U.S.-POLITICS: Immigration Battle Pits East Coast Against the West

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 20 1996 (IPS) - The immigration debate in the United States increasingly is a tale of two coasts: an East which welcomes immigrants matched up against a West that wants to find new ways to keep them out.

As election campaigns heat up, that split is showing in the contrast between the tough official stance on immigration adopted by the Republican Party and the more moderate views of the party’s most visible East Coast figures.

When the Republicans met last week in San Diego, California, to nominate Bob Dole as their presidential candidate, the party declared in its platform that “illegal aliens should not receive public benefits other than emergency aid” and that their U.S.- born children should not qualify for public aid.

The Republican platform also supports revising the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal rights for everyone born in the United States. Instead, the party is seeking to deny automatic citizenship for children born to illegal or short-term immigrants.

At the same time, however, Republican delegates embraced retired General Colin Powell, the featured convention speaker and the party’s most popular public figure, who is the New York-born son of Jamaican immigrants.

In his opening speech in San Diego, Powell asserted, “The Hispanic immigrant who became a citizen yesterday must be as precious to us as a Mayflower descendant” who arrived in Massachusetts aboard that British ship in 1620.

New York’s two leading politicians, Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, both warmly spoke of their own immigrant roots. Pataki, whose grandparents immigrated from Hungary, said the party platform could have stripped his family’s citizenship if it had been in effect then.

But as the New Yorkers lauded immigration, the Republican vice- presidential nominee, former Representative Jack Kemp of Buffalo, New York, abandoned his opposition to anti-immigration measures to support the party’s new proposed restrictions.

In explaining his new support for restrictive immigration measures, Kemp said he had come to accept the need “to close the back door to keep the front door open.”

More likely, the change reflects the need by the Republicans to attract Western voters, particularly those in California. To prevent President Bill Clinton from capturing this large bloc of electoral votes again, many Republicans argue that a tough immigration policy is essential.

Immigrant rights advocates say that immigrant-bashing has been a politically potent activity ever since 1994 when more than 60 per cent of the voters in California approved Proposition 187. The referendum — which was denounced at the time by Kemp — seeks to deny all public benefits to the families of illegal immigrants.

“There’s definitely a strong anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, anti-Asian sentiment in California,” says Michael Novick, director of the California-based People Against Racist Terror. “People still feel like they’ve lost the California dream.”

The brunt of the anger, Novick argues, has been borne by Mexicans, by far the largest immigrant group in California, a large part of which was once Mexico. Mexicans continue to move across the border to fill seasonal demand for labour, mainly in agriculture.

U.S. Census Bureau figures show that in 1993 California boasted more than a quarter-million new immigrants, 60,000 of whom were Mexicans. (By contrast, New York added fewer than 2,000 Mexican immigrants that year, compared to about 14,000 people each from China and the former Soviet Union.)

Elton Gallegly, a Republican representative from California who has led the effort to end birth citizenship for the children of short-term or undocumented immigrants, claims that services for such families has cost his state billions of dollars.

“Two thirds of all babies born in Los Angeles County-operated hospitals are born to illegal immigrant mothers,” Gallegly contends.

Sentiment against Mexican immigrants has grown so severe in California, Novick pointed out, that in San Diego, the home of the Republican convention, vigilantes have formed “citizen’s patrols” to weed out illegal immigrants.

“They were going out to the airport to identify people who didn’t ‘look like citizens’,” Novick says. “Basically, they tried to make citizen’s arrests of people who looked Hispanic.”

A new group, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), is proposing measures even stiffer than those contained in Proposition 187, including “mass deportations and house-to-house searches,” according to Novick.

With Clinton substantially ahead of Dole in California, some Republican leaders have urged their candidate to tap into the anti- immigrant sentiment by backing the CCIR. Writing in Newsweek magazine last week, columnist George Will argued that such a strategy could help win the key state in November, much as support for Proposition 187 boosted Governor Pete Wilson’s re-election bid in 1994.

But many anti-immigration policies have already taken effect, taking some of the political steam out of the issue, says Robert Crawford of the Coalition for Human Dignity, an anti-racist group based in Seattle, Washington.

A welfare bill that Clinton is expected to sign Thursday will deny a wide range of public assistance, including student loans, to even legal immigrants. New anti-terrorist legislation also makes it easier to deport immigrants, he says.

“It’s become acceptable to scapegoat immigrants for the problems that affect the United States,” Crawford says.

But the practice is not uniformly accepted in every state.

Texas Governor George Bush, son of the former Republican president, has vowed to oppose federal legislation that would deny the children of illegal immigrants free public education. Nor do many politicians in New York, Boston or other eastern cities back the immigration clampdown.

For now, however, the West is becoming the battleground for the immigration debate. As Senator Robert Bennett of Utah puts it, “We’re in an election year and a mean-spirited time.”