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Kevin McCarthy just came back<\/a> from a press trip to our southern border, full of talk about how bad the Biden administration is doing with asylum and immigration. Today, another group of House Republicans are \u201cholding a hearing<\/a>\u201d at the Mexican border. If you watch<\/a> Fox \u201cNews\u201d you know all about it.<\/p> Republicans have figured out how to have it both ways. They get cheap labor for their big business buddies, while stoking the hate and fear of their white racist base, claiming that Democrats are responsible for increasing numbers of undocumented or \u201cillegal\u201d immigrants living and working in the United States.<\/strong><\/p> While it\u2019s true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) the main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees into the US over the past 40 years has been the Republican Party itself.<\/p> There are two parts to this nefarious scheme.<\/strong><\/p> The first part has been running continuously for 40 years; the second part is more recent, having started in the early 1990s. Here are the details.<\/strong><\/p> First up was the GOP\u2019s longest con regarding immigration. While they claim they don\u2019t want \u201cillegals\u201d in the US, that\u2019s the opposite of the situation the Reagan administration and Republicans in Congress set up back in the day.<\/p> Most countries don\u2019t demagogue immigration: they regulate<\/em> it with real laws that have real teeth against employers who hire non-citizens to exploit them for cheap labor. The logic, which generally works out all around the world, is that when the jobs dry up, the immigrants just stop coming.<\/p> I lived and worked in Germany for a year, and it took me almost four months to get a work-permit from that government to do so. I also worked in Australia (although I didn\u2019t live there), and the process of getting that work-permit, just like with Germany, also took a couple of months.<\/p> In both cases, it was my employers<\/em> who were most worried about my successfully getting the work permits and did most of the work to make it happen.<\/p> I wasn\u2019t personally so worried about it, though: there\u2019s an important reason why my employers took on the responsibility and did the work to make sure my work permits were in order.<\/p> The way that most countries prevent undocumented immigrants from disrupting their economies and causing cheap labor competition with their citizens is by putting <\/strong>employers<\/strong><\/em> in jail or hitting them with huge fines when they hire people who don\u2019t have the right to work in that country.<\/strong> <\/p> We used to do this in the United States. <\/p> In the 1920s, the US began regulating immigration and similarly put into place laws regulating who could legally work in this country and who couldn\u2019t. <\/p> Because there was so much demand for low-wage immigrant labor in the food belt of California during harvest season, President Dwight Eisenhower experimented with a program in the 1950s that granted season-long passes to workers from Mexico.<\/p> Millions took him up on it, but his bracero<\/em> program failed because employers \u2014 not government \u2014 controlled the permits, and far too many unscrupulous employers used the threat of canceling people\u2019s work permits to silence workers who objected to having their wages stolen, or to intimidate workers who objected to physical or sexual abuse.<\/p> A similar dynamic is at work today because of an \u201cinnovation\u201d Reagan put into place.<\/strong><\/p> Employers get cheap labor from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using \u2014 like they did with the Bracero program back in the day \u2014 the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here even end up afraid to call the police when they\u2019re the victims of, or witnesses to, crime. <\/p> The result is unsafe communities, a terrorized undocumented immigrant workforce, and easy pickings for predators who regularly rob, rape, and inflict violence on immigrants and asylum seekers.<\/p> Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses. <\/strong><\/p> Which is exactly what the GOP wanted. The system is working just the way Reagan envisioned it.<\/strong><\/p> It started in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people.<\/p> It wasn\u2019t that Reagan had suddenly discovered he liked nonwhite people. He\u2019d opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, running for California governor, he supported a ballot initiative to end \u201cFair Housing\u201d laws in the state, saying<\/a>:<\/p> Similarly, when running for president in 1980, Reagan\u2019s biographer Lou Cannon notes<\/a> on page 520 of his book that Reagan called the 1965 Voting Rights Act \u201ca humiliation of the South.\u201d<\/p> But by 1986 President Reagan was deep into a campaign to de-fund the Democratic Party, and the Democrats\u2019 main donor was organized labor. What better way to crush unions than to replace their members with non-union workers who were legally invisible?<\/strong><\/p> For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream.<\/p> They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement. The meat packers in Wisconsin were doing so well that they sponsored<\/a> what became the only non-billionaire-owned NFL football team \u2014 the Green Bay Packers \u2014 from day one.<\/p> Reagan and his Republican allies \u2014 with unionized companies across the country making healthy \u201cdonations\u201d legalized by the 1978 <\/a><\/strong>Bellotti<\/a><\/strong><\/em> Supreme Court decision<\/a> \u2014 wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act in a way that made it <\/strong>harder<\/strong><\/em> to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.<\/strong><\/p> They abandoned systems like I had to engage so I could work in Germany and Australia in 1986\/87 and the early 2000s, or like Canada and other developed countries have had in place for decades.<\/p> Instead, under Reagan\u2019s new law, employers could easily avoid sanctions by simply having undocumented immigrants give them paperwork (often supplied by the employers themselves) that met the new requirement that it<\/a> \u201creasonably appears on its face to be genuine.\u201d<\/p> Further reducing the \u201cburden\u201d on employers, an amendment<\/a> to the law under the guise of preventing discrimination \u201cpenalized employers for conducting overly aggressive scrutiny of workers\u2019 legal status on the basis of their nationality or national origin.\u201d<\/p> The law also held companies harmless<\/a> if they simply fired all their unionized American workers and replaced them with undocumented immigrants who were employed by a subcontractor.<\/p> This led to an explosion of fly-by-night and immigration-law-skirting subcontractors providing cheap undocumented labor for everything from construction to fieldwork to cleaning factories (like the most recent charge<\/a> of child labor violations in Nebraska).<\/strong><\/p> As Brad Plumer noted in <\/a>The Washington Post<\/a> <\/em>about Reagan\u2019s 1986 immigration \u201creform\u201d: <\/p> After Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others.<\/strong> <\/p> Forty-dollar-an-hour American-citizen unionized workers were replaced with seven-dollar-an-hour undocumented workers desperate for a chance at a life in America for themselves and their children.<\/p> From the Republican point of view, an added bonus was that levels of unionization in both industries utterly collapsed, increasing profits and executives\u2019 salaries while gutting the ability of unions to finance Democrats\u2019 political campaigns.<\/strong><\/p> Reagan pulled off a double: he succeeded in transforming the American workplace and simultaneously set up decades of potential anti-Hispanic hysteria that Republicans like Trump and McCarthy could use as a political wedge.<\/strong><\/p> Without acknowledging that it was Reagan himself who set up the \u201ccrisis,\u201d Republicans today hold serious-sounding conferences and press availabilities about how \u201cillegals\u201d are \u201ctrying to steal Americans jobs!\u201d They\u2019re all over right-wing hate radio and in the conservative media on a near-daily basis. <\/p> But it\u2019s not poor people coming here in search of safety or a better life who are impacting our labor markets (and, frankly, it\u2019s a small impact): <\/strong>it\u2019s the companies that hire them<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong> <\/p> And those same companies then fund Republican politicians who pushed under-the-radar social media ads at African Americans and blue-collar whites in 2016 and the last election saying that Democrats wanted Hispanic \u201cillegals\u201d to come in to \u201creplace them\u201d and take their jobs. <\/p> America, it turns out, doesn\u2019t have an \u201cillegal immigrant\u201d problem: we have an \u201cillegal employer\u201d problem.<\/strong><\/p> Which is why every single effort by Democrats to engage Republicans on \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d runs into a brick wall: the GOP wants things just as they are.<\/p> Which brings us to the GOP\u2019s second grand immigration con job.<\/strong><\/p> When Marjorie Taylor Greene was on Tucker Carlson\u2019s show this week to pitch her \u201cdivorce\u201d between red and blue states (another grand distraction from the GOP\u2019s plans to gut Social Security and Medicare), he said, speaking<\/a> of the alleged differences between Republicans and Democrats:<\/p> We shouldn\u2019t be surprised by lies about \u201copen borders\u201d coming out of Fox \u201cNews\u201d after the <\/strong>Dominion<\/strong><\/em> revelations, but this is part of a much larger story that\u2019s worth examining.<\/strong><\/p> As I detailed on the HartmannReport<\/a> at length back on December 20th<\/sup>, whenever a Democrat takes up residence in the White House literally hundreds of Republican politicians step up to the microphone or tell their local newspapers and radio stations how the Democratic president has suddenly \u201copened up America\u2019s southern border!!!\u201d<\/p> They did it to Clinton, they did it to Obama, and they\u2019re doing it to Biden now. And every time they do, word travels from these GOP politicians and publications to desperate people south of our border.<\/strong><\/p> As any Republican will proudly tell you, there were huge surges of desperate would-be immigrants and asylum seekers during each of the last three Democratic presidents\u2019 administrations.<\/p> What they won\u2019t tell you is that none of those Democratic presidents \u201cinvited\u201d anybody or \u201cloosened\u201d border restrictions: people showed up because Republican<\/em> politicians had told them the border was now open.<\/p> Democrats don\u2019t say our borders are open, and, as far as I can tell, never have.<\/strong><\/p> In March of 2021 the rightwing <\/strong>Washington Examiner<\/a><\/strong><\/em> newspaper went on a search for Democrats proclaiming that we\u2019d \u201copened!\u201d the southern border in the first months of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency.<\/strong><\/p> They found nothing. (Well, they found that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had called the situation on our southern border \u201ca crisis,\u201d as well as a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who was merely acknowledging the surge of immigrants. And a single Democratic mayor in Texas who also said it was a crisis. But that\u2019s it.)<\/p> But literally hundreds of <\/strong>Republican<\/strong><\/em> politicians, just like they do every two years, have spent the two-plus years since Biden\u2019s inauguration proclaiming to every despairing potential refugee south of our border that the door is wide open.<\/strong><\/p> Just google \u201copen border\u201d and \u201ccongressman,\u201d \u201ccongresswoman,\u201d or \u201csenator\u201d and you\u2019ll get a list too long to print.<\/p> At the top of that list just from the past few months, of course, you\u2019ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues:<\/strong><\/p> \u2014 Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the \u201cBiden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision<\/a>\u201d; The list goes on and on, and these messages have spread all across Central and South America, just as Republicans hoped they would. Based on a lie.<\/strong><\/p> And the small percentage of migrants who actually get through our border and survive the trek across deadly deserts provide more cheap labor for Republicans\u2019 big donors\u2019 factories and construction sites, along with more Brown-skinned people they can demonize as \u201creplacing\u201d white Americans on Fox \u201cNews.\u201d Win-win.<\/strong><\/p> The tragedy is in the lives of the desperate people who listen to these Republican lies and try to make it here.<\/p> They pack all their belongings into a single backpack, bid tearful goodbyes to friends and family, and begin a grueling journey facing dangers of death, kidnapping, rape, and violence. They are fathers, mothers, and children.<\/p> Quite literally taking their lives in their hands because they believed cynical, unfeeling, uncaring, sociopathic Republican politicians who are lying for political gain.<\/strong><\/p> Now, in response to the most recent surge caused by all the politicians listed above, the Biden administration may revive a rule turning away asylum seekers who didn\u2019t first pre-register with our immigration system in another country before showing up here.<\/p> Predictably, he\u2019s being slammed<\/a> for \u201ctoo little, too late\u201d by Republicans and sued<\/a> by immigration advocates who are frustrated with almost 40 years of unsuccessful attempts to reform our immigration laws.<\/p> Immigration issues are riling the entire developed world, as refugees flee war and climate change looking for safety and better lives. And it\u2019s turning the politics of developed countries upside-down, ushering in hardcore rightwing governments from Sweden to Hungary to Italy.<\/p> Immigration that\u2019s too rapid or comes in waves invariably produces a local and typically racist\/xenophobic backlash.<\/strong><\/p> We saw that here in the US with Irish immigrants in the 1840s following the potato famine that set the stage for Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s Gangs of New York<\/em> story; with Chinese in the mid-1800s, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; and the wave of Italian immigrants starting in the 1880s leading to \u201cNo Dogs, No Italians\u201d signs<\/a> here, as northern Europe also saw.<\/p> Immigration has historically been a powerful positive force for America, but it must be regulated in a way that\u2019s both fair to immigrants\/asylum seekers and not disruptive of citizens\u2019 work and lives.<\/strong><\/p> It\u2019s way past time for our media to call out Republican exploitation and demagoguery of this issue so we can finally and comprehensively reform our immigration laws.<\/p> While once again jailing employers who break our immigration laws \u2014 instead of the desperate people they invited here \u2014 so they have to exclusively hire American citizens and Green Card holders may cut into big business\u2019 profits (which they can easily afford), everybody else in our society will be the better for it.<\/p>\n\u201cBut,\u201d you may say, \u201cRepublicans have been screaming about \u2018illegal immigration\u2019 for as long as I can remember! How can they be responsible for it?\u201d
\u201cIf an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.\u201d
\u201c<\/em>[T]he bill's sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. \u2018The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,\u2019 he says.\u201d
\u201cHow do you reconcile secure borders and wide-open borders?\u201d