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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/immigration-democrats-hillary-clinton-barack-obama
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
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.
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
Justin Trudeau Is
Not Your Friend
Jordy Cummings
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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
Beyond Social
Movement
Unionism
Sam Gindin
Our new issue, Rank and File, is out now. To celebrate its release, new
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.
Everything Old Is
New Again
Jacobin Magazine
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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
Clintons welfare reform law, made the precarious lives of undocumented people
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not need to guard against . . . Among its tens of thousands of targets were more
than 300 recent migrants from Central America, youths who crossed the border
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
Obama signed an executive order in late 2014 that would have prevented millions
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
ameliorating his odious immigration legacy was thwarted. The Supreme Court
deadlocked, allowing a lower courts ruling striking down the executive order to
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
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
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
America.
Indeed, throughout her long career, in her various roles in government, Clinton has
taken immigration stances even further to the right than most Democrats, and in
to build more walls on the border. In 2007, when New York governor Eliot Spitzer
$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
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
Post reported in December, the number of deportations through 2014 hit a new
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
Even the New York Times editorial board has criticized Obamas immigration
Clintons State Department provided material support for the 2009 Honduran coup,
aiding and abetting the golpistas in their successful drive to consolidate power via a
sham election. The resulting chaos from the putsch, as scholar Dana Frank notes,
misnamed immigration-enforcement surge that went after people this country did
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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
Many of them meet the criteria for receiving asylum: they have a well-founded
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
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
mmigration policy doesnt occur in a vacuum. The shifts over the past
growing them.
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,
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
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
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,
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
officials have been among their staunchest advocates is a stark reminder of whose
interests it serves.
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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