The Power of Immigrants

Readers:

It was a dozen years ago that I was in the middle of the last great US political battle over immigrants. The Democracy Center worked closely with the immigrant community in California for many years, doing everything from teaching media skills to day laborers to helping fight an anti-immigrant ballot measure, Proposition 187. It was that experience that led me to write The Initiative Cookbook, a guide to initiative campaigning that I dedicated to California's immigrants (who at the time included my two oldest children).

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it echoes. Here is a reflection on the echoes at hand this week as millions of immigrants take to the streets of the US, wrapped in American flags and demanding rights and respect.

Jim

THE POWER OF IMMIGRANTS

Sometimes tectonic changes in politics catch you by surprise. Such is the case with the stunning new flexing of street muscle and political power of the Latino immigrant community in the US.

Echoing their worst tendencies of that last great national anti-immigrant rant of a decade ago, the Republican right wing decided, in the midst of plummeting Bush/GOP popularity, to try to change the subject away from war and corruption. They pulled out that old standby – America ails because of the brown masses illegally swarming over the border. They proposed declaring all undocumented immigrants to be felons, for the crime of just being there. They proposed finding all those lazy immigrants by finding them, ironically, at work, through their employers.

We've Been Here Before

It is all so familiar.

Rewind to my home state, California, in early 1994. A Republican governor, Pete Wilson, was headed into a reelection disaster. The state's economy, and in turn the state's budget, was a fiasco. Even housing prices were dropping, less common in the golden state than snow at the beach. With polls showing him headed for certain defeat the following November, Wilson decided to do what a certain kind of politician does in such circumstances – he tried to change the subject and shift the blame. At a news conference on the US/Mexico border (one of many he would hold that year) he told Californians that the state's problems were the result of illegal immigrants pouring over that border.

But Wilson and his GOP brethren didn’t stop there. They decided that what they really needed was to have an anti-immigration initiative on the same ballot with his reelection vote. That would make it assured that "immigrants-are-the-threat" would dominate the fall debate. But they were late to this realization, too late to put forward a ballot measure of their own. But right there, lurking in the racist shadows, was an anti-immigrant measure sponsored by a radical anti-immigrant organization that peppered its newsletters with such gems as, "Wake up and smell the refried beans." Among other things, the measure would have prohibited the children of undocumented immigrants from entering the doors of their public schools.

The Democracy Center, still based in California then and active with immigrant rights groups, was tracking the initiatives progress and it was going nowhere. Facing a looming deadline to submit nearly a million voter signatures, the anti-immigrant measure had about twenty thousand. Well, until Wilson and the GOP decided to adopt the measure, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into paid signature gathering, qualifying it for the ballot and creating the now infamous Proposition 187.

In the realm of political history, Pete Wilson and his calculated dance with anti-immigrant racism go down as the textbook case of short-term smart and long-term really stupid. That fall Wilson won reelection, directly on the coattails of a whopping 2-1 victory for Proposition 187. He also labeled the California Republican party as so anti-Latino that the only statewide official the GOP has left is a former movie action hero who is also an immigrant.

"If you counted on silence, you counted wrong."

I guess it is a lucky thing that today's GOP leaders don't read history as well as they ought to. What was supposed to be a clever election-year strategy to change the subject has instead ignited an earthquake of Latino political action. Organizers of an immigrant rights rally in Houston on Monday expected 20,000 people. They got 500,000 – nearly half the population of the city. Half a million people turned out in Los Angeles as well, along with huge crowds in other cities dotted around the US.

Latinos and immigrants to the GOP: "If you counted on silence, you counted wrong."

The political fallout of these huge marches is also a measure of how much things have changed since the last round of US immigrant bashing. In the run-up to Proposition 187 there was a fierce internal debate among groups fighting the initiative. Immigrant groups in Los Angeles wanted to organize a huge demonstration against it. They were adamant that immigrants could not remain silent.

The political consultants (not Latino) hired by state Democrats to run the campaign were equally adamant, warning that the more visible immigrants became the bigger the backlash would be against them. “We begged and begged them not to do this,” one of the campaign directors told me.

Two weeks before the vote, march they did. Seventy thousand (mostly all Latino) immigrants marched through the streets of downtown LA, one of the largest protests of any kind in they city's history up to then. Unfortunately for the organizers, however, the march followed by just a few weeks the World Cup Soccer finals in LA, in which Mexico had been a semi-finalist. Los Angeles was awash with Mexican flags and thousands of them ended up at the march on as the lead story on news programs statewide. Immigrants handed Wilson the exact image of the foreign invasion he'd been warning about and support for the anti-immigrant measure skyrocketed overnight.

Harvesting the Fruit of Activism from Seeds Planted a Generation Before

Through the lens of history, the decision by immigrant leaders to march that October morning in 1994 can be seen as short-term bad strategy and long-term visionary. One of the organizers told me at the time why they had decided to cast aside the advice of the campaign consultants and take to the streets anyway.

“We knew the odds were against us. Our obligation is to the youth, to the so-called ‘lost generation’ to give them an opportunity to be involved in a mass movement for their civil rights."

I would like to be with him again this week, a dozen years later, to see the look on his face as he sees the long-delayed harvest of the big gamble that he and others took that fall. All those Latino teenagers that marched in 1994 are in their late 20s now and I am willing to bet they were at the core of the organizing that has turned out millions of their hermanos y hermanas out on the streets this time around, in the face of this new season of attack on immigrants.

And this time around no one is talking about the anti-immigrant backlash that will be provoked by all those beautiful brown faces in the streets. This time around the backlash pundits are talking about in the US is the one that the Republican party is getting ready to face from the nation's fastest-growing voter block, and not just this November, but for many Novembers to come.