Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide by Peter Andreas
Author:Peter Andreas [Andreas, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, Political Economy, General
ISBN: 9780801487569
Google: 90M4eva79lAC
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2000-01-15T06:46:08+00:00
CREATING AND CHANNELING THE BACKLASH AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
During much of the twentieth century, the United States and Mexico not only quietly tolerated but actively facilitated and encouraged the influx of cheap labor across the border; until recent decades the rising level of illegal immigration commanded little national political attention. For example, the platform of the Republican Party did not even mention immigration control until 1980, and only four years later did it affirm the countryâs right to control its borders and express concern about illegal immigration.1
Congressional debate over how to deal with illegal immigration culminated in the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which introduced employer sanctions for the first time, as well as a limited legalization program. But although IRCA provided a temporary sedative, the law exacerbated the very problem it purported to remedy. Rather than discouraging illegal immigration, the main impact of legalization under IRCA was to reinforce and expand already well-established cross-border migration networks. Many onetime immigrants who had gone back to Mexico returned to claim legalization papers. And those who were legalized under the program provided a more secure base for the arrival of new immigrants. Meanwhile, the primary impact of the poorly designed and minimally enforced employer sanctions was to create a booming business in fraudulent documents.
IRCAâs perverse consequences helped set the stage for a powerful backlash against illegal immigration in the 1990s, most acute in California, which was home to nearly half of the unauthorized immigrants estimated to be in the country. The state was hit hard early in the decade by a budget crisis and an economic downturn occasioned by post-Cold War cuts in military support for southern Californiaâs aerospace industry. Economic insecurity combined with a rapidly changing demographic profile to nurture rising nativist fears among Californiaâs disproportionately white, middle-class electorate. The new restrictionist mood was embodied in the passage of Proposition 187 by California voters in 1994, which sought to bar illegal immigrants from receiving social services. Proposition 187 was self-consciously designed and promoted as a symbolic gesture to express frustration and âsend a messageâ to the federal government.2 Even though it was subsequently declared unconstitutional (as its proponents expected), its passage by a three-to-two margin sent shock waves across the country and through the halls of Congress.
My purpose is not to provide a general explanation for the anti-illegal immigration backlash but, more specifically, to show how this backlash was partly created and then opportunistically channeled by political and bureaucratic entrepreneurs to focus on the border as both the source of the problem and the most appropriate site of the policy solution. Beginning with Patrick Buchanan, politicians used the border as a political prop in voicing their opposition to illegal immigration. During the 1992 presidential campaign Buchanan held a press conference above Smugglers Canyon (a well-known point of illegal entry along the border south of San Diego) to denounce what he called the federal governmentâs failure to deter an âillegal invasion.â In the following years more mainstream politicians embraced many of Buchananâs ideas and similarly adopted the border as a political stage.
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