Lessons on the history of US Immigration Policy #2: Anti-Immigrant Policies in the US are bi-partisan

I completely understand the sense of urgency around responding to the Trump Administration’s attempt to carry out mass deportations. This is why I do work with Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE.

However, millions of immigrants have been removed from the US over the past 25 years, by means of voluntary removal, enforced returns, Removals (deportation), Administrative Returns and Title 42. You can see in the graphic below what the numbers are like since the early 1990s.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans responded to fears over the free movement of capital—particularly as those fears related to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in 1994—by joining nativists in demonizing the free movement of people. The militarization of the US border began under Jimmy Carter and continues to this day.

After 9/11, 2001, all US administrations ramped up deportations and increased the budget for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), along with creating Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). You can see in the graph above (in red) how removals/deportations increased after 9/11. 

The Trump Administration has essentially made anti-immigrant xenophobia a main talking point, a talking point that has resonated with his followers. This anti-immigrant rhetoric has been effective, but it is not new. Here is President Clinton’s State of the Union speech from 1996:

“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.” 

Daniel Denvir, who wrote the book, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It, makes the following point:

“Anti-immigrant politics became defined by attacks from both right-wing nativists and the bipartisan establishment on “illegal immigration.” It was a form of security theater that functioned to safeguard not only neoliberalism but also (to nativist consternation) legal immigration. Legal immigration enabled by the 1965 reform is the largest driver of the demographic change that nativists oppose: more than three-quarters of foreign-born people in the United States are here with authorization.6 But the larger and newly diverse large-scale legal immigration since the passing of the Hart-Celler Act has always been protected by ethnic advocacy organizations, labor unions, religious groups, business interests, and powerful figures within both major parties. Anti-“illegal” politics, then, have been at the center of a public immigration debate that has blamed undocumented people for most everything.”

This is why Movimiento Cosecha was not celebrating after the Biden Electoral victory in 2020, since the affected community, the undocumented immigrant community, has first hand knowledge that both parties will deport them in larger numbers. They did banner drops that said, Democrats Deport us too!

It is incumbent that just because the Democrats do not engage in the more overtly anti-immigrant rhetoric that they aren’t carrying out the same repressive anti-immigrant policies. In 2023, I wrote an article headlined, Where is the outrage from white liberals? After 2 years, the Biden Administration’s immigration policy is very similar to the Trump Administration. In that article, I document that the Biden Administration was continuing many of the same policies that the Trump had put in place from 2017 through the end of 2020.

So, let’s fight against mass deportation now, but allies cannot abandon this movement once the Trump Administration is gone, because anti-immigrant policies in the US are fundamentally bi-partisan.