Draconian anti-immigrant bills outrage millions

Congress is debating several anti-immigration bills, each of which is meant to stimulate anti-immigrant hysteria. The most draconian of these is the Sensenbrenner-King bill.

Los Angeles WW photo: Julia La Riva

Drafted by two Republicans, this bill got enough Democratic votes to pass the House in December and is now before the Senate. Besides criminalizing the approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States—mandating jail and deportation—it would even “make any relative, employer, coworker, clergyman, lawyer or friend of an undocumented immigrant into an ‘alien smuggler’ and a criminal.” (immigrationforum.org)

Blaming immigrants for economic problems, from unemployment to low wages, is not new. Since the founding of the United States, there has been a constant drumbeat of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Detroit WW photo: Cheryl LaBash

Tennessee’s Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and an HMO robber baron who has been trying to privatize Medicare, has created an anti-immigration bill that would further militarize the U.S.-Mexico border, hire thousands more Border Patrol agents and build a huge fence along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.

A bill proposed by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas would empower state and local governments to prosecute undocumented immigrants, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to legalize vigilantism with a “Volunteer Border Marshal Program.”

Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, called the Hutchison bill a sign of an immigrant-bashing spiral. “They’re getting more and more aggressive, more and more outrageous in the proposals. It’s like immigrants are all mass murderers,” he said. “You could turn the whole country into a police state and that still won’t solve the problem. People come here for jobs that are offered by American employers.”

By comparison, two other bills, the McCain-Kennedy bill and the Specter bill, are considered “liberal.” However, they describe the undocumented as “illegal aliens.” Their provisions limit immigrants’ right to settle legally and permanently in the United States.

The McCain-Kennedy bill, which is supported by some liberals, would create a new temporary visa category. In essence, it is a guest worker program—a warmed-over version of the failed and oppressive brazero program that forced so many Mexicans into poverty from 1942 to 1964. Under this act, any immigrants out of work for more than 45 days are subject to deportation.

Sen. Arlen Specter’s immigration-limitation bill is another guest worker plan, one that could make it much tougher for immigrants fighting deportation or refugees seeking asylum to press their case in a federal appeals court. It, too, has a 45-day limit on staying in the country without a job, with no provisions for retirement, pregnancy, downsizing, strikes or recession. The Specter bill would remove rights granted to immigrants by federal courts of appeals, eroding the ability of people fighting deportation to be heard in the legal system. (Contra Costa Times, March 26). Specter’s bill also sets time limits on immigrants’ stay here and makes permanent residency an impossible dream for all but a very few.

Anti-immigrant groups such as the neo-con NumbersUSA, the Hudson Institute and the Heartland Foundation are pushing the worst of these bills, while media from Time Magazine to Fox News conduct polls showing anti-immigrant sentiment increasing across the country.

This is a carefully orchestrated campaign to create xenophobia and worker disunity at a time when anger is growing over the hardships caused by capitalism. It is the big corporations that have been outsourcing jobs, reducing pensions and benefits and cutting wages; their paid-for politicians have diverted hundreds of billions from the public treasury into war while gutting social services. Yet immigrant workers, who remain at the bottom of the ladder even as they contribute enormously to the economy, are being scapegoated for much of this.

The Filipino anti-imperialist group BAYAN says, “Low-income migrant populations are forced into a life of exploited undocumented status here in the U.S. because of a fiscal crisis made possible under the design of unjust and elitist global economic policies—policies authored by the U.S. corporate elite, enforced by the Bush administration and its U.S. puppet regimes in developing nations.”

But now millions of immigrants and their supporters are coming into the streets to fight this reactionary legislation and propaganda. While Congress conducts its sham debates, the largest working class immigrant movement in U.S. history is on the move.