BY JIM FORSYTH
I attended a rally last week of people opposing Texas' new law banning 'Sanctuary Cities.'
In addition to the usual cornball platitudes ("Love Trumps Hate") and the nauseating air of virtue signaling, the signs being carried by the crowd supporting the rights of undocumented immigrants to remain in the US and continue to arrive were your boilerplate leftist causes: a higher minimum wage, health care for all, tax the 'one percent,' the typical liberal talking points. No doubt about it, support of illegal immigrants and illegal immigration is securely a Democrat issue. I wondered how many of these confident liberals realized that, not too long ago, their main cause was a solidly Republican talking point.
In the sixties and seventies, after the now obscure Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 created today's concept of 'illegal immigration,' it was mainly conservatives who were the biggest cheerleaders for immigration. Whether an East German teenager braving Soviet machine gun fire at the Berlin Wall, a a Chinese family trekking to the US to escape Mao's hellish 'Cultural Revolution,' or 'wet foot' Cuban refugees coming ashore in Florida, immigrants from murderous Communist regimes were a powerful moral argument for that era's version of 'Make America Great Again' in the Twilight Struggle of the Cold War. The image of brave Vietnamese 'boat people' risking all to make it to the US, the 'beacon of liberty and opportunity,' allowed conservatives to claim moral victory in Vietnam, even as Communist troops poured into Saigon and the remaining Americans were being evacuated from the embassy rooftop.
But conservatives championed immigration for economic reasons too. Difficult as it is to imagine today, muscular private sector industrial labor unions once dominated the political landscape and were the key component of the Democratic Party leadership, and grizzled labor leaders like George Meany saw immigrants as people who would drive down wages, while Republicans saw them as a useful counterbalance to increasingly strident union demands. In 1973, the overwhelmingly Hispanic United Farm Workers, led by Arizona-born Cesar Chavez, who has somehow been morphed into a champion of immigrants, presaged the 'border militias' of the 2000's by more than thirty years, actually setting up units on the border (the infamous 'wet lines') to report illegal immigration to the Border Patrol, so fearful were they that new immigrants would dilute their bargaining power.
In 1986, the Simpson Mazzoli Act, now derided by conservatives as 'amnesty,' because it granted legal status to millions of immigrants currently in the US, was championed by Republicans. In 1986, Newt Gingrich voted for 'amnesty,' while Henry B. Gonzalez voted against it. The relatively unsuccessful 'border security' and 'employer sanctions' parts of Simpson Mazzoli were added on by urban Democrats on behalf of labor unions.
In the 1990's, all that began to change.
Of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, overnight turning those 'wet foot' Cubans into economic, rather than political refugees. Private sector labor unions lost their clout, not because of immigrants, but due to changing factors in the workplace and the venality and greed of their own leaders.
But there were a couple of other, far more important evolutions underway.
Battered by the loss of the 'Reagan Democrats,' and the loss of the formerly 'Solid South' to Republican operative Lee Atwater's 'Southern Strategy,' Democrats began to see immigrants as their salvation. The mantra 'Demography is Destiny' began to be heard in Democratic Party leadership sessions, along with the somewhat cynical phrase: "If you don't like the outcome, change the voters."
At about the same time, several court rulings affirmed the rights of labor unions to recruit illegal immigrants. Undocumented workers were no longer a threat to drive down wages in jobs that no longer existed...they were the seed that would create the next generation of union members. Groups which wanted to preserve various welfare programs, under attack due both to President Clinton's 'welfare reform' and rising House Republicans' 'Contract with America' rejoiced at having more cute children for TV news crews to show in stories about the 'human toll' of cuts in social programs.
And, as has always been the case in politics, money ruled.
In the early 2000s, as the immigration debate was beginning to heat up, I made a trip to the Brush Country, and the one impression I came away with was the environmental destruction caused by illegal immigration. On top of the trash, human waste, and the destruction of beautiful natural areas (One study estimated that, even if illegal immigration were to end today, returning the Arizona-Mexico border to its natural state would take hundreds of years), immigrants have a tendency to have larger families, don't arrive with the environmental consciousness that is now part of basic elementary curriculum, and they don't exactly enter the US and make a beeline to the nearest Prius dealership. New immigrants usually drive the most environmentally dangerous vehicles. In a word, stopping illegal immigration should be a top priority for Greenies.
But when I put that question to the leader of a prominent environmental activist group, I got an answer I will never forget: "We receive most of our donations from people who support a wide range of progressive causes," I was told. "Another cause they support is immigration rights. So we are officially neutral on the issue of immigration." Indeed, one billionaire donor is said to have made a major contribution to environmental groups on the condition that they cease their opposition to illegal immigration.
While Democrats and immigration have been in a happy marriage for more than a quarter century, an old suitor is ready to knock at the front door, bearing the fragrant rose of political advantage.
Gradually but inexorably, the face of illegal immigration is changing again. Ever since the end of the Great Recession, Mexico has ceased to be the number one country of origin for people entering the US illegally, due to significant demographic changes in that country, Central America and East Africa are becoming main sources of new arrivals. Slowly but certainly, China, with it's 1.4 billion people, is emerging as tomorrow's major immigrant source.
It will take a while, as it is far easier for smugglers to get an immigrant to Texas from Aguascalientes than from Shanghai, but the experts agree that the Chinese wave is coming. And people from China are far more likely to self identify as Republicans (they've seen the socialist paradise, that's why they're leaving) than is an immigrant from Tegucigalpa.
So I wonder whether it will soon be Republicans who will be looking to 'change the voters.' In another twenty years. Who knows, the pro immigrant protest of 2037 may be organized by the Tea Party.
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