The Walls Within

The Politics of Immigration in Modern America

Sarah R. Coleman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691185927
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

A history of the battles over US immigrants' rights since 1965—and how these conflicts reshaped access to education, employment, civil liberties, and more The 1965 Hart-Celler Act transformed the American immigration system by abolishing national quotas in favor of a seemingly egalitarian approach. But subsequent demographic shifts resulted in a backlash over the social contract and the rights of citizens versus noncitizens. In The Walls Within, Sarah Coleman explores those political clashes, focusing not on attempts to stop immigration at the border, but on efforts to limit immigrants' rights within the United States through domestic policy. Drawing on new materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, and immigration and civil rights organizations, Coleman exposes how the politics of immigration control has undermined the idea of citizenship for all.Coleman shows that immigration politics was not just about building or tearing down walls, but about employer sanctions, access to schools, welfare, and the role of local authorities in implementing policies. In the years after 1965, a rising restrictionist movement sought to marginalize immigrants in realms like public education and the labor market. Yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, restrictionists faced countervailing forces committed to an expansive notion of immigrants' rights. In the 1990s, with national politics gridlocked, anti-immigrant groups turned to statehouses to enact their agenda. Achieving strength at the local level, conservatives supporting immigration restriction actually acquired more influence under the Clinton presidency than even during the so-called Reagan revolution, resulting in dire consequences for millions of immigrants.Revealing the roots behind much of today's nativist sentiment, The Walls Within examines debates about who is entitled to the American dream, and how such dreams can be subverted for those already calling the country home.

1

The Rose’s Sharp Thorn

TEXAS AND THE RISE OF UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANT EDUCATION ACTIVISM

JUST BEFORE 6 AM ON September 9, 1977, a group of children and their parents were ushered through the side door of the federal courthouse in Tyler, Texas. Fearing deportation if their identities became public, the Robles, Lopez, Hernandez, and Alvarez families slipped through the side door to attend a very early morning hearing, the timing of which was also set to help them maintain their anonymity. The Lopez family arrived with their car packed with their most valuable belongings, in case they had to go back across the border quickly.¹ Two young lawyers, Larry Daves and Peter Roos of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), represented the families as they stood before US District Court Judge William Wayne Justice in order to challenge a fee imposed by the local school board on those students who could not provide documentation of their legal immigration status. What began that morning as a hearing in a small town in East Texas emerged as a landmark Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe, which would expand the rights of noncitizens in the United States.

That this case grew to change the law of the land was no accident, as it was the capstone of several key developments that began building in the 1960s. One of these developments was the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, which profoundly altered the demographic profiles of communities across the country by increasing their diversity due to immigration. These changes also inspired opposition movements that worked with state and local governments to craft laws that would restrict immigrants’ access to public services and benefits. It was this broader oppositional movement that produced laws and covenants, like the Tyler school fee, to block unauthorized immigrants’ access to public education.

In response to this increase in restrictive laws, in the 1970s, a group of activist lawyers formulated a broad legal strategy to expand immigrants’ educational rights. To do so, they built upon the legacy of the civil rights movement by mobilizing established professional networks and tapping funding sources that had supported many similar efforts and by embracing the legal strategies and notions of “rights” that had been successfully employed in the civil rights movement. Specifically, they sought to strike down restrictive statutes like the Tyler fee, which were fiercely defended by local and state officials and conservative public interest groups.

Indeed, just as the liberal legal challenges were borne of societal and political changes in the 1960s, so too was the opposition they would engender, as conservative legal activism emerged largely in reaction to the rights revolution of the 1960s. Conservative legal activism used the networking connections forged during the welfare reform efforts in California to build their organizations and borrowed some of the language of the 1978 taxpayer revolt in order to mobilize support around a different notion of “rights.” Given these competing forces, Plyler grew into a landmark case because all sides saw it as one front in a larger battle over rights, both in terms of who was entitled to them and what specific benefits were correspondingly granted.

From the beginning, given the high stakes of defining whether one’s immigration status would exclude one from the protections of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, both sides assiduously sought the support of the federal government. As the case wound its way to the US Supreme Court, the federal government’s role in the case was highly contested within both the Carter and Reagan administrations, whose positions were deeply influenced, not just by constitutional arguments but by political and policy concerns. Efforts to maintain the support of key political constituencies, the hard-fought 1980 presidential election, and concerns over the expansive growth of federal benefits all impacted the government’s positions. The voices concerned with the expansion of benefits for immigrants that emerged in Plyler were the early roots of a movement that would come to dominate the immigration debate in the following decades. In the end, the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision extended the rights of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to unauthorized persons, expanding the rights afforded to those with anything less than citizenship status to new bounds.²

The expansion seen in the Plyler case is one key moment in a longer history of alienage rights. Throughout American history, the distinctions between citizens and noncitizens have cyclically increased and contracted. During periods of labor recruitment, including the turn of the twentieth century when Mexicans supplanted Asian workers in the West, distinctions between citizens and noncitizens were loosened in response to economic priorities. After World War I, economic contractions led governmental officials and citizens to demand that Mexican laborers return to Mexico with families that included many US citizens. This pattern of restriction repeated itself with the depression in the 1930s, and the repatriation campaigns that followed. During World War II, the border with Mexico was reopened, the Bracero program responded to labor shortages, and citizenship-based distinctions were submerged. Operation Wetback and the McCarran-Walter Act represented another swing toward restrictions and the sharpening of distinctions based on citizenship.

During these ebbs and flows, noncitizen immigrant residents and activists made claims upon the state. Beginning in the 1880s, the Supreme Court began to recognize “a sphere of constitutional protections for aliens beyond the domain of immigration regulation.”³ In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the court struck down a San Francisco ordinance that made it illegal to operate a laundry in a wooden building without a permit from the Board of Supervisors. While on its face race-neutral, when the regulation was applied, every Chinese laundry owner in the city was denied a permit, while every White-owned laundry was granted one. The court held that, notwithstanding their alienage, resident aliens were protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.⁴ Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, states and localities at various points continued to try to legislate or regulate alienage rights within their state bounds.⁵ Other scholars have shown that even in ages of rising restriction, immigrants at times have been able to successfully access the benefits of the welfare state when certain actors have recognized their “belonging” to and legitimate rights claims on American society despite their tenuous technical legal status with the state.⁶ The Plyler case, and the larger expansion of alienage rights during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent restriction during the 1990s, fit into a much longer pattern in the history of alienage rights.

Early Roots

While the Plyler case would not reach the Supreme Court until 1981, many of its roots can be traced to the late 1960s and early 1970s. These years saw the emergence of demographic trends, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and corresponding pro-immigration activism that would continue to frame the debate for the decades to come.

Beginning in 1968, legal Mexican immigration to the United States had become increasingly restricted as a hemispheric cap was imposed for the first time, forcing Mexicans to compete with immigrants from the Caribbean and Central America for 120,000 available visas. Rapid population growth and a declining economy in Mexico in the late 1970s fueled an explosion of unauthorized immigration from Mexico to the United States. There was a 40 percent drop in legal immigration from Mexico by 1977.⁷ Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehensions of Mexican nationals grew from 55,340 in 1965 to 99,883 in 1977.⁸ Between 1965 and 1986, an estimated 28 million Mexicans entered the United States as unauthorized immigrants.⁹

There was an increase in concern with unauthorized immigration as towns and cities across the nation began to grapple with their changing demographic profiles. In 1965, when Congress had passed the Hart-Celler Act, immigration was not a major concern for most Americans, and most felt immigration should be kept at similar levels or were ambivalent about it. A poll taken that year showed that 39 percent of Americans felt immigration levels should be kept the same, 20 percent were unsure, while 7 percent wanted it increased, and 33 percent wanted it decreased.¹⁰ By the early 1970s, sentiment was starting to change.

Immigration to the United States increasingly was portrayed in popular discourse as an “invasion” by a threatening non-assimilating population.¹¹ The popular media sensationalized the immigration shifts. A headline in U.S. News and World Report heralded a “Surge of Illegal Immigrants Across American Borders,” and the accompanying story highlighted that “[n]ever have so many aliens swarmed illegally into the U.S.—millions, moving across the nation.”¹² According to other news reports, “Great waves of Latin-American immigrants appear well along the way to accomplishing what their Spanish ancestors couldn’t: the ‘conquest’ of North America.”¹³ The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, and other outlets warned of the “growing peril” of immigrants.¹⁴ This invasion narrative was heightened by rhetoric that increasingly portrayed the fertility rate of Mexican women as abnormally high and menacing.¹⁵

According to the popular media, the problem was not just the number of immigrants arriving; it was also that these immigrants were unassimilable outsiders causing problems. The New York Times, for example, ran stories that blamed the “character” of arriving Mexicans for urban problems like crime and poverty, claiming that immigrants in San Francisco “did not fit into the traditional lifestyle set by the long-time residents.”¹⁶ The Los Angeles Times ran a story in 1977 which argued that the image of an unauthorized immigrant as “a servile person who stays out of trouble” was no longer accurate as, according to the LAPD, “illegal aliens commit 50 percent of all pickpockets, 30 percent of all hit-and-run accidents, 25 to 30 percent of all shoplifts, 20 to 25 percent of all burglaries, 20 percent of all auto thefts and 5 percent of all homicides.”¹⁷ Beyond crime and poverty, immigrants were depicted as a public health threat due to their supposed high rates of communicable diseases and drug use.¹⁸

These narratives and discourse about immigrants permeated the political sphere as well. In 1973, INS commissioner Leonard Chapman stated, “The problem [of immigration] is serious. But we are seeing the beginning of a flood—a human tide that … is going to engulf our country, unless something is done to stop, or at least slow it.”¹⁹ The US Supreme Court increasingly began to address unauthorized immigration from Mexico during the 1970s, labeling it “a ‘colossal problem’ posing ‘enormous difficulties’ and ‘formidable law enforcement problems.’ ”²⁰ Some justices called the immigration from Mexico “virtually uncontrollable” and argued it was creating law enforcement problems of “titanic proportions.”²¹

While anti-immigrant sentiment was growing nationwide and across all three branches of government, so was the effort to expand immigrants’ rights, and in particular, rights for unauthorized immigrants. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of rights expansion more broadly. Moving beyond the passive desegregation and voting rights fights of earlier years, the rights battles now focused on government expansion of affirmative action, active integration through busing, and the birth of the welfare rights movement. At the same moment in the early 1970s, a varied group of activists began to mobilize for the rights of unauthorized immigrants, both at the grassroots level and through legislative and legal challenges, replicating the approach taken by the African American civil rights movement.²² This growth of support for the rights of unauthorized immigrants was a recent development, as previously many Mexican American organizations and most of the mainstream organized labor groups often had directly opposed unauthorized immigrants in their claims on state and society.²³ This chapter focuses on one of the legal challenges, but grassroots mobilization also occurred across the nation, as seen in the work of groups like the Maricopa County Organizing Project. Seeking to improve conditions for unauthorized migrants working in the citrus fields, MCOP successfully organized a series of work stoppages at Barry Goldwater’s Arrowhead Ranch between 1977 and 1979 that resulted in a labor contract that included housing, paid vacation, health insurance, health and safety rules, and pay increases for its workers.²⁴

Deep in the Heart

In Texas, many nationwide trends were evident in the early 1970s. Between 1970 and 1980, the US Census’s conservative...