TomDispatch
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, The Criminalization of Immigrants From Clinton to
Trump
By Aviva Chomsky
Posted on April 25, 2017, Printed on April 25, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176271/ ;
From his "big, fat, beautiful wall" to his travel bans, much of Donald
Trump's push to isolate America, like so much else in his program, has hit a
series of ugly speed bumps. Not only won't the Mexicans "pay" to build that
much-promised wall, but even Congress is unlikely to do so, as its price tag
soars by the week. Of course, much of what Trump wants to do when it comes
to keeping "them" out, or throwing "them" out, has (as TomDispatch regular
Aviva Chomsky writes today) already been done. Our last president wasn't
given the moniker of "deporter-in-chief" by his critics for nothing, and as
for that wall, a far more sophisticated, layered version of it is already in
place, complete with advanced sensors, cameras, drones, biometrics, spy
towers, radar systems -- much of the technology tested on America's distant
battlefields -- as well as actual walls. Even if there isn't a single
old-fashioned wall along the full length of the U.S.-Mexican border, the
construction of the layered "wall" that does exist began in the years of
Bill Clinton's presidency and its expansion has continued in a bipartisan
fashion ever since.
And yet, even if Donald Trump never builds his wall, his attitude, whether
toward Mexicans or Muslims, and the spirit of nativism and authoritarianism
he's released in those who police and bureaucratically control America's
borders, along with a bully-boy language that relies on phrases like
"extreme vetting" and on demands to turn over personal passwords for
electronic equipment at the border, will go a significant way toward walling
this country in. Take tourism. Just the other day, Dubai's
government-owned airline, the largest in the Middle East, announced that it
was significantly cutting back on its flights to the U.S. because interest
among its customers had fallen radically and bookings were way down. ("The
recent actions taken by the U.S. government relating to the issuance of
entry visas, heightened security vetting, and restrictions on electronic
devices in aircraft cabins, have had a direct impact on consumer interest
and demand for air travel into the U.S.")
But it isn't just Mexicans and Muslims, the obvious targets of Trump's
banning efforts and other restrictive urges, who are losing their urge to
travel here; it's true, too, of Asians and Europeans. According to travel
companies, interest in voyaging to America, whether for vacation or
business, is down across the planet. Searches for flights to the U.S. have,
for instance, dropped by 13% in Great Britain, 35% in New Zealand, and 40%
in China. Twenty-nine percent of Britons recently claimed that they were
far less eager to holiday in America. (Globally -- go figure -- only Russian
interest seems to be up.) And if, as Secretary of Homeland Security John
Kelly has warned, the present visa-less travel from most European countries
comes into question, watch out.
Already, it seems clear that tourism to the U.S. has taken a genuine hit --
a drop, reports the Bureau of Economic Analysis, of 10.2% for last December,
January, and February. According to Tourism Economics, 4.3 million visitors
will decide not to come to the U.S. this year, a potential loss of $7.4
billion, and in 2018 those figures might rise to 6.3 million and $10.8
billion. (The "Trump slump" in tourism already underway will obviously also
mean lost jobs for the jobs president.)
And don't forget that, as with America's wars, so with the walling in of
America, there's a distinct history here for President Trump to build on
and, as Aviva Chomsky writes today, it's a history that is remarkably,
dismally bipartisan. Tom
Making Sense of the Deportation Debate
How Bill Clinton and Barack Obama Laid the Groundwork for Trump's
Immigration Policies
By Aviva Chomsky
Ever since he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in
June 2015 and swore to build his "great wall" and stop Mexican "rapists"
from entering the country, undocumented immigrants have been the focus of
Donald Trump's ire. Now that he's in the Oval Office, the news has been
grim. A drumbeat of frightening headlines and panicked social media posts
have highlighted his incendiary language, his plans and executive orders
when it comes to immigrants, and the early acts of the Border Patrol and
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when it comes to round-ups
and deportations. The temperature has soared on the deportation debate, so
if you think we're in a completely unprecedented moment when it comes to
immigration and immigrants, you're in good company.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that immigrants, especially undocumented ones,
are flooding the United States, causing crime waves, and depleting social
service budgets. Never mind that the number of such immigrants has been in
steady decline since 2008, that immigrant crime rates are lower than citizen
crime rates, that the undocumented have no access to most social welfare
programs, and that crime figures, too, have generally been on the decline in
recent years.
The media has played its own role in fanning the flames. Since Donald Trump
entered the Oval Office, news reports have proliferated about rising raids,
arrests, detentions, and deportations. These suggest that something new,
terrifying, and distinctly Trumpian -- something we've simply never seen
before -- is underway, including mass sweeps to deport individuals who would
have been protected under the previous administration.
The numbers tell a different story. A Washington Post scare headline
typically read: "ICE Immigration Arrests of Noncriminals Double Under
Trump." While accurate, it was nonetheless misleading. Non-criminal
immigration arrests did indeed jump from 2,500 in the first three months of
2016 to 5,500 during the same period in 2017, while criminal arrests also
rose, bringing the total to 21,000. Only 16,000 were arrested during the
same months in 2016. The article, however, ignores the fact that 2016 was
the all-time low year for arrests under President Obama. In the first three
months of 2014, for example, 29,000 were arrested, far more than Trump's
three-month "record."
And even though arrests went up during Trump's first three months in office,
deportations actually went down, mostly due to the fact that the number of
immigrants crossing the border declined.
To those who have been following deportation politics in this country,
Trump's policies, as they are now unfolding, have an eerie resonance. They
seem to be growing directly out of policies first instituted in the
presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. True, President Obama liked
to talk about "our tradition of welcoming immigrants," while our new
president has tossed such liberal humanitarian rhetoric in the garbage can,
instead playing up a harsh nativism. Still, the fact is that two Democratic
presidents laid the groundwork for Trump's developing policies.
It was, after all, President Clinton who oversaw the draconian "Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act" of 1996. It
drastically increased all levels of immigration "enforcement," expanding the
Border Patrol, criminalizing numerous types of low-level immigration
violations, and facilitating and expanding deportation procedures. (A
similar emphasis on casting blame on individuals for structural and systemic
problems was also at the heart of Clinton's welfare reform of that same
year.)
In many ways, Donald Trump is only reiterating, with more bombast, ideas and
policies pioneered under Clinton, that then became a basic part of Barack
Obama's approach to immigration. Those policies drew directly on racist
tough-on-crime and anti-terrorism police tactics that also helped foment
white racial fears.
Anecdotally speaking, there have already been numerous cases of detention
and deportation that appear to go far beyond what was occurring in the Obama
years. But a closer look at those cases and at the numbers suggests
surprisingly more continuity than change. Both the mainstream media and
social media have highlighted what appear to be extreme cases of the arrest
of DACA ("deferred action for childhood arrivals") youth, also known as
"Dreamers," as well as of individuals appearing for routine check-ins with
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, or other arbitrary
detentions and deportations. Most of these cases, however, have been far
more in line with Obama-era policies than readers of such news might
imagine. Then, too, "low-priority immigrants" were swept up surprisingly
often in what the New York Times in 2014 called "the net of deportation."
Obama's Legacy: A Three-Part System
At first glance, President Obama's legacy on immigration enforcement appears
contradictory indeed. He claimed to be a humanitarian who sought to deport
only "felons, not families," while granting relief from deportation to
hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, he was
dubbed the "deporter-in-chief" for a reason. He oversaw historic rises in
deportation rates.
To grasp the contradictory nature of his policies, it's necessary to explore
three geographically different policy realms when it comes to the
undocumented: interior enforcement, border enforcement, and the Mexican
Southern Border Program. In the area of interior enforcement, Obama created
several protection and priority programs for undocumented immigrants already
in the country that did indeed shield whole groups of people from
deportation. Immigrant rights supporters who emphasize the humanitarian
nature of what Obama did focus on such protections, while downplaying the
two border prongs of his policies. Yet, though not much attended to, even
the humanitarian programs incorporated a darker side, criminalizing and
targeting those not eligible for them.
When it came to interior enforcement, President Obama called on ICE to
exercise "prosecutorial discretion." Immigrants who were parents, students,
hard-working, had close family and community ties, or served in the
military, he suggested, should be granted relief from deportation.
In the process, however, he offered a language of innocence versus
criminality and the illusion that, when it came to immigrants, the notion of
criminality was self-evident and universally agreed upon. By dividing them
into felons versus families, he actually contributed to the criminalization
of large groups of immigrants and so fed directly into Trump's future
rhetoric. He also drew on Bill Clinton's "tough on crime" policies in ways
that linked the criminalization of people of color with the deportation of
"criminal" immigrants (also overwhelmingly people of color).
As immigration scholars Alan Aja and Alejandra Marchevsky explain:
"The criminalization of immigrants in part resulted from more aggressive
policing of communities of color. In the 1980s and '90s, law enforcement
agencies across the nation implemented broken windows and stop-and-frisk
strategies, claiming that mass arrests for low-level offenses would prevent
more serious crime. As the immigrants who lived in these communities fell
victim to racialized policing and mass incarceration, the federal
government's rosters of the criminal immigrant exploded."
Once criminalized, they then fell into a separate-and-unequal immigration
enforcement system in which due process was eliminated and deportation, the
ultimate draconian penalty, could be implemented regardless of the
seriousness of the "crime." Worse yet, the ever harsher over-policing of
communities of color and the expansion of mass incarceration produced, Aja
and Marchevsky point out, "a reservoir of immigrants with criminal records,
creating an endless chain of detentions and deportations."
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, has made strikingly
clear, all of this -- the redefinition of minor crimes as felonies, the
increasing pressure on those charged to plea bargain, and measures that then
excluded felons from public housing, employment, welfare rolls, voting
booths, and other aspects of society -- relegated a significant number of
black men to a permanent underclass. Undocumented immigrants were also
caught in this web, with some special twists.
In the wake of Clinton's 1996 immigration law, for instance, convictions of
just about any sort, including the most minor crimes, became grounds for
deportation -- even retroactively. So a long-ago violation that resulted in
probation and community service, or a small fine, now became evidence of an
immigrant's "criminal" status from which deportation naturally followed.
And there was another new catch-22 category as well: so-called immigration
crimes. Those with a record of illegal reentry and those who engaged in what
was termed "immigration fraud" were automatically re-categorized as
"criminals" under President Obama's priority enforcement policy. "Illegal
reentry" is, in fact, the most curious of crimes, since it distinguishes
between those who succeed in entering the country without inspection on
their first try and those who are caught and only succeed on a subsequent
try. "Immigration fraud," a broad category, includes common practices like
using a false social security number in order to work.
Obama's interior deportation scheme relied heavily on this expansive notion
of the criminality of the undocumented, who might otherwise have qualified
as people trying to get by as best they could. Now, President Trump is
extending that criminalization further by ruling that anybody convicted of,
charged with, or even suspected of a crime constitutes a priority for
deportation. In the process, he's expanded the concept of the "criminal"
even as he's built directly on the Clinton-Obama legacy.
At the Border and Beyond
What earned President Obama the moniker of "deporter-in-chief," however, was
his policy towards border enforcement, since it was there that the number of
deportees rose most sharply. This was in part because he prioritized
"recent border crossers" for deportation; everyone, that is, who had crossed
without authorization, which essentially meant everyone apprehended in the
border region, was now criminalized. Under previous administrations, most
of those caught there had been granted what was called "voluntary
departure." In other words, they were returned to the Mexican side of the
border without legal sanction. During the Clinton and Bush administrations,
more than a million people a year were returned to Mexico in this manner
without being transformed into criminals and so were not included in the
usual deportation figures.
In the Obama years, those apprehended at the border began to be formally
charged and fingerprinted before being issued a deportation order. In this
way, they were redefined as "criminals," and if they were caught attempting
a second border crossing, as criminal "repeat immigration offenders." It
also meant that formal deportations began to skyrocket, although the numbers
crossing the border, those apprehended at the border, and those sent back to
Mexico were all beginning to fall.
Soon enough, immigration crimes came to rival drug crimes in the federal
court system. Obama became the deporter-in-chief not because he deported
more people than previous administrations, but because he criminalized more
of those he deported. This, then, was how he managed to protect many from
deportation, while also racking up deportation statistics far beyond those
of his predecessors. In fact, the situations of many of those caught at the
border proved remarkably similar to those being granted prosecutorial
discretion in the interior. They had family, including children, in the
United States, or jobs and strong community ties, or had lived in the
country for years. Because they had left and tried to return, however, they
were redefined as criminals.
Finally, one aspect of immigration enforcement under the Obama
administration generally goes unmentioned: the president's role in
pressuring Mexico into collaborating by arresting and deporting Central
Americans heading north (including families and unaccompanied children)
before they reached the border with the United States. In 2014, under
growing pressure from Washington, the Mexican government implemented the
Southern Border Program. While U.S. law was being repeatedly updated to
provide humanitarian treatment to families and children apprehended at the
border, when the Mexicans got to them first, they simply deported them.
In 2014, only 3% of the minors apprehended in the U.S. were deported; in
Mexico, the figure was 77%, or 18,269. As one report summed up the
situation: "The United States is outsourcing its border enforcement to
Mexico." As in the United States, so Mexico's increasing militarization and
repression on its southern border did not actually slow the flow of
migrants. It merely made the voyage far more dangerous, while giving ever
more power to smugglers and gangs that now prey upon Central American
migrants desperately trying to evade Mexican border controls.
Immigrants, Criminalization, and the Labor Market
Long before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, this "tough on crime"
approach to immigration fit into a broader pattern of the criminalization of
people of color that fed the prison-industrial complex, made the U.S. the
globe's leading incarcerator, and encouraged the proliferation of private
prisons. It helped justify the increasing militarization of the police in
those years and the over-policing of communities of color. It also fed a
national sense of insecurity that contributed to political passivity,
disempowerment, and the kind of nativism that Trump has thrived on.
Criminalization plays a role as well in the country's growing economic
inequality. It justifies both high rates of unemployment and low wages
among people of color, while warehousing those whose labor has become
superfluous. And it plays a particular role when it comes to immigrants and
the labor market.
Immigrants actually experience significantly higher labor force
participation and lower unemployment rates than the native-born, making them
an exception among people of color. However, they earn less ($681 week)
than do native-born workers ($837 a week), according to Bureau of Labor
Statistics figures for 2015. For employers in recent years, the
criminalization of the already unstable status of immigrants (and their
inability generally to access social services), makes them a uniquely
exploitable and so desirable work force. They tend to be hired to do jobs
so dismal, arduous, or dangerous that they fail to attract native-born
workers. Anthropologist Nicholas de Genova has suggested that the very
"deportability" of undocumented immigrants makes them desirable to such
employers.
Meanwhile, the criminalization of people of color and of immigrants in
particular lent a distinct helping hand to Donald Trump in his campaign for
president, even as it helped the prison-industrial complex and the police
justify ever-increasing budgets and employment.
The Trump administration's multipronged approach to immigration relies on
and promotes the criminalization of immigrants. Whether halting the entry
of refugees or persons with visas from particular countries, hiring
thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol agents, promising to build a "great,
great wall," denying federal money to sanctuary cities, or publishing lists
of crimes committed by immigrants, Trump's immigration policies follow in
the footsteps but also intensify those of his predecessors and continue to
create fear, justify exploitation, and rationalize authoritarianism.