Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

10/20/01 News Report -- The Philadelphia Inquirer

A mere six weeks ago, President Bush was pushing a liberal immigration policy. He wanted to loosen the U.S. borders and make it easier for millions of illegal Mexican immigrants to move freely between America and their homeland.

With an eye on the burgeoning Hispanic electorate, Bush was making the argument that America, a nation of immigrants, is always at its best when it welcomes foreigners who yearn to breathe free.

But that theme was extinguished when planes became bombs Sept. 11.

Americans, reeling from the discovery that an unknown number of terrorists have exploited our porous immigration laws, are not feeling very hospitable these days. A siege mentality has taken hold, and the instinct today is to roll up the welcome mat and, in many cases, to view immigrants and visitors not as comrades in democracy but as objects of suspicion.

There have been numerous mood shifts in the American past. Immigrants are typically welcomed during periods of economic expansion - and scapegoated during recessions. But the current situation is different. It's about national security, not economics - and that has disheartened many immigration advocates who feel whiplashed by the stunning turn of events.

Maria Blanco, national senior counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said: "We were in a period of extreme optimism. Finally, it looked as if America was going to acknowledge that its economy depended on Mexican and Latin American workers, and that these undocumented workers would be allowed to come out of the shadows. Well, now we can forget about amnesty for them."

And James Garcia, a Latino political analyst based in Arizona, said: "Before Sept. 11, Bush was only concerned about the far-right reaction [to a more liberal immigration policy]. But now it's moderate Americans who are more fearful of anyone from a foreign country doing anything that might threaten 'the American way of life.' "

The mood swing is stark. Before Sept. 11, Bush was weighing a policy that would have allowed illegal Mexican immigrants to essentially live and work legally in America. Even before the attacks, however, Americans were lukewarm about the idea; in one poll, only 43 percent were strongly or somewhat supportive.

Since the attacks, support for immigration has collapsed. In two national polls, at least 80 percent of Americans said that the United States had "made it too easy" for foreigners to enter this country. In another, 77 percent said the government was not doing enough "to control the border and screen people."

Analysts say it would be political suicide for Bush to revisit his Mexican proposal in the foreseeable future. None of the FBI's most-wanted terrorists are Hispanic, but in the war on terrorism, Hispanics, the largest U.S. minority, are suffering collateral damage.

America's open-border tradition is on trial. It is clear, as immigration advocates readily concede, that terrorists have finessed a flawed screening process that fails to identify suspects and fails to track the stateside behavior of those granted entry. At least nine of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were living here on valid visas.

Congress is trying to make amends - boosting security on the Canadian border (although Canada's liberal immigration policies are seen as a problem); allowing the FBI to detain noncitizens suspected of terrorist ties for seven days without trial; giving officials better intelligence information, so they can flag the visa applicants who have criminal backgrounds.

Congress is financing a computer program that was enacted in 1996 but never activated: a tracking system for the 500,000 foreigners holding student visas. Immigration officials have never checked whether these people show up for school or leave the United States when their visas expire. One Sept. 11 hijacker had a student visa, but he never attended class.

Some conservative groups seek a broader crackdown against all immigrants, citing national security. They are targeting a current provision - popular among Hispanics, and supported by Bush - that allows illegal immigrants, on a waiting list for green cards, to get their visas processed in the United States rather than return to the U.S. consulate in their home country.

Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told a congressional panel Oct. 12 that this provision "negates our ability to keep out those judged to be dangerous - because they're already here, whereas an alien who went home only to be found ineligible would, in effect, have deported himself."

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, where the Hispanic population has tripled since 1990, State Attorney General Charles Condon said last week: "You can go around the streets of [the state capital], and you can see people that there's every reason to suspect are not here legally. . . . You go to a construction site, or see a landscaping crew, and none of them speak a word of English."

In Arkansas, Republican Senate candidate John Cooksey extolled "terrorist profiling" in a TV ad, and said that "anyone with a diaper on his head . . . fits the profile of a possible terrorist." (He later apologized.)

And Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis has nixed a bill - passed by state lawmakers - that would have made it easier for illegal immigrants, mostly Hispanics, to obtain car insurance and driver's licenses.

Sergio Bendixen, an independent pollster in Miami, said: "There has always been a facet of our national character that looks inward, but never before has that impulse appeared in such a dramatic fashion. Sept. 10 seems like a century ago."

Yet the climate for immigrants could be worse. There have been no calls for internment camps, unlike in 1942. There is no push for immigration quotas - unlike in 1924, when curbs were enacted and President Calvin Coolidge said, "America must be kept American." There is no serious congressional support for shelving the aforementioned provision that allows illegal immigrants to get screened for visas while already living in America.

Rodolfo de la Garza, a Hispanic analyst in New York, said that Bush had played the key role in staunching the anti-immigrant backlash - by repeatedly urging Americans not to indiscriminately target people who might appear to be foreigners.

"It speaks well for Bush that he has done that," de la Garza said. "He is trying to carve out a safe place for his [liberal policy for Mexican guest workers], so that he can revisit it. He is trying to prevent the issue from being contaminated."

For the foreseeable future, however, these illegal workers will continue to be "secondary victims of terrorism," as Garcia put it. Many are being laid off because they work in U.S. service industries hit by the tourist slowdown. Yet they don't want to leave for Mexico, fearing that reentry won't be so easy.

"But these folks are used to frustration," Garcia said. "They don't blame Bush for dealing instead with a national emergency. And they're certainly not in a position to go into the street and complain."

And activists are confident that most Americans will distinguish between those who want to share the American dream and those who want to kill it. In the words of Jeanne Butterfield, who directs the American Immigration Lawyers Association: "Hispanics will be seen as the 'good' ones. They're not the ones who are crashing planes."