Democrats respond to GOP with massive deportations

Ian Haney López, Moyers & Company - Deportations reached another record high last year. This is a striking development in light of the fact that illegal immigration and Border Patrol apprehensions have been falling for over a decade, and when - despite intransigence among some House Republicans - for several years there has been broad support for a fundamental restructuring of deportation policies, .

In June, President Obama promised to move forward, alone if necessary, by the end of the summer. Rather than doing so, however, he recently announced more delay. Mass deportation seems to be the Democratic response to right-wing dog whistling around Latino immigrants.

 

 

Since 2005 deportations have been rising precipitously, with removals under Obama consistently exceeding those under George W. Bush. The total number of deportations under the Obama administration now exceeds 2 million persons - this is, truly, "mass deportation," by far the highest sustained rate of removals this country has ever seen.

Mass deportation might suggest surging numbers of persons crossing the border illegally, an impression no doubt strengthened by this summer's arrival of women and children fleeing violence in Central America. However, as numbers from Princeton's Mexican Migration Project show, "the rate of undocumented emigration is nearing zero. It peaked at about 55 of every 1,000 Mexican men in 1999; by 2010 it had fallen to 9 per 1,000, a rate not seen since the 1960s."

This dramatic fall-off in the numbers of undocumented immigrants entering the country is corroborated by the government's statistics on Border Patrol apprehensions. From roughly 1.6 million arrests a year at the start of the new millennium, they've now fallen to about one-quarter that level. Indeed, last year the Obama administration deported almost 18,000 more persons than the Border Patrol detained.

It's not immigration itself driving mass deportation; rather, it's the politics of immigration. But this isn't a simple Democrat/GOP split, for there are many Republicans who support immigration reform, from George Bush to John McCain, and major conservative idea-shapers do so as well, from David Brooks to Rupert Murdoch. Witness the comprehensive immigration reform bill the Senate passed with bipartisan support in the summer of 2013.

Rather, as research by political scientist Christopher Parker shows, there's a split on the right, with those associated with the tea party significantly more likely than other conservatives to take a hard line on immigration. Summarizing his research, Parker found that while half of non-tea party conservatives support the DREAM Act, creating a limited path to citizenship for stellar young immigrants, less than a third of those who identify with the tea party do so. Conversely, less than half of non-tea party conservatives support changing our constitutional citizenship law, in which someone born here is automatically a US citizen; in contrast, two-thirds of tea party-identified conservatives support upending the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship. Most telling of all, Parker reports, fully four out of five conservatives who identified with the tea party reported being either anxious or fearful of "illegal immigrants."