Immigration d
By Max J. Castro
The backlash against Latin American immigrants that took place in Miami in 1980 with the passage of the anti-bilingual referendum and in California with the approval of Proposition 187 in 1994 is now happening in states, cities, and counties across the United States, from Arizona to Illinois to northern Virginia.
The reaction against the Latino demographic and cultural upsurge that has taken place over the last three decades has arrived at different times in different places, and it has assumed a number of forms, from local ordinances targeting street vendors to state-wide initiatives denying access to public services and dismantling bilingual education. But the underlying sentiments, the rhetoric, and the objectives of anti-immigrant movements have been remarkably similar in places as different as Miami, Florida, the state of California, Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and Herndon, Virginia.
The reaction against the Latino demographic and cultural upsurge that has taken place over the last three decades has arrived at different times in different places…
By Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@google.com
The backlash against Latin American immigrants that took place in Miami in 1980 with the passage of the anti-bilingual referendum and in California with the approval of Proposition 187 in 1994 is now happening in states, cities, and counties across the United States, from Arizona to Illinois to northern Virginia.
The reaction against the Latino demographic and cultural upsurge that has taken place over the last three decades has arrived at different times in different places, and it has assumed a number of forms, from local ordinances targeting street vendors to state-wide initiatives denying access to public services and dismantling bilingual education. But the underlying sentiments, the rhetoric, and the objectives of anti-immigrant movements have been remarkably similar in places as different as Miami, Florida, the state of California, Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and Herndon, Virginia.
This debate is not about economic competition, immigration status, or even race, although all of these factors play a role. It’s a debate about culture. It’s a debate driven mostly by what social scientists, depending on their discipline, call ethnocentrism or nativism. A more common word for it is xenophobia.
In Miami, for instance, where in 1980 the vast majority of immigrants were anticommunist Cubans, legal residents, white, middle class in outlook if not always in income, Republican-leaning and pro-American to a fault, what could nativists possibly complain about? They found something, a 1970s ordinance that declared the county bicultural and bilingual. It became the focus of a resentment that had much deeper sources.
Things were different on the surface in California, where there is huge a Mexican population, native and immigrant, legal and undocumented. There, Proposition 187 was formally aimed at denying public services to undocumented immigrants. But the referendum, as evidenced by the rhetoric surrounding it, was really a protest by the white majority against the growing Mexican and Central American footprint in the state. That the backlash in that state was not just about undocumented immigrants or social services but had a strong cultural component was further driven home by passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, which aimed at destroying the state’s bilingual education program.
Today, in places like the town of Herndon and Prince William County in Virginia, legal status or the lack thereof, is once again the issue around which the debate is framed, as it was in California in 1994. But the substance of the complaints is very much the same as in Miami in 1980: They are not assimilating. They insist on speaking Spanish. They play their music too loud. They live too many to a house and have too many cars in their yards. They are not like the old immigrants. They are ruining our community. They are not like us.
In each place, the objective is to drive out Latinos, or keep more from coming, by making the community feel unwelcome and by making their individual lives difficult. Deny them medical care. Deny their children an education. Deny them a driver’s license. Deny them work. Deny them housing. Get the police after them. Make them feel threatened. Scare the hell out of them.
Even the language is similar. More than a decade ago, during one of Miami’s many waves of immigration, radio talk show host Neil Rogers founded Save our South Florida (SOS), a short-lived effort to protest the latest Cuban influx. Today, there is an organization with a similar name in Virginia. It is centered in the town of Manassas and adjacent Prince William County, the latter a place in which the Latino population increased from 4.5 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2005. The group’s web site declares that “Help Save Manassas is the largest chapter within the HelpSaveVirginia network, and joins over 600 residents in the greater Manassas area including Prince William County, the City of Manassas Park and the City of Manassas together in a grassroots organization dedicated to helping preserve our communities and protect them from the effects related to the presence of illegal aliens…”
The contrast between Washington, DC and its suburbs, such as Manassas, exemplify the range of responses to undocumented immigration and the factors conditioning the choices. In DC itself, where local government is dominated by African Americans and Democrats, and where there is a strong and longstanding Latino activist community, no one is thinking of persecuting immigrants, despite economic competition between low income blacks and immigrants.
In the affluent white suburbs immediately outside DC, such as Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax, Virginia, where a well-educated population with roots all over the United States and the world has been increasingly leaning toward the Democratic Party, anti-immigrant legislation has not prospered, despite some support for it and the limited power of Latinos.
But, in places such as Loudon and Prince William counties, twenty miles or more from DC, formerly rural areas where Southern culture is still strong and Latinos have no power, counties which in recent years have experienced a furious building boom fueled by the economic growth of metropolitan DC and enabled by immigrant labor, the citizenry and the political leaders support anti-immigration measures overwhelmingly.
Those who have embarked on a campaign against immigrants are engaged in a fool’s errand. A recent court decision overturning an anti-immigrant law in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, is reminiscent of what occurred in Miami and California after attempts at legislating away the Latino demographic and cultural presence. In each case, the legislation was amended, declared unconstitutional, or overtaken by demographic and social reality. In neither case did it have its intended effect of rolling back the Latino population, which continued to increase. Similar attempts to use harsh law and symbolic rebukes to scare off Latinos in some areas of Virginia and in other states will also fail to meet constitutional muster or to succeed in driving immigrants motivated by forces far too strong to be stopped by campaigns of intimidation or slaps in the face.
As futile as the anti-immigrant-inspired state and local measures will prove in the long run, they are already creating divisiveness and taking a toll among defenseless immigrants, especially in places where Latinos have little power. The success of xenophobic campaigns anywhere emboldens nativists everywhere. That is another lesson taught by the experience of Miami and California. That is why Latino organizations and leaders at the national level, in alliance with progressives and religious and civil rights organizations, must fight fiercely against every single manifestation of xenophobia through all legal means available, including law suits, demonstrations, and economic boycotts.
