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Robert D. Skeels rdsathene@g.ucla.edu

No Friend of Immigrants | Jacobin
September 18, 2016 at 22:50 PM
Robert D. Skeels rdsathene@alumni.ucla.edu

the time.

Clearly uncomfortable, Clinton demurred. Amanpour persisted, asking point blank:

Should they be sent back? After some additional dissembling, Clinton responded:
[W]e have to send a clear message. Just because your child gets across the border,

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/immigration-democrats-hillary-clinton-barack-obama

The Long Road to

Crisis
Nicole M. Aschoff

that doesnt mean the child gets to stay.

However callous, Clintons answer wasnt necessarily surprising. While such harsh

Reason in Revolt

stances often call to mind openly anti-immigrant Republicans like Donald Trump,
the Democratic Partys record on immigration issues is far from progressive.
Over the past few decades, Democratic presidents have implemented some of the
most punitive immigration policies and the most draconian enforcement in modern

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history, as part of a broader push to restructure the US economy and the states role
in it.
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Bill Clinton

No Friend of Immigrants
Democratic presidents have been responsible for

8.11.16
Robert D. Skeels is a UCLA graduate and a JD
candidate at Peoples College of Law.

hen Bill Clinton came to office, he inherited previous legislative

attempts to stem immigration across the Mexican border like the
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Eager to make his

mark, the new president introduced his own draconian programs.

some of the most punitive immigration policies in

modern history.

Immigration scholar Justin Akers Chacn singles out Operation Gatekeeper, which
helped nearly triple the budget for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and

F E AT U R E D

by Robert D. Skeels

employed a control through deterrence strategy that deployed more personnel

and military hardware to the border.

Justin Trudeau Is
Not Your Friend
Jordy Cummings

The administration focused in particular on crossings in high-visibility areas of San

Diego, erecting a fifty-two mile fence that stretched from Imperial Beach to the
Otay Mountains. The barrier forced migrants to cross in significantly more

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dangerous regions.
Tellingly, federal guidance for such efforts came from the Department of Defenses

Gary Johnsons
Hard-Right
Record
Nick Tabor

Center for Low Intensity Conflicts. In essence, Clinton was waging a war on
migrants with all the attendant casualties. Scholar Bill Ong Hing points out:
The number of migrant deaths increased six hundred times from 1994 to 2000; a
number that could be attributed to Operation Gatekeeper. One estimate put the
number dead since Operation Gatekeepers enactment at over 6,600 and the
remains of another 1,000 migrants have been unidentified.

The fence at the US-Mexico border near Naco, Arizona. ourfunnyfarm / Flickr

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Clinton also signed two laws before the end of his first term that spurred more
unjust detention and deportation. Regarding the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi writes, families

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and communities have been torn apart; and entire generations of immigrants have
been criminalized.

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Everything Old Is
New Again

deterrence strategies. Yet immigration control was central to Clintons presidential

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identity: his re-election campaign featured ads highlighting his administrations

n 2014, journalist Christiane Amanpour sat down for a town hall

interview with Hillary Clinton. Amanpour asked Clinton what the

Today the Clintons try to downplay the militarism and sheer aggressiveness of their

Jane McAlevey

harsh immigration laws. These measures, coupled with austerity legislation like

US should do about the thousands of undocumented,

Clintons welfare reform law, made the precarious lives of undocumented people

unaccompanied minors who were crossing the southern US border at

even more difficult.

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not need to guard against . . . Among its tens of thousands of targets were more

The subsequent eight years of Republican presidential rule didnt substantially

than 300 recent migrants from Central America, youths who crossed the border

reshape US immigration policy. In George W. Bushs second term, an explosion of

without their parents.

immigrant rights marches, including the largest in history the March 25, 2006
protest in Los Angeles killed the Sensenbrenner-King bill, which would have

After six years of unremittingly harsh policies and, in the face of GOP

earmarked $2.2 billion for more border fences and made undocumented migration

intransigence, a failed attempt to push through an immigration reform bill

a felony offense. Other legislation, which would have provided a path to

Obama signed an executive order in late 2014 that would have prevented millions

citizenship but also included exploitative guest-worker programs, also failed.

from being deported and granted them the right to work in the US legally. The
immigrant rights movement, which had pushed and prodded Obama throughout his
presidency, celebrated.

Barack Obama

But in June of this year, their hopes were dashed and Obamas attempt at

s Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, many assumed he

ameliorating his odious immigration legacy was thwarted. The Supreme Court

would be more sensitive than his predecessors to the racism

deadlocked, allowing a lower courts ruling striking down the executive order to

underlying US immigration policies. His promises during the 2008

stand.

campaign help fuel that assumption. Speaking before the National Council of La
Raza (NCLR), he proclaimed: I will be a president who will stand with you, who
will fight for you.
Yet Obamas about-face has been so pronounced that by 2014, NCLR president
Janet Murgua was openly denouncing the president a rare move for a nonprofit
group so close to the Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton

illary Clintons 2014 comments to Christiane Amanpour were in

keeping with past statements. In a 2003 interview with WABC radio,
Clinton said:

For us, Murgua said at the groups award ceremony that year, this president has
been the deporter-in-chief. Any day now, this administration will reach the two

I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants. . . . [C]ertainly

million mark for deportations. It is a staggering number that far outstrips any of his

weve got to do more at our borders. And people have to stop employing

predecessors and leaves behind it a wake of devastation for families across

illegal immigrants. Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau

America.

counties, stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx youre

going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work

Obama earned the deporter-in-chief epithet by building on Clintons aggressive

and construction work and domestic work.

enforcement apparatus and expanding George W. Bushs surveillance state.

Under Obamas Department of Homeland Security, the Secure Communities

Indeed, throughout her long career, in her various roles in government, Clinton has

program requires local police agencies to forward the fingerprints of apprehended

taken immigration stances even further to the right than most Democrats, and in

people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The government then

certain respects, to the right of some Republicans.

orders the deportation of any undocumented arrestees with criminal records.

When she was in the Senate, Clinton supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006, a bill
2010 was a banner year for severe enforcement. The administration increased

to build more walls on the border. In 2007, when New York governor Eliot Spitzer

removals under Secure Communities by 71 percent, and the president signed a

backpedaled on granting drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, she not

$600 million border security bill that called for an additional 1,500 Border Patrol

only backed him she declared that as president she would not support any such

agents, customs inspectors, and other border enforcement officers, as well as the

proposal. And while on the campaign trail this election season, she has touted the

deployment of unmanned aerial drones. By September 2011, Obama had deported

numerous times she voted to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent

more than a million undocumented people just shy of the 1.57 million Bush

illegal immigrants from coming in.

expelled in his entire two terms.

Todays nexus of domestic law enforcement, barriers, increased border patrol, and
Since then, deportations have continued apace. Under Obama, the Washington

Homeland Security bound together by policies like Secure Communities

Post reported in December, the number of deportations through 2014 hit a new

represents an approach that Clinton has long advocated.

high while the number of returns is lower than at any point since the Ford
administration. Obama has long since passed the two-million mark that incensed

In her capacity as secretary of state Clinton added to her inhumane record,

NCLRs Murgua, and continues to add to that number by the day.

proposing deportations as a way to deal with a tragedy she helped create.

Even the New York Times editorial board has criticized Obamas immigration

Clintons State Department provided material support for the 2009 Honduran coup,

policies, particularly those regarding asylum seekers. Instead of offering protection,

aiding and abetting the golpistas in their successful drive to consolidate power via a

the Obama administration offered Operation Border Guardian a grossly

sham election. The resulting chaos from the putsch, as scholar Dana Frank notes,

misnamed immigration-enforcement surge that went after people this country did

led to an almost complete destruction of the rule of law in Honduras.

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 a significant push factor for migration to the US and a pet cause for neoliberal
Children began fleeing by the thousands, taking the long, perilous journey to the

Democrats.

US. According to Hing, 920 Honduran children were murdered between January
and March of 2012, and many other Latin American refugee children fell victim

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by Bill Clinton in

to human and drug trafficking rings.

1994, eliminated many protections for Mexican workers, particularly agricultural

workers and sustenance farmers. Family farms died out, forcing many people to

Many of them meet the criteria for receiving asylum: they have a well-founded

seek work elsewhere.

fear that if they returned to their home country, theyd endure persecution on
account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or

David Bacon describes the disruptive process:

political opinion. Yet Clinton worries that granting these children asylum would
send a message that is contrary to our laws. Instead of welcoming them, she
publicly calls for their deportation.

Corn imports . . . rose, from 2,014,000 tons to 10,330,000 tons from 1992
to 2008. US producers like Archer Daniels Midland, subsidized by US
farm bills, sold corn at artificially low prices to gain control of the

Profits Inform Policy

Mexican market. Then small farmers in Oaxaca, Chiapas and southern

Mexico couldnt sell their crops at a price high enough to pay the cost of

mmigration policy doesnt occur in a vacuum. The shifts over the past

growing them.

few decades often draconian and frequently pushed by Democratic

presidents have been part of a broader process of economic

restructuring, both in the US and around the world.

But the free movement of capital was not matched by the free movement of labor.
The same year NAFTA began making it easier for corporations to flee the country,

Key to this process is privatization, particularly the privatization of state functions.

Operation Gatekeeper started deterring and sweeping up migrants.

For example, until relatively recently, immigrants held while their status was being
determined, or asylum seekers unable to post bond while awaiting a hearing, were

In the decades since, the key, from the perspective of business and sympathetic

kept in facilities maintained by the Border Patrol under the aegis of Customs and

elites, has been to regulate the flow of foreign labor to make sure capital has the

Border Protection.

requisite workers. For example, as digital technology becomes more and more
central to the US economy, the federal government has readily accommodated the

Beginning in the late 1990s, however, corporations began taking advantage of the

labor needs of US tech companies by using the H-1B program. H-1Bs are now

surge in detentions. The first privately contracted Criminal Alien Requirement

being called outsourcing visas because they allow firms to train workers and

prison opened in 1999, and the next decade saw a steady growth in privately

send them home to do the same jobs for lower wages.

managed prisons, with immigrant detention centers at the forefront because of their
higher profitability. [T]he tipping point, the ACLU writes, came in 2009 when,

Draconian immigration policies and neoliberal restructuring dovetail neatly. Both

for the first time, more people entered federal prison for immigration offenses than

exact a stark human toll while benefiting capital. They remove barriers for business

for violent, weapons, and property offenses combined and the number has

while erecting them for labor. That the Democratic Partys most powerful elected

continued to rise since then.

officials have been among their staunchest advocates is a stark reminder of whose
interests it serves.

The explosion of deportations under Obama coupled with the exodus of

immigrants from Central America proved to be a windfall for these companies.
In 2012, the Huffington Post reported that [t]he two largest for-profit prison

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companies . . . have more than doubled their revenues from the immigrant
detention business since 2005.
Whats more, these prisons are subject to weaker regulation and oversight than
other institutions under the Bureau of Prisons, allowing their operators to spend far
less on detainees and pad their bottom line.
In order to cement that lucrative arrangement, top firms like Corrections
Corporation of America and the GEO Group have parlayed their enormous growth
into political clout. In the 2016 presidential election cycle alone, the two companies
have together contributed more than $130,000 to Hillary Clintons campaign and
her Im Ready for Hillary SuperPAC. So while detainees languish in squalor,
executives see their bank accounts swell, knowing the Democratic establishment
has their back.
Also central to the shifting immigration landscape have been free-trade agreements

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