Border Battles: Scapegoating Immigrants Isn't New

This isn't the first time that the US has been in the grip of an anti-immigrant fever. Twenty year ago, for example, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson announced that undocumented pregnant women should be denied prenatal care. His underlying message was clear, brutal and similar to what we're hearing today: If you’re “illegal,” get out of our country!
     That was also a dangerous time for immigrants, marked by resurgent racism, increased police brutality, vigilante violence, and rationalization of virtually any attack. In other words, we’ve been here before.
  

     Anti-immigrant activists predictably deny charges of racism. But the facts tell a different story. Almost unlimited numbers of immigrants from mostly white, European countries are allowed into the US, while Latin Americans and Africans rarely even get tourist visas. And although sweatshops that employ undocumented workers are condemned, they aren’t often shut down. They're merely raided, resulting in deportations. The owners may be fined but they still come out ahead. After all, deported workers can’t collect back wages.
     In the early 1980s, low intensity conflict (LIC) theorists constructed a Los Angeles insurrection scenario requiring a military response and sealing the nearby border. A decade later, the Border Patrol played a key role in the L.A. riots of 1992, deployed in Latino communities and arresting more than 1,000 people. Afterward, the INS began work with the Pentagon’s Center for Low-Intensity Conflict. The line between civilian and military operations was largely erased.
     Throughout the 1990s, Human Rights Watch accused the US Border Patrol of routinely abusing people, citing a pattern of beatings, shootings, rapes, and deaths. In response, INS detainees in a private jail rioted in June 1995 after being tortured by guards. After 9/11, the federal government considered placing US soldiers along the Mexican border. 
     But efforts to curtail immigration through tighter security did little but redirect the flow into the most desolate areas of the border, increasing the mortality rate of those crossing. Between 1998 and 2004, at least 1,900 people died trying to cross the US-Mexico border. Arizona became the main entry point for undocumented immigrants and an estimated 460,000 lived in the state. Since then, however, that total has dropped by at least 100,000. 
     Since the 2007-2009 Great Recession, more Mexican immigrants have returned to their homeland than have migrated to the US, according to the Pew Research Center. The decline results from factors including weakened job opportunities, tougher border enforcement, a long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates, and an improving Mexican economy. 
     More than 150 years ago, at the end of a two-year war between Mexico and the US, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. Many Latinos still feel that the treaty, accepted under pressure by a corrupt dictator, was an act of theft violating international law. Mexico surrendered half its territory — now the Southwestern US — and most of the Mexicans who stayed in the ceded region ultimately lost their land.
     In a sense, that war never ended. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, US officials, working closely with white settlers and elites, used often-violent means to subdue Mexicans in the region.
     Once the region was “pacified,” border enforcement became a tool to regulate the flow of labor into the US. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, the Border Patrol emerged as gatekeeper of a “revolving door,” sometimes processing immigrant labor, sometimes cracking down. The Bracero Program, which brought in Mexican agricultural laborers, was followed (and overlapped by) Operation Wetback, an INS-run military offensive against immigrant workers.
     The border is still a battlefield. During recent decades, government strategies for combating undocumented immigration and drug trafficking have re-militarized the region. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meshed neatly with more obvious aspects of low-intensity conflict doctrine. The definition of immigration and drug trafficking as “national security” issues brought state-of-the-art military approaches into domestic affairs. 
     But just as the projection of a “communist menace” was a smokescreen for post-war expansionism, a “Brown wave,” the “Drug War,” and "radical Islamic" terrorism have been used as pretexts for military-industrial penetration.
     LIC doctrine uses diverse tactics — from the subtle and psychological (“winning hearts and minds”) to the obvious and brutal. Such flexibility requires the most sophisticated tools available, and the integration of police, paramilitary, and military forces. It also requires a plausible “enemy” — in this case, immigrants who can be accused of almost anything.
     In this kind of war, borders are ultimately unimportant. Battles are waged everywhere, even in communities far from a frontier. This blurs the line between police and the military, and further threatens basic rights.
     Nevertheless, Latinos will soon be the largest minority group in the US, according to Census Bureau predictions: at least 44 million, or 15 percent of the nation’s population. Although the biggest expansion will occur in states that draw the most immigrants — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey — the spill-over will reach from Atlanta to Minneapolis and Washington state. California is expected to undergo the most dramatic transformation — to at least 50 percent Latino and possibly only 32 percent white by 2040.
     Overall, immigration is fueling US population growth, and the Census Bureau predicts a tripling of the Hispanic and Asian populations in less than 50 years. While the number of whites may increase by seven percent, the three largest minorities — Hispanic, Black, and Asian — are expected to rise by 188, 71, and 213 percent respectively. The bottom line is that these three groups are expected to constitute at least 47 percent of total US population by 2050. While such forecasts certainly have much to do with the current anti-immigrant climate, the trend won’t be reversed by race-motivated legislation or even a wall. 
     Low-intensity war against non-white immigrants is expanding,  especially along the US-Mexico border, and takes many forms: militarization, criminalizing the undocumented, repressive legislation, human rights violations, and cruel, discriminatory attacks on children and the poor. 
     With the rise of Donald Trump and a renewed anti-immigrant movement, the choice facing the nation has become stark, between what Mexican author Jose Vasconcelos once called Universopolis – a place in which all the peoples of the world are melded into a “cosmic race” – and the Blade Runner scenario.
     In Blade Runner, a prescient 1982 film, Los Angeles in the 21st century has become an ominous “world city” marked by cultural fusion and economic stratification, a sunless and polluted place, overcrowded with Asian and Latino drones who barely look up at the metal fortresses of the rich. That option is basically an advanced imperialist state.
     Like Vasconcelos, author Salman Rushdie envisions a more optimistic, multicultural alternative. Immigrants may not so much assimilate as leak into one another, he suggests, “like flavors when you cook.”
     Of course, this is precisely what frightens many Trump supporters. For them the USA is hot dogs and apple pie, and they show little interest in expanding their diets.
  
This essay is also posted by permission at VTDigger.

Presidential Regression 

Blaming Outsiders: An American Tradition Since 1800

This isn't the first time that the US has faced a potential constitutional crisis or charges that the presidential race was rigged with the aid of a foreign power.

Rumors of conspiracy and war were also rampant at the end of the eighteenth century. The "enemy" then was France. Some warned ominously that Napoleon's troops were moving on Florida and Louisiana. By April 1798 Congress had voted funds to arm merchant ships and fortify the harbors. In May it instructed US warships to capture any French vessel caught in American waters.

Public fears were on the rise and the pressure for action was intense. John Adams' wife Abigail supported a declaration of war and criticized Congress for acting too slowly. But the President and Congress decided instead to focus on enemies at home.

As the summer temperature soared past 90 degrees in Philadelphia, lawmakers went further than even Adams hoped, passing the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Adams called them emergency wartime measures. After all, there were more than 25,000 French immigrants in the country! And most of them were survivors of the slave uprising in Haiti on the island of Santo Domingo. Obvious security threats, right?

As historian David McCullough notes, there were French newspapers in Philadelphia as well as French schools, booksellers, boardinghouses and restaurants. “The French, it seemed, were everywhere,” he writes, “and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?”

The Alien Act was a Trumpian initiative aimed directly at immigrants, increasing the period of residency to qualify for citizenship and giving the President the power to deport any foreigner he considered dangerous. But the more consequential law turned out to be the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to stir people up or write anything critical of the government, Congress, or the President.  Editor Noah Webster backed the idea, declaring it time to stop other newspaper editors from libeling public figures. Even George Washington commented privately that some publications deserved punishment for their attacks. War was the pretext, but a little censorship sounded reasonable to many leaders. We've heard similar calls from Trump.

Officially, the purpose of the Sedition Act was to crack down on illegal actions that tended to cause the disruption or overthrow of the government. Rather than a foreign spy, however, the first target was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, an opposition editor in Philadelphia arrested for libeling Adams. In daily attacks he had belittled Adams as “President by three votes,” mocking his weight and describing him as a British tool. But Bache was never convicted, instead dying of yellow fever before he could stand trial.

Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon was equally high on Adams’ list. After the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had demanded a roll call vote to see “who are friends and enemies of the Constitution.” Jefferson agreed, calling the repressive new laws an unconstitutional “reign of terror.” But what triggered President Adams into action was a letter to the editor. Responding to an attack in the Federalist Vermont Journal, Lyon wrote the US should stay out of war with France. The Adams administration, he went on, had forgotten the welfare of the people “in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.”

There was also a comment about Lyon’s foot and the seat of the president’s pants.
 
That was enough for Adams and his allies. Lyon was placed on trial, in Vermont, in front of a judge who had run against him for Congress, convicted of bringing the President and government into contempt, fined $1,000, sentenced to four months, and marched in chains through the streets of Vergennes to jail. The sentence was imposed in October 1799, just a month before he was up for re-election.

But Adams and the Federalists had made a tactical error. They had targeted a hero, a popular figure who had come to the colonies as an indentured servant, fought the British with Ethan Allen, and married one of Allen’s cousins. As a result Vermont voters defied the President and re-elected him anyway. Despite Lyon’s occasionally extreme behavior the arrest had made him even more popular, an early example of the state’s outspoken, contrarian, and sometimes defiantly independent streak.

The next year, for the only time in US history, the President - John Adams - ran against the Vice President - Thomas Jefferson. Since Matthew Lyon’s trial for sedition, eleven more people had been convicted under Adams' law. But that didn’t stop the Anti-Federalist press from calling him a monarchist, an old man too impressed with the British. Some claimed he was insane.
 
The attacks on Jefferson were equally harsh, from weakling and French intriguer to libertine and unrepentant atheist who mocked Christian faith. But the criticism of Adams came from both Anti-Federalist republicans, who considered him a warmonger, and Federalists, who said he was too cowardly to confront the French.
 
The race turned out to be closer than anyone expected. Adams did well enough in New England, but lost in New York, the West and South. The outcome in New York was largely the result of Aaron Burr’s influence in New York City. Counting up electoral votes from the nation’s 16 states, Jefferson had 73 to 65 for Adams and 63 for Charles Pinckney, a Federalist stalwart from South Carolina. But Burr also had 73 votes, which created a tie. That meant the choice went to the House of Representatives.

Burr’s refusal to step aside and clear the way for Jefferson fueled suspicions that he was privately bargaining with the Federalists. Alexander Hamilton distrusted both men but opted for the current Vice President. “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself,” he charged, “thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement…Jefferson is in my view less dangerous than Burr.”

In the end, the tie-breaking vote was cast by Lyon, the same person whom Adams had targeted with sedition charges. Lyon respected Burr as a New York power broker, but he was philosophically allied with Jefferson. It thus surprised few when he picked the Virginian over Boston’s first citizen to be the next president. Burr became vice president and Adams became a one-term President

In 1801, the former president was still bitter -- and still blaming immigrants. “Is there no pride in American bosoms?" Adams wrote. "Can their hearts endure that (James) Callendar, (William) Duane, (Thomas) Cooper and Lyon should be the most influential men in the country, all foreigners and all degraded characters?” All four had been charged with sedition.

Adams called them “foreign liars." He also charged, a bit oddly at the time, that there were “no Americans in America.” It all sounds too familiar.