I recently wrote about the horror show of migrant abuse being perpetrated by Texas authorities along the southern border who have begun to usurp, in violent fashion, the border security role properly carried out by the federal government. Among other things, I noted that the aggression and obsession exhibited by the broader GOP in its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies requires a massive countervailing effort by the Democratic Party.
In this vein, I wanted to recommend this recent post by Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr., titled “The left needs to win, not duck, the immigration debate.” Assessing the Democrats’ immigration stance, Bacon notes that conservatives will continue to win on immigration — “pushing policy to the right and bludgeoning Democrats electorally whenever immigration is in the news” — unless and until Democrats and the left “forcefully defend the idea that immigration is good for the United States.” Bacon does a great job of digging into the specifics of how the Democrats have allowed Republicans to dominate the public discourse on immigration, with the end result that the discussion is continually being pushed to the right, and with the Democrats themselves adopting a muddled and arguably conservative-lite position on this vital issue. He reminds us of current and shockingly extreme Republican policies, such as those “allowing local and state law enforcement officials to deport people from the country and declaring that children born on U.S. soil are not automatically citizens and “cruelly flying and busing immigrants to left-leaning areas and then dumping them off like garbage.”
Bacon points out the basic hopelessness of the Democrats trying to avoid talking about immigration while the GOP focuses on it relentlessly. To this we should add the tsunami pressure of right-wing media’s supporting fire, so that lies and propaganda about migration are continually fed into the public discourse. These are both things over which the Democrats have no control, and we could go so far as to say that their efforts to avoid a full-on confrontation echo the self-defeating magical thinking that if you close your eyes, the thing that threatens you will obligingly disappear.
Bacon zeroes in on a basic element of this imbalance: “neither senior Democratic officials nor those on the broader left are articulating a clear vision of immigration policy to contrast with the right.” He suggests five grounds on which Democrats can make the case for immigration: a moral case, in which the U.S. is historically the refuge for those fleeing violence and discrimination; as a source of national pride and identity; solid economic reasons; as a basic method of countering the right-wing populist drift of immigration discourse; and as a way to appeal to increase turnaround amongst left-leaning voters who are sympathetic to more immigration. These are all sound and persuasive points, and the Democrats would do well to take heed.
I noted last time that hostility to (brown-skinned) immigrants flows naturally from the white supremacism and white nationalism that have fully overtaken the Republican Party, but I think it’s worth coming at this point from another direction. Currently, there is some sheen of pretense — abetted both by the media and a Democratic Party that’s pulling its punches — that the GOP is acting in a somewhat reasonable manner in its opposition to immigration, out of a sort of hard-assed assessment of the national interest; that it is simply applying a tough-love approach to would-be newcomers who supposedly pose a drain on the nation’s resources and job availability; that it is opposed to immigration for the good of the country rather than on the basis of riling up and perpetuating the unfounded fears of its white base.
Denying the GOP this plausible deniability feels key to the project of unwinding GOP dominance on the immigration front. To do so, Democrats need to draw a line between the GOP’s dehumanization (and violence towards) migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, and a whole host of policies aimed at restricting the vote and erasing the history of non-white Americans. They also need to make it clear that the GOP’s border policies are tainted by the same illiberalism that characterize the Republican Party’s attitudes across a whole range of areas, from subversion of elections, to anti-environmental policies, to attacks on women’s rights — that they flow from a predominantly white, Christian minority’s wish to asserts its dominance over the American majority.