and further muddy the intended meaning of “Civil Rights.”
They, unfortunately, continue the practice of expanding the laundry list of perceived social injustices that are often blamed on, but never quite proven to be the result of racism; and thus, they believe these “civil rights” need to be obtained via Civil Right style marches. Of course, the Civil Rights Movement was never intended to endow foreigners the rights that are guaranteed to US citizens and there are many who know this.
If there is to be a diplomatic resolution to the obvious demand for labor and the ample supply south of us, the ignorant ethnic rhetoric has to subside and intellectual honesty must prevail in the public discourse.
What I think about immigration is that immigrats should have the same rights as any one else. Like the Chiness came to the U.S.A and they were yes were immigrats and why do they have more right they us. They fought for there freedom so why can’t we fit for owers. And also the song says ”ONE NATION UNDER GOD” While that is not happing. This so post to be a free counter but is it . “I Just have to say One thing we are going to fit for ower freedom even if even if it tack for ever and thats is when we are going to be “ONE NATION UNDER GOD”.