One of the key issues in the current debate over immigration reform here in the United States has to deal with who may be considered an American. The anti-immigrant activists here in Texas are arguing that American citizenship has nothing to do about where you were born, but who gave birth to you. By extension, they believe–the 14th amendment notwithstanding–that the government must limit the reproductive capacities of immigrant women. Since the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to persons born on US soil, which grants them equal standing as citizens. Thus, immigrant women of childbearing age are central targets of unjust immigration reform policies. (h/t to Manny)
Lawmakers here in Texas have filed several bills based on that argument.
- HB127: Requires state agencies to ask customers whether they are legal U.S. residents and report the cost of services provided to illegal residents.
- HB38: Requires proof of legal residency in the U.S. to obtain professional licenses.
- HB40: Applicants for medical assistance must prove their legal status.
- HBs578, 691, 1377: Applicants for a marriage license must swear they are not marrying as a way to circumvent immigration laws.
- HB28: U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants would be ineligible for state services and state jobs.
- HBs104, 141, 159, 39: Eliminates undocumented immigrant students’ ability to receive in-state tuition rates.
- HBs858, 905, 907 1012, 1256: Allows state and/or local police to enforce federal immigration laws.
- HB904: Prohibits cities from setting up day labor centers.
- HBs931, 932: Requires proof of legal status for a driver’s license and a citizenship label on driver’s licenses.
- HB29: Imposes a fee on money undocumented immigrants send to Central and South America.
- HCR11: Resolution calling on the Texas attorney general to pursue lawsuits to collect money from the federal government to repay the state for the cost of undocumented immigrants.
Currently, the bills are in State Affairs Committee, which is lead by state Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas. Understanding how much of a hot potato this issue is, Swinford plans to get the attorney general’s, Greg Abbott, advice about whether the bills are constitutional before sending the bill forward.
“If they’re unconstitutional and we go through this whole process and they get taken to court and thrown out, well, that’s kind of a waste of time and energy,” he said.
It is clear who is behind this measure. Groups, such as the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), who has two goals: (1) “To end illegal immigration” and (2) “to set legal immigration at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the demographic, economic, social, and environmental realities.” They believe immigrant women of childbearing age are a significant source of the country’s so-called “illegal immigration crisis.” Texas House Bill (HB) 28, sponsored by Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, is very interesting because if Berman gets his way, it will be considered the test case before the US Supreme Court that would eventually establishes if the “and the jurisdiction thereof” clause of the 14th amendment applies to children born in the US who do not have a parent who is a citizen or resident alien.
In an AP article written in December, Berman said, “Texas can no longer afford to lure illegal immigrants to give birth on U.S. soil by promising citizenship and access to lucrative public benefits.” This explains why HB28 is loaded with vicious, mean spirited goodies that make the KKK look mainstream. Should the bill become law it would: deny employment to American born children of undocumented parents, deny services such as primary education, secondary education and higher education and, of course, deny any sort of public assistance such as health care. All withheld to American born children.
Berman and others like him in the Texas legislator assert that immigrant women are risking their lives just to enter the US to give birth, who can then sponsor other relatives before they reach the age of 21; hence the term “anchor babies.” They also contend that “anchor babies” and their families create a strain on the country’s social service programs. The irrational stance of anti-immigrant advocates echoes that of 1990’s welfare reformers. Both assume that childbearing by immigrants or poor women of color creates a cycle of poverty and dependence on the government. Immigrant women and women on welfare are depicted as irresponsible mothers and fraudulent freeloaders.
This. of course, is a false assumption. Back in December, a report was published by the Texas Comptrollers Office, “Undocumented Immigrants In Texas: A Financial Analysis of the Impact to the State Budget and Economy,” which found that undocumented immigrants contributed $17.7 billion to that states economy and that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceeded what was spent on services for them by $424.7 million.
The Comptroller’s report estimates that undocumented immigrants in Texas generate more taxes and other revenue than the state spends on them. This finding is contrary to two recent reports, FAIR’s, “The Cost of Illegal Immigration to Texans” and the Bell Policy Center’s “Costs of Federally Mandated Services to Undocumented Immigrants in Colorado”, both of which identified costs exceeding revenue.
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The Comptroller’s office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million….The largest cost factor was education, followed by incarceration and healthcare. Consumption taxes and fees, the largest of which is the sales tax, were the largest revenue generators from undocumented immigrants.
It is interesting that Berman is still moving forward despite the finds of the Texas Comptrollers Office. It just goes to show nativists will stop at nothing to rid this country and state of anything Brown, regardless is there are numerous research that contradicts their argument.
Today’s immigration debate extends beyond the aim of restricting the rights and humanity of immigrants: it’s mission is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing defined by the conservative think tank the Council on Foreign Relations is:
[E]thnic cleansing nonetheless defies easy definition. At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an “undesirable” population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.
Under this definition, then, the slow dispersal and annihilation of North America’s indigenous population was indeed ethnic cleansing. In their efforts to gain and secure the frontier, American settlers “cleansed” most Indians from their lands, even though the process was slow and, until the nineteenth century, carried out mainly under private initiative….
Ethnic cleansing has taken many forms. The forced resettlement of a “politically unreliable” population-one conquered and incorporated into an empire yet still likely to rebel-dates from the eighth century bc. (emphasis mine)
Although many people associate the term with violence, it is hard to argue against the appropriateness when it comes to the current immigration debate given the groups who are lobbing for these bills.
Over the last decade, the population-immigration argument has been forcefully and deliberately made as part of a bigger agenda by anti-immigration, it has become a focus of population control advocates such as Population-Environmental Balance (PEB) and The Social Contract Press. FAIR has a very interesting history, it was created after John Tanton split with the eugenics group known as Zero Population Growth, better known today as Population Connection. Worse, the anti-immigrant groups have been masquerading themselves as environmentalists so they can penetrate liberal environmental groups like the Sierra Club. They have used Orwellian names such as Carrying Capacity Network and Population-Environment Balance. This is not some conspiracy theory.
Historically, immigrants have been targets of environmentalists, some of whom linked with the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, Immigration Restriction League, to advocate for immigration controls. The eugenics movement considered undocumented immigrants and people of other non-white races to be biologically inferior to whites.
The “Hispanic Paradox” is that the country’s political culture cannot function without scapegoating migrant laborers either. America’s fear of immigrants is not new. In the 1920s, Congress passed Immigration Act of 1924, which placed immigration quotas that barred Asians, Italians, Greeks, and Jews. These quota laws, passed after lobbying by the Ku Klux Klan, Immigration Restriction League and others, codified the eugenics theories of Madison Grant, whose work focused on the supposedly inferior skull sizes of Jews and other immigrants.
The reason that overpopulation is primary threat to the finite resources of the planet was made popular through Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” that was published in 1968. The book predicted that disaster for humanity would happen “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” due to overpopulation and the “population explosion.” Now, the nativists are using this theory to distort the public conscious in order to push their anti-immigration agenda.
Before Garrett Hardin died in 2003, he was the significant link between the population and environment groups and the anti-immigration movement. He wrote many books and popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin was a peculiar figure among members of the Republican party who supported Planned Parenthood and an environmentalist who believed in population control.
Fear of overpopulation is a warped lens, which views the lives of the poor as faceless numbers by creating artificial boundaries among people. It breeds racism and sexism, denies history, and reinforces Western parochialism about countries outside the US. In a 2003 issue of the Social Contract Press, Wayne Lutton wrote:
Overseas screening of visitors, immigrants, and refugees is likewise inadequate. In a system rife with fraud, prospective entrants to the U.S. submit certification of health. Inspections by visa officials and at U. S. ports of entry are cursory, often taking less than 5 seconds. These procedures are rarely able to detect foreigners carrying contagious diseases and parasitic infections, nor identify persons with other personal problems, such as mental illness, mental retardation, alcohol and drug addiction, and many other major health problems, including heart and kidney disease, diabetes, and cancer.
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Exposure to imported illnesses not only endangers Americans’ physical well-being, it costs taxpayers billions of dollars. Additionally, funds diverted to cover the medical expenses of foreigners, are leading to severe cutbacks in services available to U. S. citizens in areas enduring especially high rates of immigration.
Is this really any different from what occurred in 1920s? None, absolutely none. Mexican immigration was numerically insignificant from 1900 to 1909 and those who were here primarily took agricultural jobs in the Southwest. Despite the anti-immigrant lobby, growers and industrialists — who extracted super-profits from the Mexicans’ cheap, unskilled labor–testified before Congress of the value of Mexican workers, successfully stalling restrictive legislation. In part due to this capitalist lobby, the 1924 Immigration Act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. As World War I ended, the 1921 recession exacerbated a competition between white and nonwhite workers.
The Sins of the Past Repeats Itself
It was at this time, the press and politicians began to whip up anti-Mexican sentiments. Congress put the “Mexican problem” on the agenda. Every year from 1926 to 1930, Congressmen proposed bills expanding the quotas to the nations of the Western Hemisphere, clearly with Mexico in mind. Both the anti-immigration and capitalist pro-immigration lobby employed similar racist stereotypes to make their arguments. Both considered Mexicans a biologically inferior race, with natural tendencies towards docility and ignorance.
The anti-immigration lobby argued that these biological characteristics made Mexicans unfit for U.S. citizenship. Racist sectors of the labor movement claimed these supposed traits were “ruinous” to the U.S. standard of labor. The pro-immigration lobby argued that these very characteristics made Mexican immigrants “harmless” to US society. Furthermore, they argued, Mexicans “did jobs that no one else would take.” Do those arguments sound any different from the current arguments being made today. No!
The US government began to use the newly formed Border Patrol to discourage legal Mexican immigration. The informal, fluid migration that characterized the earlier period was replaced by one in which Mexicans not only took literacy tests and paid a head tax, but also were subjected to humiliating public medical examinations, which included bathing and hair removal. Such procedures were banned with European immigrants.
In California, state officials and local health authorities participated actively in efforts to restrict Mexican immigration throughout the 1920s and to expel both Mexicans and Filipinos during the 1930s. With the outcry from nativist groups, who argued that Mexicans created overwhelming social problems, took jobs away from Whites, and represented an undesirable racial group, public health officials helped to craft the anti-Mexican discourse and at the same time led efforts to segregate, exclude, and repatriate Mexican immigrants. Kenneth L. Roberts wrote in the Saturday Evening Post:
“…and see endless streets crowded with the shacks of illiterate, diseased, pauperized Mexicans, taking no interest whatever in the community, living constantly on the ragged edge of starvation, bringing countless numbers of American citizens into the world with the reckless prodigality of rabbits.”
In 1927, Grizzly Bear wrote in the journal of the Order of the Native Sons of the Golden West:
“It is evident that, unless an end is put to the influx of Mexicans, this country will have merely substituted a low-grade Westerner for a European immigrant, with a new race problem thrown in. … The effect of this Mexican influx on the already over-burdened taxpayer should be considered. Los Angeles County … is the dumping ground for poverty-stricken Mexicans.”
During a Congressional hearing on the “Mexican Problem,” Rep John C. Box of Texas said:
“Unless the tubercular and venereal Mexican is cared for through the public health department he is likely to become a public health problem of sufficient size to affect the general public health.”
The bills filed in the current Texas legislature are filled with the same xenophobic racism that was written in the early 20th century. If the bills pass, like the Minutemen, Texas will be in the business of mainstreaming hate.
Since the 1920s, capitalist politicians have attempted to manipulate the immigration pool, in particular from Mexico, in order to meet the imperialist system’s economic and political needs. They use the tactic of deportation to terrorize the Latino community and strip it of political and labor rights, and whip up racism to stigmatize Latinos as an “illegal” people.
Think it is made up? Think the US will only deport the “illegals”? Think again vato! It is time to wake up learn your history, ignorance is not a bliss. Use the Internet while it is still accessible to you and me to do your historical research. Still don’t believe it, then explain why in 2005, the state of California passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, which officially recognized the “unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent” and apologized to residents of California “for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration.”
What will it take for Texans and the rest of the country to realize that our government is defaulting on its promissory note to us. When will we realize we have been given a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. Now is the time to make real on the promises of democracy! Now is the time to make justice a reality!
The sins of our past, are repeating itself and people are still wondering around in a haze. IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP!!!
