Republican xenophobia: Another turn of the screw
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
The Republican Party has a longstanding record of opposing immigrants and immigration dating back at least to the early decades of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, the twenty-first century GOP seems to be trying to outdo its predecessor.
Since the current wave of immigration began in the late 1960s, virtually every anti-immigrant piece of legislation at the local, state, and national level has been sponsored and supported by Republicans. Proposition 187, the infamous 1994 California law to deny schooling and other public services to undocumented immigrants — invalidated by the courts — was pushed by the state’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson. In 1996, the Republican Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, passed harsh federal legislation barring immigrants from many social programs and making deportation mandatory for even petty criminal offenses committed years or decades before.
The pattern has continued during the present century. In 2005, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Immigration Control Act, an extremely punitive bill that, fortunately, was never approved by the Senate. The measure sparked massive street protests by Latinos and their supporters. In this decade, Republican-dominated state legislatures and city councils have passed hundreds of measures intended to crack down on illegal immigrants. Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005
The most recent and draconian of these is Arizona’s SB-1070, passed earlier this year by that state’s GOP-led legislature and quickly signed into law by Republican governor Jan Brewer. The law, among other things, would require all law enforcement officers to inquire into the immigration status of persons detained or arrested where there is a “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally. This measure, passed on the basis of a campaign of demagoguery linking immigrants with crime, seems to provide a license for police officers to engage in ethnic profiling.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Arizona, asserting that immigration is the sole purview of the federal government. At the end of July, shortly before the law was to take effect, a federal district judge essentially handed the Justice Department a victory when she enjoined the state from enforcing key provisions of SB-1070. The state is appealing that decision.
The current wave of xenophobia has now reached its zenith with a proposal currently being floated by republicans in Congress to change the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in order to deny citizenship to the offspring of undocumented immigrants. The Fourteenth Amendment, one of the most important amendments to the Constitution, states in its first section:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…”
Once, talk of changing the Fourteenth Amendment and abolishing birth-right citizenship was confined to anti-immigration zealots, including a few in Congress, such as Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo. Now, GOP members of Congress, who only a few short months or years ago were backing comprehensive immigration reform leading to citizenship, notably South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain, are talking about holding hearings on, or outright changing, the Fourteenth Amendment.
The issue has provoked ugly and uninformed talk, including speculation about foreign (read Mexican) women coming into the United States deliberately in order to “drop a baby” who automatically becomes a citizen and thus an “anchor baby,” facilitating other members of the family in attaining legal status.
The idea of toying with the Fourteenth Amendment — a dubious and unlikely proposition — and using such dehumanizing language (‘drop a baby’, ‘anchor baby’) reflects the fierce opposition of the hard-core Republican base to which the GOP politicians are pandering vis-à-vis the ethnic transition underway in America. It also reveals the desperation of the Republicans to stench the growth of the Latino population, a demographic trend that spells doom for the Republican Party as we know it.
Latinos are upset with President Barack Obama, and with good reason. He didn’t deliver on his promise of immigration reform not in his first year in the White House (or even in his second). And it is true that a record number of deportations have happened under the Obama administration. At the same time, the Obama administration has focused away from work place raids and concentrated on expelling immigrants that have committed serious crimes. Meanwhile, the administration has been quietly refraining from deporting undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, a practice that has infuriated Republicans. And we also should consider the role of Republicans in obstructing immigration reform nor should we ignore what is in store for us should the Republicans, once again, control all the levers of power in Washington.
