U.S. immigration policy in regards to Latin America has since 1965 been “We don’t want you, but we know you’re coming anyways, so we’ll figure it out later.” Before 1965 the border “problem” was barely a part of the public debate, little more than a cat-and-mouse game for the involved parties. Otherwise, Hispanic residents in California and the Southwest had to deal with the same problems of discrimination and “creative” law enforcement that blacks dealt with in the South. During the Great Depression, the FDR administration looked the other way when Hispanic residents, the majority U.S. citizens, were rounded up in “border states” and “repatriated” to Mexico whether they were born there or not.
“Forgotten” even by "Hispanic History Month" are court cases that set the groundwork for Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, such as Mendez et al v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al in 1946, when white parents banded together and declared that “people of Mexican descent were intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior to European Americans” and would be banned from attending “white” public schools.
The school district was sued for discrimination, and a U.S. district court judge in California ruled that “the clear purpose of the segregation by the school districts was to discriminate against pupils of Mexican descent” and that this violated the 14th Amendment, a decision that was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Not long afterward, then governor Earl Warren signed a law mandating school desegregation, and he of course would subsequently remember this case as Chief Justice in the Brown case.
But today people need a group to "hate," and conveniently there is the people crossing the border, which is “bad news” for Democrats (or so says Bill Clinton, one of the co-architects of the U.S.' disastrous immigration policy based on exclusion). But it’s always “bad news,” but just more so for Democrats because they try to put a more “humane” face on their border and asylum policies which are more façade than reality.
With another government shutdown looming in the near distance, the Republican far-right is demanding essentially shutting down the “border” for good, while a nervous Joe Biden’s “don’t come here” policy of restricting asylum hearings is—contrary to claims by the far-right—is just as dehumanizing as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s policy. Its all “good” politics for those looking for scapegoats who are essentially without voice in this country, and typical of the mindless stupidity that racism against people without their own "history" usually engenders.
In a 2012 study by the Population Development Review written by Douglas Massey and Karen Pren entitled Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America located here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3407978/# it is apparent that racist immigration laws meant to curtail the “inflow” of those who arouse the paranoia of nativists and xenophobes has instead caused a chain reaction of “unintended” consequences.
The year 1965 is often cited as a turning point in the history of US immigration, but what happened in the ensuing years is not well understood…The 1965 amendments were intended to purge immigration law of its racist legacy by replacing the old quotas with a new system that allocated residence visas according to a neutral preference system based on family reunification and labor force needs. The new system is widely credited with having sparked a shift in the composition of immigration away from Europe toward Asia and Latin America, along with a substantial increase in the number of immigrants.
The study notes that before the 1965 law, “Countries in the Western Hemisphere had never been included in the national origins quotas, nor was the entry of their residents prohibited…Indeed, before 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions.” But
The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere. Subsequent amendments further limited immigration from the region by limiting the number of residence visas for any single country to just 20,000 per year (in 1976), folding the separate hemispheric caps into a worldwide ceiling of 290,000 visas (in 1978), and then reducing the ceiling to 270,000 visas (in 1980). These restrictions did not apply to spouses, parents, and children of US citizens, however.
That latter might not have led to such a large expansion in the “legal” immigrant population if not for the fact that legal immigrants who did not seek U.S. citizenship felt pressured to do so by increasingly harsh immigration laws that threatened their legal status, the reason for which we’ll get to later.
While the 1965 law was “intended” to be “non-discriminatory” and gave immigrants from Asia and Africa as much “right” to come here as Europeans, in regard to immigrants from Latin America the caps it placed on “traffic” from other countries in the Western Hemisphere was just a hole in the dike that in combination further restrictive laws would only grow bigger.
The most disastrous single event in the U.S.’
self-destructive Latin American immigration policy would come soon afterward,
with the ending of the “Bracero” program. Admittedly, activists like Cesar
Chavez (who I happened to see along with Jesse Jackson speaking in support of
health care for California state workers in front of the capitol building in
Sacramento around 1990) opposed the program for labor rights reasons, but that betrayed
a lack of a sense of reality behind the dynamics of cross-border traffic and the mindset of migrant workers themselves, which would become apparent almost immediately:
Legal immigration from the region grew from a total of around 459,000 during the decade of the 1950s to peak at 4.2 million during the 1990s, by which time it made up 44 percent of the entire flow, compared with 29 percent for Asia, 14 percent for Europe, 6 percent for Africa, and 7 percent for the rest of the world). The population of unauthorized immigrants from Latin America also rose from near zero in 1965 to peak at around 9.6 million in 2008, accounting for around 80 percent of the total present. How this happened is a complicated tale of unintended consequences, political opportunism, bureaucratic entrepreneurship, media guile, and most likely a healthy dose of racial and ethnic prejudice.
It is noted that U.S. immigration policy “has very little to do with trends and patterns of immigration” and is “rarely grounded in any real understanding of the forces that govern international migration.” Thus race-based immigration policy in regard to Latin America is hypocritically defined in political terms, often disguised as “economic” concerns:
Instead, over time the relative openness or restrictiveness of US policies is more strongly shaped by prevailing economic circumstances and political ideologies In the United States, especially, immigrants carry significant symbolic weight in the narrative of American peoplehood and how they are depicted in the media, portrayed by politicians, and treated by legislators probably reveals more about America’s aspirations and hopes—and its fears and insecurities—than anything to do with immigration itself.
“Peoplehood” is to be understood as more “cultural” than political and economic, and you have those on the far-right obsessing over the country becoming “mongrelized.” But “Mexican” culture has always been tolerated before under the pretense of being "open" to doing something different (i.e., going to a "Mexican" restaurant), and in television and film from the 1950s into the 1970s, Hispanics were only portrayed as “different” by those who were prejudiced against them.
Today, they are given no “human” qualities except the worst kind; yet in places like western Washington we see a “slow” but steady process of white people giving away the store to East and South Asians which they can no longer control, which I discussed in this post here https://todarethegods.blogspot.com/2020/06/someones-got-to-take-blame-for-windows.html and will refer to later in regard to the insane two-tier work visa and immigration policy that tries to keep out workers the country needs to keep itself “fed,” and those who actually take jobs that white people think belongs to them.
The study also noted that in 1970 the number of foreign-born people in the country was below 5 percent—the lowest in U.S. history. But that would change dramatically with the end of the Bracero program, when U.S. farmers failed to see any “natives” rushing to take the place of temporary foreign workers—and they had to get those workers from somewhere, illegally if need be. While as noted above the program was seen on the “outside” to be exploitive to foreign workers, that wasn't necessarily what all these workers themselves thought, and of course nobody asked what they thought either (so typical today), especially Mexicans for whom the money they were sending home was more than what they could expect if they stayed in Mexico.
By the time the foolishness of ending the Bracero program without a provision to replace those workers (save with returning workers, now "undocumented") was "visible," it was essentially too late because it had become a "free-for-all," and the reaction to this was simply to be blind to the causes and double-down on keeping “them” out:
Owing to the Bracero Program, the lion’s share of the migration was temporary and circular and, hence, invisible to citizens. During the period 1955–59, around half a million Mexicans were entering the country each year, the number fluctuating around 450,000 temporary Bracero migrants and 50,000 permanent residents. Given this large annual inflow, the sudden elimination of the Bracero Program clearly would have dramatic consequences on migration between Mexico and the United States; and with the imposition of a hemispheric cap, and eventually country quotas, the displaced temporary migrants were not going to be accommodated within the system for legal immigration.
In short, as a result of shifts in US immigration policy between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, Mexico went from annual access to around 450,000 guestworker visas and a theoretically unlimited number of resident visas in the United States (in practice averaging around 50,000 per year) to a new situation in which there were no guestworker visas and just 20,000 resident visas annually. The effect of these new limits on the system of Mexican migration that had evolved during the Bracero era was predictable.
This
graphic shows how illegal immigration was practically nil while the Bracero
program was in existence; when it was ended, illegal immigration skyrocketed in
relative terms:
Workers who before entered legally through the Bracero program simply returned to the fields without being "legal." If policymakers and the border patrol simply looked the other way at this traffic, we wouldn’t be seeing the “inflow” we are seeing now. Instead, politicians made it an “issue” and passed even more ridiculous laws that showed once more that policymakers simply had no clue of what they were doing because the simply didn’t see migrant workers as human beings just trying to make a living.
With the border “closed” and "normal" cross-border traffic interrupted, those who would otherwise be temporary residents felt they had no option but to stay. People legally in the country on a “temporary” basis decided to seek legal permanent residence and naturalization—and once having obtained it, could lawfully bring family and relatives into the country, thus increasing the immigrant population beyond the set “quotas.”
As they say, stupid is as stupid does. Rather than stop the “inflow,” what the U.S.’ absurd immigration policy did was curb the natural outflow. But instead of passing a comprehensive immigration law that provides at least a recognizable avenue to legal entry even on a temporary basis, we only see more punitive and restrictive laws that simply creates more desperate people in desperate circumstances.
On top of that, the refusal to make provision for asylum seekers from Central American countries brutalized first by right-wing murder regimes armed and funded by the U.S., and then by the “deportation” of violent U.S.-bred gangs, is of course evidence of a failure to “communicate” the truth to the public. The report observes that
When the United States intervened in the region by launching the Contra War and funding paramilitary groups, the level of violence increased; and as the region’s economy deteriorated, the resulting wave of emigrants met with the same restrictions on legal entry that had earlier blocked the entry of former Braceros from Mexico. The sole exception was Nicaragua, whose emigrants were fleeing a leftist regime and were thus allowed to overstay tourist visas and ultimately adjust their status to become legal permanent residents. In contrast, the flows of undocumented Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans remained predominantly illegal, accumulating total undocumented populations of 570,000, 430,000, and 300,000, respectively, by 2008.
Instead of a good faith effort to stop this and accommodate those who actually wanted to do things “legally,” only excuses were made to keep "them" out, typically using language once thought to be the province of evil regimes like that of Nazi Germany:
The most common negative framing depicted immigration as a “crisis” for the nation. Initially marine metaphors were used to dramatize the crisis, with Latino immigration being labeled a “rising tide” or a “tidal wave” that was poised to “inundate” the United States and “drown” its culture while “flooding” American society with unwanted foreigners. Over time, marine metaphors increasingly gave way to martial imagery, with illegal immigration being depicted as an “invasion” in which “outgunned” Border Patrol agents sought to “hold the line” in a vain attempt to “defend” the border against “attacks” from “alien invaders” who launched “banzai charges” to overwhelm American defenses.
Politicians quickly discovered the political advantages to be gained by demonizing Latino immigrants and illegal migration. Ronald Reagan, for example, asserted that illegal immigration was a question of “national security,” and in a 1986 speech he told Americans that “terrorists and subversives are just two days’ driving time from [the border crossing at] Harlingen, Texas” In his 1992 reelection campaign, California Governor Pete Wilson called on Congress to “stop the invasion” and borrowed footage from “Border Under Siege” for a series of attack ads. As images of migrants dashing through traffic rolled, a narrator intoned, “they keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.”
Obviously the "narrative" is an "old" one. The report also notes that the media took advantage of the paranoia and racism of many Americans to gain viewership:
The media discovered that the trope of a border under siege made for dramatic copy and good visuals and happily played handmaiden to aspiring politicians and bureaucrats. Later, a host of pundits joined the anti-immigrant chorus to attract attention and sell books. Lou Dobbs framed the “invasion of illegal aliens” as part of a broader “war on the middle class.” Pat Buchannan charged it was part of an “Aztlan Plot” hatched by Mexicans to recapture lands lost in 1848, stating that “if we do not get control of our borders and stop this greatest invasion in history, I see the dissolution of the U.S. and the loss of the American southwest.” From his lofty Harvard position, Samuel Huntington warned Americans that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages… The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.” All these views received extensive coverage in print and broadcast media throughout the country.
Thus
The shift in the legal auspices of Mexican migration thus transformed what had been a largely invisible circulation of innocuous workers into a yearly and highly visible violation of American sovereignty by hostile aliens who were increasingly framed as invaders and criminals. The relentless propagandizing that accompanied the shift had a pervasive effect on public opinion, turning it decidedly more conservative on issues of immigration even as it was turning more conservative with respect to social issues more generally. Indeed, the rise of illegal migration remains inadequately acknowledged as a factor in the rightward shift of American public opinion.
Today we hear of all people Bill Clinton warning of the “danger” of illegal immigration to Democrats, but he himself contributed to the incomprehension with the 1996 immigration law—first concocted as a “reaction” to various terrorist acts here and abroad against U.S. targets—was made in a “bi-partisan” fashion with increasingly far-right Republicans. Clinton—who many charged as being a “Democrat” in name only, oversaw a law that many saw as inhumane, or at least acquiesced to the desires of Republicans who were:
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act authorized the deportation of noncitizens from ports of entry without judicial hearing and, in an effort to restrict family migration still further, required sponsors of legal immigrants to provide affidavits of support that demonstrated a household income at least 125 percent of the federal poverty line. Not only would resident noncitizens have to wait in a long line to sponsor the entry of a spouse or child, when their turn finally came, they would need more money as well. Meanwhile, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act placed new restrictions on legal permanent residents’ access to public services, barring them from receiving food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, and other means-tested benefits for five years after admission.
Again, this would be inhumane and counterproductive, and was in no way grounded in the reality on the “ground,” if in fact the hope of these policies was to persuade the immigrants to leave the country. This was compounded by the 2001 Patriot Act, supposedly in reaction to 9-11:
None of the terrorist attacks involved Mexicans, and none of the terrorists entered through Mexico. Indeed, all came to the United States on legal visas. Yet Mexicans nonetheless bore the brunt of the deportation campaign launched in the name of the war on terrorism, comprising 72 percent of those removed in 2009.
Yet as we continue to see, even this was not “successful”:
The net effect of these legislative acts was to dramatically increase the pressure on noncitizens, regardless of legal status. In response to the rising pressure, more immigrants adopted a strategy of “defensive naturalization” in order to protect themselves and their families from detention and deportation and to guarantee their continued access to public benefits…To say that US immigration policies have failed is an understatement. From 1970 to 2010 the population born in Latin America increased more than 11 times. Owing to mass immigration, the total Hispanic population grew by a factor of five, and the percentage of the population born in Latin America residing in the US more than tripled. All these trends unfolded in spite of—and, as we have shown, paradoxically also because of—the progressive limitation of opportunities for legal entry, the massive build-up of enforcement resources at the border, the large rise in deportations, and the systematic restriction of the civil liberties and social rights of noncitizens. If the goal of such actions was to limit immigration from Latin America and prevent the demographic transformation of the United States, they achieved the opposite.
The U.S. government apparently never authorized a “study” of the reasons for migration from Mexico and Central American, or the consequences of ever more restrictive immigration policies; it was always assumed it was for “economic” reasons, but few understood that this was in conjunction with the environment in which people could not safely live their lives, usually the consequence of past U.S. policy in the region. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that U.S. immigration simply didn’t take into consideration that migrants were not simply mindless vermin:
The crux of the problem is that Congress routinely makes consequential policy decisions with scant consideration of the underlying dynamics of the social processes involved. That was certainly the case here, for in orchestrating immigration reforms during the 1960s and 1970s Congress took little notice of the long history of recruitment in the hemisphere; the high degree of circularity that historically had prevailed; the strong connection of flows to the dynamics of labor supply and demand; the key role of networks in sustaining and expanding migration over time; the motivations of migrants and how they change in the course of a migratory career; the structural transformations that occur in sending and receiving areas as a result of mass migration; the likelihood of a migratory response to economic, political, and military intervention; the large size and well-established nature of flows into the United States on the eve of restriction; and most importantly the strong momentum that accrues to migratory flows once underway.
U.S. immigration policy simply did not take into consideration any thought save more and more onerous restrictions. Things likely would have been different if by
…choosing to reform the Bracero Program, Congress had enacted safeguards to improve the wages, working conditions, and treatment of workers instead of shutting down the program entirely. Suppose that in implementing the new system of ethnically neutral country quotas, Congress had granted special, more generous visa allocations to Canada and Mexico as America’s closest neighbors. Finally, suppose that instead of funding the Contras and other paramilitary operations, generating a cycle of violence and economic disruption, the Reagan Administration had let events in Nicaragua take their course without interference.
Under those circumstances mass migration from Latin America might indeed have been avoided. With the continuation of a reformed temporary labor migration program, the flow from Mexico would have remained predominantly circular. With a generous country quota for permanent resident visas, Mexican workers who established legitimate ties and wished to settle in the United States would have had a legal pathway. Hispanic population growth would thus have been slow and illegal migration would likely not have risen to the high levels that have made it into a major political issue. The Latino threat narrative would not have gained traction, fears of an alien flood or invasion would not have pushed Americans toward greater conservatism, and there would have been little support for restrictionist policies.
Racism against Hispanics, of course, has played not just a large part, but the principle part in all of this. And yet white nativists and xenophobes in this country have actively taken part in their own destruction through work visa and immigration policies for non-Hispanics, at least from what I can tell from what I see at the University of Washington, and in Seattle and Western Washington generally.
You think that all those call centers with Indians answering the phone are located in India? Not the General Electric call center for GE employees asking about their health insurance, which was located in an office building in Seattle before the pandemic hit, and then apparently vacated to do “home work.” As I wrote in the post from the link above,
Companies like Microsoft
claim that they need H-1B workers because of alleged shortages of qualified
workers, but as the Economic Policy Institute points out, the real reason is
because they are paid significantly lower wages—anywhere from 17 to 34 percent
below the median—than non-H-1B workers. The Institute suggests that the only
real way to know if there is a true shortage of qualified native-born workers
is if employers are forced to pay H-1B employees at least the median wage—that
is assuming that the hiring manager is not Indian who only wants to work with
other Indians, particularly those who are of the same “caste” because of shared
“culture.”
On the website insights.dice.com, you find comments like this:
You should take a look at all
of the Indian recruiters and staffing firms out there. I get anywhere from 25
to 50 emails per day looking to fill American jobs at ridiculously low
rates!!! I also get at least 10 follow
up phone calls per day. Most of the emails are for the same roles at the same
company. They lowball the hourly rates to the extreme down low. Americans
really are getting the sh-t end of the stick with the massively huge list of
recruiters and staffing firms.
We really need to get
organized into a group and stop the H-1B gravy train. These people have screwed
the market hard. All the dirty tricks they use have ruined this field. Fake
papers lying. They set people up for bad interviews so they can claim they were
not able to find a local candidate. Pure lies! I am Indian I was sponsored here
when I was eight years old and I am a citizen. I have insights on how these
shops are operating. They are ruining the local job market most people are able
to fill these roles and this is cheap labor for the tech companies.
And
Many H-1B holders of expired visas assume American names so they can’t be tracked for overstaying the max 6 years allowed by the H-1B program. There is an estimate that there over 1 million holders of H-1B visas that are expired. A research of Linkedin indicates that only 1 in 10 go home. Many work for the worldwide monopoly, Microsoft, this should be resolved using current anti-monopoly laws. They have complete control of I.T. contract consulting. Rarely do I receive e-mails from American recruiters. Still, they will fill the positions with their own people before Americans, because they fear being found out regarding their expired visas.
And
I currently work as a
contractor for a 15 billion dollar company who outsourced to the supposed best
outsourcing company there is. The outsourcing company is all Indian and they
don’t know the hardware or the software, they guess most of the time. There
have been more outages in the last 2 years than there where in the previous 10
and they are doing about 70% less work than the previous group.
What
does one Indian have to say about these complaints of taking jobs that the “natives”
could easily do themselves if allowed to?
This is very sad that how most Americans don’t like Indians through we work hard and try to go above and beyond at work, where most Citizens I have seen either do not want to work hard or don’t care about work (especially in govt sector). Who do you think handles the work at the time of thanks giving and Christmas holidays? There is no one at work and we are the only ones sitting at office and finish the work. The reason why the young generation is not getting the good jobs are baby boomers don’t want to retire!!... people here just don’t want to work hard, mostly lack the skills!!!! Companies have to depend on H1B talent because we do the dirty work which you refused to do (citizens just leave at 5, where as if needed an immigrant stays longer to finish the work (even work remotely) and do not expect compensation(some companies pay overtime some don’t), and that is what companies like about us!!
That latter of course is what Hispanic migrant workers doing farm or roof work in the pouring rain would say, except that there is no “door” that is as easy for them to walk through as for those described above, who seem to enter the country with no one minding the store. Of course white America set this up with its trumped-up “merit-based” system meant to discriminate against the handful while watching other groups (East and South Asians) taking even more spots away from them, such as at the University of Washington, which gladly takes the extra money charged to international students (some, such as Chinese nationals, we may suspect are on the payroll of the Chinese government).
Having set themselves up to fail, white Americans cannot call themselves a discriminated-against “minority” now in need of affirmative action (although that is what Title IX is for white women), without looking like complete hypocrites. The current Supreme Court case against using “race” as a factor in college admissions brought largely by racist Chinese immigrant activists at Harvard isn’t meant to “help” white people either.
So we live in a two-tier work visa and immigration policy, one a closed-door policy for one group, the other an open-door policy for another group—and both have had “unintended” consequences. As they say, stupid is as stupid does.
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