USA: The new shape of the anti-immigrant movement
Published on Saturday, 28 January 2012 23:08 Written by Devin Burghart and Lenny Zeskind
Dramatic developments are taking place inside and outside the anti-immigrant movement in the United States, according to a study by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights. A report, The New Shape of the Anti-Immigrant Movement, published in December, details how the support has eroded for many of the national anti-immigrant groups. Further, the number of local nativist groups has plunged dramatically in the last two years.
Nevertheless, the amount of anti-immigrant legislation introduced in the States has continued to skyrocket. Opinion polls show nativist sentiment at dangerously high levels, as the Tea Party has become a new force driving anti-immigrant politics.
Anti-immigrant movement fades
First, the good news: anti-immigrant organisations established during the last four decades are in a period of sharp contraction, with both membership in the national nativist groups and the number of local anti-immigrant groups falling since they reached a peak in 2007.
Years of effort by human rights groups to expose the controversial leaders and connections of the national anti-immigrant groups have tarnished the “brand” nativists worked hard to keep squeaky-clean in the public’s eye. Today, when many human rights activists think of the anti-immigrant movement, they tend to picture the interwoven network of organisations often described as “the Tanton Network” – named after a Michigan eye-doctor, John Tanton, considered to be the grandfather of the modern movement. This network includes the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, Center for Immigration Studies, Californians for Population Stabilization, and a myriad of other front-groups which long-time Searchlight readers may recall from past issues. At its height in 2007-08, this network had an active core of as many as 1.2 million supporters and over 400 local groups.
The new study by the Institute illuminates just how far that network has fallen. The oldest and most well-known of the groups, FAIR, has seen membership plummet from 45,000 in 2007 to 19,872 in 2011, a decrease of 55%. The other national organisations have experienced similar declines. Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) announced in December that is was closing the doors of the operation to “re-brand” after recent fundraising efforts failed.
At the same time, the two national Minueteman border vigilante factions driving much of the local growth in recent years have now nearly vanished. One faction, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), officially shuttered its national headquarters in 2010. Of the 38 local MCDC chapters active in 2010, only 19 have shown any sign of activity in 2011. The other faction, Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project, continues to operate. But the group’s public image was significantly tarnished when one of its leaders murdered a nine-year old girl and her father to fund continued vigilante activities. Of the 77 Minuteman Project local chapters active in 2010, only 36 have been active in 2011.
What’s true inside the Beltway and on the border is also true on the ground in the rest of the country. Overall, the number of state and local anti-immigrant organisations has also fallen decidedly in the last two years. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of “nativist extremist groups” stood at a dismaying 320 in 2010. Our investigation of those same groups shows that the number of those still active in 2011 plummeted to 121, a 62% decline in the last year.
Yet, despite these hopeful data, nativist politics continues to dominate the discussion of immigration. At the federal level, any effort at comprehensive reform has been effectively stymied by enforcement-only nativist lobbying. Attacks on the 14th Amendment (which grants citizenship and the equal protection of the law to everyone born in the USA) continue. And there are high levels of raids and deportations by federal agents.
At the same time, passage of draconian legislation in Arizona, Georgia and Alabama has developed into a strategy known euphemistically as “enforcement through attrition”, because it seeks to make life so horrible for immigrants that they will pack up and leave. It’s not isolated to the South or Southwest, however. A recent study by the National Conference of State Legislators shows another record-breaking wave of anti-immigrant legislation in 2011. This year, 1,592 bills were introduced in the 50 states this year, with 151 laws enacted and 95 resolutions adopted in 40 states.
How is it possible for established anti-immigrant organisations to decline in number and for anti-immigration legislation and opinion to be so omnipresent? One reason: the Tea Party movement has energised anti-immigrant sentiment, “re-branding” nativist politics, broadening its reach and popularity.
Enter the Tea Party
In 2011, the Tea Party took up the anti-immigrant cause with a vengeance. Around the country, events were held in support of a harsh new anti-immigrant law in Alabama, and Tea Party groups are helping push similar legislation in dozens of states this year. In California, Tea Party groups launched a petition campaign for a ballot initiative to eliminate birthright citizenship. In Maryland, Tea Party groups helped lead a successful campaign to stop a law that would allow the children of undocumented immigrants to attend college. In Illinois, they also led the charge, but failed to enact similar legislation. In Texas, Tea Partiers are campaigning to end Sanctuary City policies. In Indiana, Tea Party groups are pushing for English-only legislation.
Tea Party groups often claim their mission is confined to “Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets”. But the IREHR study contradicts the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths and mantras. Instead, Tea Party ranks are permeated with concerns about race and national identity – particularly immigration.
The Tea Party pushes a brand of nationalism that defines immigrants, people of colour, poor people, liberals, trade union members, etc as wholly un-American parasites. Take, for instance, the so-called Birtherism so popular from the beginning with Tea Partiers. Birtherism is, at its core, an anti-immigrant attack, using racist imagery to depict president Obama as foreign, exotic, “not American”. Birtherism is still alive among the local Tea Party ranks, and five of the six national Tea Party factions have had birthers on their national staffs. (four of them still do). Anti-immigrant Islamophobia has also taken root in the Tea Party, with all six national factions providing a platform to anti-Islam organisations.
Quietly, the Tea Parties have continued to expand in size and mission. As documented in Tea Party Nationalism, there are six different national Tea Party factions. The membership core has roughly doubled in size during the last year to over 350,000 members. A second layer of supporters (those who donate to a group, attend a rally, contribute to a candidate, etc) is estimated at 4-6 million. That’s about twice the size of the anti-immigrant movement at its height. There are more than 3,000 local Tea Party groups active today, nearly ten times the number of local anti-immigrant groups.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the core of the Tea Party movement from the beginning. Five of the six national factions have adopted anti-immigrant politics as part of their platform. One faction is even run by officers in the Minuteman Project. The gravitational force the five factions have exerted has pulled the sixth, FreedomWorks, towards a more “restrictionist” stance, particularly after some Tea Party groups attacked FreedomWorks chair Dick Armey as “soft on immigration”.
Another reason for the decline in the number of local anti-immigrant group is that the Tea Party movement has swallowed up the established anti-immigrant organisations’ energy and activists. The new IREHR study documents the many former local anti-immigrant group leaders now serving as Tea Party activists.
At the same time, Tea Parties were incorporating nativism into the movement’s core messaging, almost from the start. As a result, anti-immigrant groups began moving towards the Tea Party. In the fall of 2009, for instance, ALI-PAC piggybacked onto Tea Party rallies across the country, holding “Tea Party Immigration” events in over 40 cities. Not to be outdone, NumbersUSA, one of the premier anti-immigrant organisations, hired an official Tea Party “Liaison” to interface with Tea Party leaders and speak about its cause at events. In California, a former FAIR staffer recently launched a project called the Immigration Tea Party. And a new group called the Tea Party Immigration Coalition has sprung up, featuring local Tea Party and anti-immigrant groups from nine different states.
Anti-immigrant groups are down, but not out. They’re still responsible for churning out the new ideas, the studies, the legislation, the legal theories and many of the strategies that Tea Party groups are now appropriating. They’ll still continue to play a role, and need to be watched and countered. But the new fight on the ground is with the Tea Party movement.
By Devin Burghart and Lenny Zeskind, Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.