Introduction

IMMIGRATION_Ch01.qxd 21/11/07 4:43 PM Page 1 Chapter 1 Introduction “America, at its best, is a welcoming society. We welcome not only immigrants themselves but the many gifts they bring and the values they live by.” So said President George W. Bush at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens at Ellis Island in July 2001. The fifty million immigrants admitted legally to the United States in the twentieth century alone lends substantial credibility to Bush’s words and to the old adage that “America is a nation of immigrants.” Indeed, immigrants seeking their freedom and fortune and fulfilling the American dream have become part of the nation’s mythology. No symbol of this is more potent than the Statue of Liberty and no words more poignant than those of Emmas Lazarus inscribed upon it: Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teaming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! And yet the history of immigration to the United States is far from unambiguously positive, as Bush’s “at its best” caveat recognizes. His qualification implies that Americans have ambivalent attitudes towards immigrants and immigration and that the broadly positive welcome afforded immigrants has been punctuated by a series of anti-immigrant episodes throughout American history. Many potential immigrants have been refused entry and many new immigrants persecuted because of their skin color or religion. Others have been excluded because the resident population decided they burdened schools, hospitals, and welfare rolls, because they took the jobs of native-born workers, and because they avoided taxes. What’s more, each new wave of immigrants is regarded as less morally upstanding, hardworking, or assimilable than previous ones. In the mid 1990s, for example, the public debate revolved around how best to remove aliens illegally resident in the United States and how to prevent the entry of any more. The talk was of prison, of deportations, of digging trenches along the U.S.- Mexico border, of calling in the National Guard to stop the “alien influx,” of barring undocumented children from public schools, of repealing the birthright IMMIGRATION_Ch01.qxd 21/11/07 4:43 PM Page 2 2 REPUBLICAN PARTY AND IMMIGRATION POLITICS citizenship provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, of withholding medical care and welfare help, and of Americans informing on “suspected” illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration is a main theme of this book, but the story also involves legal immigration. Most Americans draw a distinction between legal and illegal immigration—the former is central to the United States’ mythology while the latter is regarded much more negatively1—but hostility toward all forms of migration grew in the 1990s. Some prominent Republican Party politicians uti- lized the antipathy to argue for a reduction in the level of legal immigration and for deep cuts in legal immigrants’ public benefits. A central aim is to explain why many Americans, both citizens and elites, turned against immigration in the 1990s. It is, in other words, to uncover how the United States turned from a nation that wanted foreign nations to “give me your tired, your poor” to one that told them to “take back your tired, your poor.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, the terms of debate changed. While many ordinary Americans remained hostile to large-scale illegal immigration, elites in both political parties introduced legislation to legalize the status of millions of previously undocumented residents. President Bush was at the forefront of the campaign, yet in the previous decade his GOP colleagues led the anti-immigration agenda. The book aims to describe and account for the changes in the Republican Party’s immigration discourse. After decades of studying the phenomenon, social scientists and historians actually know quite a lot about why Americans periodically revolt against immigrants and immigration. There is, for example, an especially rich seam of scholarship on the anti-immigrant impulse of the first decades of the twentieth century when the United States shut it doors to Asians and to eastern and southern Europeans, while leaving the door ajar for (white, protestant) immigrants from northwestern Europe. The usual explanations for this restrictionist episode include the large increase in immigrants arriving on America’s shores in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and first three of the twentieth; a cultural crisis about American identity and “foreignness,” engendered in part by World War I; and a downturn in the economy in the early 1920s. In addition to the “usual suspects” of numbers, identity/racism, and the economy, more subtle analyses have shown how eugenicists’ racist “science” dovetailed neatly with public and elite opinion about immigrants to produce an unstoppable momentum in favor of restricting immigration.2 Social scientists and historians also know quite a lot about the form and causes of the anti-immigrant episode in the 1990s. We know that while its form was dif- ferent to that of the 1920s—the focus this time was largely on illegal immigration from Mexico, rather than legal immigration from southern and eastern Europe— it shared many of the same causes. We know that it was preceded by a large increase in the number of illegal and legal immigrants, by an economic downturn, and by debates about American culture and identity—especially in California where some in the white majority thought their economic and social hegemony was threatened by the fast-growing Latino population.3 Not unrea- sonably, most attempts to explain the restrictionism of the 1990s have focused on the recession, racism, and numbers. And they are quite right to do so. Each was crucial to the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment. Without each, it is unlikely that the United States would have witnessed anything more than a latent, ill- defined ill feeling toward illegal immigrants. IMMIGRATION_Ch01.qxd 21/11/07 4:43 PM Page 3 INTRODUCTION 3 However, these factors cannot account for either the timing or the intensity of the contemporary anti-immigrant impulse. The usual suspects are, in other words, necessary but insufficient explanations. They helped engender an environment that was conducive to increasingly negative attitudes toward immigrants, but they were not the factors that forced illegal immigration to the forefront of Americans’ minds and to the top of the political agenda. That distinction belongs to a conflation and conjuncture of events, people, and processes that occurred in California in the early 1990s. There, feelings of resentment toward illegal immigrants had been stirred initially by an especially deep and long recession. Sensing the public’s growing unease and hoping to profit from it politically, some politicians, notably California’s Republican governor Pete Wilson, began to speak out against illegal immigration, arguing that undocumented persons took jobs, burdened schools and hospitals, and avoided taxes. These arguments played on people’s fears and further increased the saliency of illegal immigration. Seizing the political opportunity offered by this early politicization of the issue, a group of grassroots anti-immigrant activists came together to write and qualify for the November 1994 ballot a direct democracy initiative that became known as Proposition 187. Prop. 187, which denied public services to undocumented residents of California and required persons to report “suspected” illegal immigrants to the authorities, became the vehicle for Governor Wilson’s reelection drive.4 His focus on illegal immigration and support for Prop. 187 raised the initiative’s profile, and it in turn further increased the salience of the illegal-immigration issue and Wilson’s campaign against it. As we shall see, these symbiotic relationships helped propel Prop. 187 to victory, Wilson back to the governor’s mansion, and illegal immigration onto the national agenda. Simply stated, without Wilson and without the direct democracy process, the illegal-immigration issue would not have become as salient and explosive as it did. Yet scholars have until now treated Wilson’s reelection strategy and the success of Prop. 187 as manifestations of the anti-immigrant backlash. I show that they are both cause and effect. As is so often the case in our history, it is the timely convergence of people, events, and ideas that brings change. *** Proposition 187 is in many ways the most important direct democracy proposal of the last 25 years. The following chapters detail its conception, birth, life, and death. They show how it was a driving force behind the 1990s anti-immigrant impulse, how it helped engender changes to immigration law at the national level, and how, ironically, it helped inspire a new political activism among Latinos and encouraged some in the Republican Party to moderate their anti-immigrant, anti-minority rhetoric.5 While several books provide aggregate-level analyses of direct democracy procedures,6 few initiative-specific monographs have been published.7 Given the relative absence of research, we actually know very little about the genesis of direct democracy proposals, the battle to qualify them for the ballot, their agenda-setting function, and the campaigns for and against the measures. The absence of scholarly work is especially surprising given the increasing importance of the initiative process as a tool to effect major and, some would say, IMMIGRATION_Ch01.qxd 21/11/07 4:43 PM Page 4 4 REPUBLICAN PARTY AND IMMIGRATION POLITICS invidious, even insidious, changes in public policy. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that direct democracy proposals, especially those originating in California, ignite further significant reforms across the United States, but more systematic research is required.8 The direct democracy process was introduced in some U.S.

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