“We can follow what happened back in the 40s or 50s—I was just a little girl in Miami—and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country. Because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and they shipped them back. [Wild applause]. We must stop them. I’m not in the legislature, so I’m not sure of all of what is available for me to use to get done what we want to get done, but I will do it when I know exactly what to do to get it through.” ~ Florida State House candidate, Marg Baker
That’s via Matt Yglesias, who writes:
Historically speaking, I’m a bit confused as to what she’s talking about. There were “displaced person” camps in Europe in the 1940s for World War II refugees and there were refugee camps in 1980 associated with the Mariel Boatlift, but those were Cubans and not illegal immigrants. At any rate, if you’re looking to talk about people who’ve come to the United States in hopes of making a better life for themselves in as dehumanizing a manner as possible, you should take lessons from Baker and her audience.
No matter how much anti-immigrant nonsense I hear, I’m always surprised when I run across something like this. I’ve heard people say we should put land mines up along the border with Mexico. SB 1070 was like a kick in the teeth. The support the law received despite its obvious trampling of civil liberties, the flat out lies that were used to justify its passage – it took me off guard even if it shouldn’t have.
No, armed drug gangs from Mexico are not raiding peaceful Arizona farmers. Blood is not flowing in the streets. Contra Jan Brewer, ‘most’ illegal immigrants are not smuggling drugs. The bulk of violence and crime in Arizona* stems from the War on Drugs, not from hard-working immigrants trying to make a better life for themselves. We won’t solve that problem by building a danged fence. (*And even these stories of kidnappings are wildly overblown by the media.)
It’s interesting to me that the last three Republican presidents were fairly pro-immigration given the rabid opposition to any sort of “amnesty” among conservative activists. Of course, Ronald Reagan signed a bill that granted amnesty to nearly three million illegal immigrants, and both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. made significant efforts to court Hispanic voters in spite of the obvious, ugly reality that the Republican party has no interest in making itself more hospitable to them or to pursue anything resembling humane immigration reform.
This brings us to the latest immigration debate: birthright citizenship. The recent push to do away with birthright citizenship is not only morally reprehensible, but extraordinarily short-sighted. One of the reasons we integrate so many cultural and racial groups so well here is because of birthright citizenship (though there are many other reasons as well). It’s a great American tradition, one of the best features of our young society. Will Wilkinson sees modifying or ending birthright citizenship as a potential bargaining maneuver with the anti-immigrant crowd. Marg Baker proves how naive this is. As Jason Kuznicki points out:
I don’t imagine that anti-immigration activists are going to be bought off so easily. Instead, a permanent, multi-generational class of non-citizens would just be fuel for the fire. Twenty years on, immigration foes will look at all the second- and third-generation non-citizens we’ve created, and the mass arrests and deportations will really begin in earnest. Not a problem I’d want to create.
Worse, by then the anti- side may even have a point. A permanently alienated underclass isn’t going to be so loyal or so invested in the American polity. They wouldn’t have any reason or need to be. The genius of birthright citizenship is that it changes the incentives for everyone involved. It says to all populations: You’ve got roughly twenty years to figure out how to live with one another, as citizens. Now get to work.
Amen to that.
Bulworth
Sigh. The anti-immigrant crowd can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It absolutely will not stop.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Is this going to be mentioned on TV besides people like Maddow and KO? My guess is not. Most all of them are empty-headed jackasses.
The Moar You Know
You ought to try living in San Diego for a few months. I routinely hear people urging that the Army be called in, take up station along the border, and that all migrants attempting to cross be shot on sight.
These people are a minority but not a small one. Some of them even self-identify as liberal.
There are real problems, including real criminal problems, associated with migration (I would not want to be living in a remote border town such as Boulevard, for example) but there is not the nonstop bloodbath that the nutcases would have you believe there is.
On the other side of the border is a wholly different story, of course. They’ve got real problems from the cartels associated with drug smuggling, and, increasingly, from drug tourists taking advantage of the Mexican laws that allow one to buy opioids over the counter.
@Bulworth: What you said.
schrodinger's cat
Who is Will Wilkinson and why should we take him seriously?
Violet
Reforming the drug laws would go a long way to changing some of the violence associated with illegal immigration. Wouldn’t change the teathuggers’ attitudes, but if the violence lessened it might change some of the more “reasonable” people’s attitudes.
QDC
Balko has a post up featuring the hateful drivel of one Wendy Murphy:
So let’s see. We have vile, dehumanizing rhetoric directed at a minority, combined with discussion of putting them in “camps.” Oh, and yesterday we had talk of deporting all Muslims. So literally not a day goes by that we don’t talk about mass deportations of a minority.
The Republican party is now the party of ethnic cleansing.
Smurfhole
The Republicans know they have to win on this issue or else embrace total political irrelevance within the next 20 years.
And If they were, somehow, to prevail on this issue, the next step would be figuring out ways to strip American citizenship away from people they didn’t consider likely Republican voters.
The right-wing vision for America has always vaguely resembled South Africa, if South Africa had had a white majority population. Now that the white majority is in jeopardy in this nation, I think we’re seeing the rhetorical equivalents of apartheid and bantustans begin to occur with alarming frequency- and that kind of talk has moved from the relative quiet of the fringe right to the mainstream conservative movement.
The sad part is that an America whose only viable electoral choices are a weak and ineffectual center-left party and a xenophobic, dangerously extremist crypto-Fascist right-wing party is not likely to be an America with long-term political stability in the picutre.
schrodinger's cat
I bet these foaming at the mouth nativists don’t like legal immigrants either. Illegal immigrants just make an easier target that’s all.
Tonal Crow
@The Moar You Know:
Neither cartels nor drug tourism would exist if we legalized drugs. It’s long past time to do so.
Jeff
Reaallly big sigh. What my wife calls my “Gramma Rose” sigh.
Unfortunately, the vein of Know-Nothingism runs deep in American history, and I doubt we’ll ever be rid of it
c u n d gulag
If I’m not mistaken, most European countries have this problem with their Muslim populations because they DON’T grant full rights to some of the people born there.
But, never argue logic with people who have feelings. You can’t win. So, don’t waste you time. Just move around them, and do what you have to do to make things better any way you can.
Mike in NC
I’ve heard “reasonable people” say we should put land mines, machine gun emplacements, belts of barbed wire, searchlights, motion detectors, and thousands of soldiers along the border with Mexico. No issue makes people imitate Glenn Beck quite like this one does.
Sentient Puddle
OK, now as a practical matter, this strikes me as absurd on its face. As a constitutional amendment, you can’t touch it without going through the amendment process, and the amendment process is so convoluted and has so many choke points that by the time you actually can touch the amendment, you’ve probably already built up a coalition that can solve whatever problem you were trying to solve by using birthright citizenship as a bargaining chip to begin with (a problem that I’m not entirely clear what is, either).
That and, yeah, I see nothing good coming from striking the citizenship clause.
Comrade Dread
Really? We’re talking about putting Mexicans in camps now? Really?
Sweet f***ing Buddha.
People who advocate this shit need to have government agents show up at their home, kick in their door, give them an hour to grab their belongings before they and their families are arrested and escorted to a train that takes them into the middle of a f***ing desert in shoddily and rapidly constructed barracks where they’re given a blanket a person, there are dozens of other families in the same barracks and no dividers.
Keep them there for two weeks, and then let them go back home only to find that their property, jobs, or businesses are now lost or foreclosed upon.
Then 50 years after the fact, maybe they’ll get an apology and a check.
Sometimes I’m really embarrassed that I share oxygen with these idiots.
QDC
One of Yglesias’s commentators thinks that the “camps” might be a reference to–I’m not kidding–Operation Wetback.
gnomedad
@QDC:
What are the odds this individual is “pro-life”?
Tonal Crow
@Sentient Puddle: Further, opening the Constitution to amendment in this political climate is full-metal suicidal.
matoko_chan
Tell it to your base.
we already got this shit down.
Roger Moore
@c u n d gulag:
This. The effect of denying birthright citizenship is to create a permanent underclass. Preventing that was the whole point of creating birthright citizenship in the first place, though in that case it was blacks who were the intended primary beneficiaries. I suspect that the creation of a permanent underclass is seen as a feature, not a bug, by the Confederate Party.
Indie Tarheel
@Bulworth:
Which makes Jefferson’s proposed solution null and void:
__
__
Of course, he took a long view in terms of lives lost during the process…
Xenos
@matoko_chan: His base does not give a damn. People like Kaine need to organize a third party of sane and educated people who are now independents. They may never take over the government completely, but they could be respected again.
All it takes is to establish the brand and then give the Democrats a few chances to screw up again, and the probability of that approaches ‘1’ pretty damn quickly.
But they have to absolutely repudiate the GOP before anyone will listen to them.
DougJ
Good post, good points.
Thanks for this.
Kryptik
This shit always especially infuriates me, because if these assholes got their way, I would not only be a citizen, but I probably wouldn’t even be allowed in the country. Be it because I was born to Filipino immigrants (forget that they eventually naturalized, they some damn ferriners!), or because I have a Hispanic last name (which is practically admittance of guilt in being an illegal in these spheres) or because I’m sufficiently brown enough to be obviously non-American, I wouldn’t have a fucking chance.
This, of someone who grew up in Southern West Virginia, who prefers Kentucky Fried Chicken to Chicken Adobo, pizza to lumpia, and pot pie to dinuguan. I grew up more whitebread than any of my family, and yet because of my name, my skin, and because I happened to be unlucky enough to be born to someone who wasn’t some Anglo-European who happened to already be a citizen, I would be denied not only citizenship, but general rights.
So this is why I continue to call bullshit everytime people harp ‘but it’s only the Illegals we worry about’, because fuck all, attacking the 14th fucking amendment proves you just fucking hate immigrants, especially if they’re fucking brown.
Erik Vanderhoff
There is a very simple response to the “anchor babies” argument: It is the single stupidest form of becoming an American citizen I can think of. You have to wait until your child is 21 for them to sponsor you for citizenship, and then you must have lived the last ten years continuously in your home country, and THEN you still have to go through the regular immigration process, which can take upwards of 15 more years. Who the fuck thinks, “By jove, if I pop out this kid, I’ll be an American citizen in 30 years!”
These “repeal the 14th!” folks are morons. Their own arguments don’t make sense.
Nylund
deportation:
I really would love for a “send ’em back!” type to explain the costs, logistics, and manpower needed to identify, track ,transport, feed, house, and process 12 million people. How many government workers? how many billions, how many camps? Are you going to pack them into cattle cars on a train?
14th amendment:
I have this sneaky feeling that the whole 14th amendment this is secretly about the equal protection clause. They really miss being able to discriminate!
Its also the amendment that extends the bill of rights to the state level and prevents states from taking those away from you. This is good!
Its also the amendment that make corporations into people, in legal terms. This is bad.
And don’t all these southerners know that the North could have been dicks and just denied citizenship to everyone who seceded from the union? It was a pretty cool of the North to ensure the losers and their children would get to keep all their rights in perpetuity despite the fact that they tried to kill the very same country that gave them those rights.
Sentient Puddle
@Erik Vanderhoff: You also have to remember that these are the same morons who obsess over the birth certificate because they believe the whole Manchurian president bullshit. The anchor babies crap strikes me as being within the same realm of thought.
jrg
@Erik Vanderhoff:
Many of these people are the same idiots who think that the East Coast, New York elitists (you know, the folks who were attacked on 9/11) hate America and want to establish an Islamic theocracy.
In short, “simple responses” don’t work when you’re dealing with people this profoundly stupid.
Mark S.
I’m pretty sure there would still be wild applause at the end.
debbie
So many of these angry people speak as if they’re descended from the Mayflower. I’d be interested in knowing just how many generations of their family tree are gen-u-ine Americans (as if there is such a thing). If they’re only one or two generations removed from an anchor baby, why shouldn’t they be sent packing back to their motherland?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Amen.
Great post, not much to dissent from.
Amy Chua wrote an interesting book Day of Empire arguing that high levels (by contemporary standards) of religious and/or ethnic tolerance has been a common feature of the largest and most successful empires from Achemenid and Han/Roman times till the present. And Kevin Phillips has pointed out how strange it is that today nobody even notices how ironic it was that Operation Overlord was led by a general with the surname Eisenhower – illustrating how successful the US had been in assimilating German-Americans and other groups from Central Europe.
It is a major geopolitical strength of the US today, that by allowing us to keep our society younger (via continual emigration from the demographically younger global south) we have an enduring advantage over our 1st World peer nations. Just think how much worse the pension problem here in the US would be if we had a population as rapidly aging as say that of Japan. That people want to bust their asses and even break laws to come to the US is a feature, not a bug.
Yet another reason why the unhinged right seemingly hates us for our freedoms.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
It didn’t start out that way, especially stuff I follow in Southern California, where some people went out of their way to make clear that they were against illegal immigration, not immigration in general. And they would specifically fight off the goons who would crawl out from under rocks to push for more immigration of white Europeans as opposed to other groups.
But this new noxious stuff pushes all reason and distinctions aside.
And again, what is most worrying is the degree to which the Republican leadership condones and encourages this stuff. I think that some GOP leaders think that they can ride this mob to victory in the midterm elections and the 2012 presidential election and then simply shut down the most outrageous elements. But I don’t think they understand the ugliness and the potential for mischief that can be caused by nurturing bigotry.
And it is both comical and tragic to watch the GOP, supposedly stern strict constructionists, encourage the piece by piece unraveling of the Constitution by ignorant fools who clearly misunderstand everything that the founders were trying to create.
PurpleGirl
I thought the people advocating stuff like this didn’t want our courts or government to use European ideas or laws in thinking about and interpreting our laws. I thought anything European was bad; but apparently not. One of the things causing great damage to Europe is the fact that they have created two (maybe even more) divisions of status and rights and in the process alienated whole generations of people. The stupid it burns. (Thank you EDK for posting this and for being not-insane on this issue.)
redoubt
@Roger Moore: This. Black Codes II–This Time We’re Nationwide.
I’m sure this has been mentioned before but this is also a backhanded slap at President Obama, and why O RLY Taitz hasn’t been in the news–she has others to take up the torch for her.
Roger Moore
@Nylund:
Not really true. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment that says anything about corporations. What happened is that judges held that corporations counted as persons for 14th Amendment purposes. That’s obviously a terrible ruling for many reasons, but it’s fundamentally a problem with the ruling, not with the 14th Amendment.
PurpleGirl
…some GOP leaders think that they can ride this mob to victory in the midterm elections and the 2012 presidential election and then simply shut down the most outrageous elements.
It may be a cliche by now but the scene in Cabaret at the country chalet after the crowd sings Tomorrow Belongs to Me, Christoper Isherwood says to his friend, “You still think you can control them?” is paradigmatic. (And we know how well that turned out.)
bago
I hate to Godwin the thread, but we’ve seen this happen before.
Mary G
@Mark S.: This. I swear, some of the rhetoric I am hearing from the right smells exactly like the National Soci-a1ists in Germany talking about the Jews. Even more about Muslims, but about immigrants too. It’s scary.
pablo
And this is what said camps will look like.
matoko_chan
@Xenos:
then let him FUCKING DO THAT an’ quit takin’ up space here.
like i said, we got this.
go away.
Brachiator
@bago:
No need to Godwin when we have good old all American precedents
The Native American “exception” let people still be white with some degree of “Injun” ancestry.
Uplift
@1++.
There is NO BARGAINING WITH THE CRAZIES. They do not operate in good faith; they are not rational.
When you bargain with them, they see it as weakness or a confirmation of their worldview and get more extreme.
applecoreinaz
You can’t set it up this way and expect to be taken seriously.
Yep, people are stupid. Educate don’t flatulate.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Everything changed when we elected a brown president, ED.
Now the people you identify with have shown themselves to be nothing but crass opportunistic racists, turning on the very demographics they used to pretend to court, especially when the main benefit to themselves was contributions from people who wanted to hire the cheap labor.
But seriously, we are glad you are here to equivocate on the evil shit that hides behind the “conservative” label every day. That friendlier face on a bunch of monsters really makes all the difference.
matoko_chan
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: dude, hes just an apologist enabler for his base like McMegan and Douthat. He comes here and laffs at the base but scratch him and hes an assclown christofacist socon like the rest of them.
Martin
And the kidnapping stories are completely inverted. The kidnappings are happening, but its the undocumented immigrants that are the victims to a mish-mash of other undocumented immigrants and US citizens. So there is crime directly related to the immigration problem, but it doesn’t spill out into the citizenry – mainly because that would be extremely risky to the enterprise.
The reason this can even happen is that as it becomes increasingly difficult for people to cross the border unassisted, they turn to organized crime elements within the US to get in. Ratcheting down the border will only make this trade more profitable unless they can also put more law enforcement on stopping this effort, but it’s going to involve the same escalation of funds and manpower as we’ve seen in the war on drugs. The GOP once again fails to understand how the laws of supply and demand are going to drive this.
The solution is to give would-be immigrants a safe and reasonable path in. No matter what the current immigrations laws look like, the agency is massively, massively understaffed on the processing side. And the laws are designed to create a mountain of red tape rather than process immigrants efficiently. Give people a reasonable and understandable path in, and you’ll start to see that demand at the border go down.
dcdl
I just shake my head about all the crazy immigration crap. My husband came to America in ’75 fleeing the communists in Cambodia. If it was up to the Republicans he never would’ve gotten his citizenship and our children would be sent somewhere. You know since Obama isn’t considered a citizen even if his mother was a US citizen.
In the town we live in because he drives a ‘beaner’ car, it’s what we can afford. He’s always getting pulled over because he looks Mexican. The police normally have an excuse like he didn’t have his blinker on long enough, he crossed the yellow line when he was making a turn, etc.
The funny/sad thing is he knows what communism is. Heck his mother’s family is completely gone and she came from a family of nine and they all had lots of kids. His mom goes back once to twice a year trying to find her family. Five years ago his father found a few of his siblings in Vietnam.
Bill Murray
@Roger Moore:
It is a feature, capitalism, with the big profits, doesn’t really happen unless you have a permanent underclass to exploit. The best of these are those with no legal privileges like slaves and illegal immigrants. The fact that that people can’t move to where the jobs are, as opposed to capital moving to where the cheap wages are is another nail in the coffin of the “free market”
DPirate
If there were enough jobs for the people living here they wouldn’t care so much about immigration. There aren’t. I know plenty of citizens who compete daily against legal immigrants for work – I can name at least 20, and I live in a town of about 3000 or so. I can only imagine how they would feel if the work was going to illegals.
Sheesh
You don’t even need to make the ‘capitalism needs an underclass argument’. This is just straight up follow the money bullshit. ‘Twenty years on’ we’re going to need manpower and facilities to do the ‘mass arrests’ and house all the brown people before we ship them out. Arresting, housing, and deporting all costs money.
And here in Reagan’s America if something costs money, someone is making money.* Someone has to profit on these arrests, concentration camps, and transportation (see Arizona’s privatized incarceration industry), so the men that stand to profit will ensure this comes to pass.
*Especially if it’s tax-the-poor to pay someone in the for-profit business of ripping off the government.
kay
Great post.
I’m pro-immigration reform, because it’s humane, and because I think it’s the rational US position, but also because I think that’s where the new US labor movement comes from.
That’s where the last one came from.
Once they’re no longer “guest workers”, I suspect they’ll organize.
I certainly hope so.
Lisa Krempasky
There is no logical reason why other nations should feel they can require us to give their children citizenship. There is no logical reason why citizenship should not follow the citizenship of your parents.
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