The War on Immigrants. Get ready for a Republican assault their opportunity for election-year demagogy

By Harold Meyerson

The conventional wisdom is still unpersuaded that the Republican Party is about to mount a full-force attack on American’s undocumented immigrants — of whom, by some counts, there are 11 million. After all, the Republicans are the party of employers — large (agribusiness), medium (construction companies), and small (restaurateurs) — who have long depended on immigrants for cheap labor. The cheap labor sectors of American capitalism are a huge source of donations for the GOP. How could the Republicans turn their back on them?

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Republicans are coming up on a midterm election in which their control of both houses of Congress is very much at stake. Their advantage in foreign and military policy has been diminished by the president’s stunningly inept handling of the war in Iraq. And on the domestic and economic fronts, they have nothing to offer at all — save only a greater zeal than the Democrats possess to “do something about immigration.” With control of Capitol Hill very much in the balance, they will beg the forbearance of their longtime friends at the building contractor, big agra, and restaurant lobbies, and go after the immigrants tooth and nail.

And no wonder. Fear and resentment of the effects of an open border — primarily the economic effects, and only secondarily the cultural ones — are rampant throughout the American working class. That is clear from all available polling, and to any journalist who writes about the economy and gets responses from his or her readers. That’s certainly been the case with my own column in the Washington Post. Whenever I write about wages and incomes, characteristically in columns that take the side of unions and question the benefits of globalization, I always get dozens (at least) of e-mails from readers sympathetic to my viewpoint and to liberal politics generally, but who want to impress on me that the other huge problem is all those immigrants who are taking jobs away from the native-born and driving down wages across the land.

There is a response to this argument that is popular among both employers and pro-immigrant liberals: that immigrants take jobs that no native-born workers would want. Among affluent liberal professionals, comfortably cocooned, it is almost possible to see how this illusion could be sustained: immigrants mow the lawns and take care of the kids, something nobody else in the neighborhood would do. But this belief is utterly wrong, and pro-immigrant liberals who invoke it are doing their cause, and themselves, no favor.

For there are all manner of jobs in which the immigrant labor force has supplanted the native-born one, uncomfortable as it may be for the champions of immigration to acknowledge. In most major American cities, for instance, hotel housekeepers used to be overwhelmingly black. Then hotels let those workers go and replaced them with immigrants — a grim reality that the hotel workers union, HERE (before it merged to become UNITE HERE), recognized at its 2000 convention by resolving to pressure management in negotiations to begin rehiring African Americans. (Every four years, when I cover the New Hampshire primary, I even rediscover hotel housekeepers who are white.)

As anyone who’s followed the efforts to clear away the damage from Katrina and rebuild the Gulf Coast can plainly see, the contractors who have received our tax dollars are using them to hire a largely undocumented immigrant work force (though some of them have now been constrained by the reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act that was forced on the president by Congress). What’s gone on in the Gulf is emblematic of the far greater shift in construction in America, in which immigrants are the preferred work force for non-union jobs (and almost all construction in the Sunbelt, and all residential construction everywhere, is non-union).

Since the late 1980s, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has done a brilliant and heroic job unionizing the largely immigrant janitors who work in the downtown high-rises of the nation’s major cities outside the South (and now, with the recent success in Houston, inside the South as well). But in the ’80s and ’90s that immigrant work force largely supplanted a native-born, often heavily African-American work force. In Los Angeles, the flood of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in the mid-’80s was exploited by janitorial contractors, who discharged their unionized black employees (the union was notably weak in those days) and hired the immigrants at a pay rate that was a little under half of what the unionized workers had been getting. Small wonder that when Pete Wilson’s appalling Proposition 187 — which would have denied all public services, such as the right to attend K-12 school, to undocumented immigrants and their children — appeared on the 1994 ballot, the African American precincts of Los Angeles joined the most conservative white neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley in supporting it. (Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly, though a court subsequently struck down almost all of its provisions.)

A lot of the industries that disproportionately hire immigrants — agriculture and slaughterhouses, for instance — do indeed offer the dirtiest, most dangerous and thankless jobs in the nation. But unionized packinghouse workers at least made a decent wage (and still do, in the dwindling number of factories that are still unionized). And unionized construction workers, in cities such as Las Vegas where projects are plentiful, make a good living. It is folly to deny that immigrants take jobs that might otherwise be taken by the native born.

None of this is to deny that the reasons for the broad stagnation of working-class incomes in this country since the late 1970s — and their steady decline even amid the recovery of the past nearly four years — are many and varied. American employers’ very successful war on unions is a primary culprit. So is automation. So is the process by which previously American manufactures, retailers, and now even service providers have been able to shift their production abroad, a cosmic shift greatly abetted by trade laws promoted by investment institutions. But if globalization offers one plausible explanation for the decline in incomes during this recovery, and for the paradox of a declining unemployment rate absent any significant job creation (that is, people are dropping out of the labor force), so does immigration. Anyone who follows the declining ranking over the past 40 years of the Los Angeles metropolitan area (the mega city most impacted by the immigration of the past quarter-century), when the median income of cities is compared, would be hard pressed to argue that immigration, combined with deunionization and all the rest, isn’t a factor.

It should come as no surprise that tens of millions of Americans are sorely vexed by the changes in the economy and the elimination of vast numbers of decent paying jobs. When it comes to the causes of this stagnation, Americans have three distinct reactions. By the evidence of polling, an increasing number — clearly a majority now — recognize the importance of unions, though fewer and fewer have any firsthand contact with unions or an understanding of what they do. This is, however, something of an opinion in vacuo — the number of Americans who understand how labor law reform could revive the union movement is miniscule. Secondly, as any number of focus groups have made clear, globalization to most Americans seems an inevitable process, as unstoppable and even natural as the movement of the tides. That it is a system both constructed and gamed by the investment community and large corporations may be partly understood, but that hardly means anybody but a few progressive trade and union economists has the slightest idea, or inclination, as to how to alter its terms.

Which brings us to immigration, on which public opinion is becoming as active as it is passive toward globalization. We may not be able to keep Wal-Mart production here, but we should be able to patrol our own borders — this is a credo that wins broad support. The desire to punish those undocumenteds currently here is a more narrowly held belief, but it’s still widespread, and growing. It is growing particularly within the white working class, which since Nixon has been an important part of the Republican coalition. Up to now, it’s a group that Republicans have appealed to on issues of military toughness, cultural traditionalism, and here and there, when electorally necessary, good old-fashioned racism. Until recent years, the economy has performed just well enough, and mass immigration hasn’t been so obvious a fact, that the Republicans haven’t been forced to appeal to this constituency with an all-out war on immigrants. Individual Republicans facing imminent defeat have done this, most notably Pete Wilson, who salvaged his floundering re-election campaign in 1994 by backing Proposition 187. But Wilson’s campaign cost the California Republicans the support of Latino voters (the fastest-growing group in the state, and national, electorate) in subsequent elections, and Wilson quickly became a pariah in his own party.

This year, however, dozens of Congressional Republicans will likely find themselves in the kind of bind Wilson was in just before he endorsed Proposition 187. And their response, no matter what the National Restaurant Association wants, will likely be to wage a Wilson-like campaign.

Against this, liberals will have plenty of their own themes to run on. And when the subject turns to immigration, we are right to insist, as a matter of human rights, on the legalization and naturalization of the undocumenteds among us. As the dominant power in the United States of NAFTA, we need to provide the funds for the economic development of Mexico — likely the only way to stop the flood of immigrants here. We need to support smarter border security as well, though the idea of the militarization of the border runs counter not just to liberal values, but to the very essence of America. And we are right to insist on labor law reform and on a negotiated change in the global economic order that makes worker rights and labor standards the prerequisites for doing business in the world market.

But the grim fact is that outside the creation of massive public works projects, the left, like the center and right, has no real idea how to bring back millions of decent-paying jobs to the United States in an era of globalized work. And until we do, the Republican solution to the great stagnation will be to beat up on immigrants. It may only work for them in a relative handful of races, but it is their chief opportunity for election-year demagogy, and we must prudently assume they will take it.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.

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