History of US Immigration policy sessions at Fountain Street Church: Part IV

After the first session I posted an article providing a summary of the first two sessions that I had done at Fountain Street Church about the History of US Immigration Policy. In Part I,  I provided an immigration policy overview since the US was founded through the current Trump Administration.

In Part II, I talked about the importance of asking the question about the root causes of people fleeing their country to come to the US, particularly those entering the US through Mexico. I presented a brief historical overview of US military and economic interventions in Central America from the mid-19th century til today. I talked about how the US sent the Marines to invade many of those countries, plus the history of US funded and military training for the counterinsurgency wars in the 1970s and 80s, followed by some analysis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, also known as CAFTA.

In Part III of the History of US Immigration Policy this past Sunday, I focused heavily on the anti-immigrant narrative or the xenophobic narrative(s) about immigrants that politicians and US news media companies use when talking about undocumented immigrants.

For decades now, there have been certain narratives about immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, narratives that are false. Despite these false and unsubstantiated narratives, politicians parrot them, and most commercial news agencies perpetuate them. Here are a few of the more dominant false anti-immigrant narratives:

• Immigrants take jobs fro real Americans
• Immigrants drive down wages
• Immigrants don’t pay taxes
• Immigrants are a drain on the US economy

It is important that we create accurate narratives to counter these false narratives, so let’s do that for each of these 4 dominant anti-immigrant narrative. Much of what I am sharing here comes from an excellent book by Aviva Chomsky, They Take Our Jobs! and 20 other myths about immigration.

In the fourth and last session that I did on the history of US immigration policy at Fountain Street Church I focused on the history of immigration detention, using two chapters from Silky Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.

The author provides us with a clear understanding of the evolution of immigrant detention in the US. One point that is critical to understand was that immigrant detention was an outgrowth of the further criminalization of Black communities after the Civil Rights era. Shah writes in Chapter 1:

“Since the 1980s, a combination of economic restructuring and increasing tough-on-crime policies have produced devastating results: the highest rates of incarceration in the world and the greatest number of deportations in US history.”

The author notes that immigration detention essentially began during the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. Shah argues that immigrant detention centers were meant as a deterrent for Central Americans that were fleeing by the thousands during the US funding counter-insurgency wars at that time. The detention of undocumented immigrants were mandatory, with the belief that it would minimize the number of undocumented immigrants crossing in to the US at the southern border. While the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) passed in 1986 and provided amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants, new undocumented immigrants were criminalized, with the administration using language that would demonize anyone coming to the US without papers.

The growth of mass immigrant detention continued during the Clinton years, with the adoption of more Neoliberal economic policies, like the end of welfare, which took away basic safety net resources to economically desperate population, including undocumented immigrants. In addition, several states were adopting policies to further criminalize immigrants, like with Prop 187 in California in 1994. The author goes on to say:

“Both the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) were passed that year. Together they changed the paradigm on immigration to one that emphasized citizenship rather than residency and laid the legal foundation for the expansion of the deportation machine that emerged following 9/11.”

The George W. Bush administration continued the further criminalization of undocumented immigrants, especially after 9/11 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and the creation of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) in 2003. ICE was created with complete bipartisan support.

With the creation of ICE, which a more militarized version of the INS, this increased the number of immigrant detention centers around the country, which fit within the framework of the War on Terrorism. The Obama Administration continued much of the same criminal immigrant framework when he took office in 2009.

According to the author, the Obama Administration made the immigration system bigger and more effective, but not in a good way. His administration created new programs and partnerships and increased family detentions and creating the Secure Communities program, which got county sheriff departments involved in immigration enforcement, like what happened in Kent County in 2012.

The Obama Administration was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief”, since he deported more immigrants (3.5 million) during his tenure, which was the most at that time for any administration.

Lastly, the author makes the point, stating: “the Obama administration expanded and set up a powerful machinery for Trump to exploit by plugging in the detention and deportation system much more closely to criminal law enforcement across the country.”

As I mentioned in week #1, with the slide presentation I did, the history of US immigration policy, with all of the xenophobia and white nationalism, has been a bipartisan policy.