The Democrats Have an Immigration Problem
The Democrats Have an Immigration Problem
Family separations, multibillion-dollar border-wall schemes, unleashed ICE officers —the Trump presidency has taught the Democrats what they stand against. Now they have to figure out what they stand for.
The Families Belong Together march last June.CreditCreditMark Peterson/Redux
By Robert Draper
- Oct. 10, 2018
Her staff made calls. Usually, undocumented immigrants in the area were held at the Northwest Detention Center, a private facility operated under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the detention center had not received the women. There were too many of them for ICE to house. Instead, as Jayapal learned on June 7, the mothers were now inmates at a Bureau of Prisons facility near the Seattle-Tacoma airport.
Jayapal flew home to Seattle the following night. She showed up at the federal prison the next morning and was escorted to the three pods where the new inmates were held. There were 174 women. Many of them had come to the United States with their children, some as young as 5. A majority were from the violence-racked Central American countries El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; others had traveled from as far as China and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All of them sought asylum. Some of them, after crossing the Rio Grande, spent their first night in the United States shivering in their damp clothes on Mylar sheets in the sprawling processing center in McAllen, Tex., nicknamed the hielera, or icebox.
But at least their children had been with them. Now they were gone. The immigration authorities would not say where the children had been taken or when they would be returned. As part of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, several thousand children were being separated from their parents at the border — a tactic that previous administrations had avoided and that the mothers could not have anticipated. Meanwhile, the 174 women, having been denied initial interviews to determine whether their asylum claims merited their protection under international law, were instead piled onto airplanes and flown to the Pacific Northwest, where they were given slips of paper with their children’s names on them.
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Jayapal sat and listened to the women for nearly three hours. Then, outside the prison, she spoke into an aide’s video camera. After vowing to help return the separated children to their parents, Jayapal set her sights on ICE. “I am going to do everything I can in my power,” she said, “to stop funding a rogue agency at the Department of Homeland Security.”
Of the 535 current members of Congress, only 12 are immigrants, and Jayapal is one of them. The first Indian-American woman to be elected to the House, Jayapal, who is now 53, came to the United States at age 16, unaccompanied and on a student visa — not to flee chaos but to attend great universities (Georgetown and Northwestern) and then make a comfortable living (first by executing leveraged buyouts at PaineWebber on Wall Street and then by selling heart defibrillators out of Cincinnati). She left the private sector in 1991 to work for nonprofits, and in 2001, a year after becoming an American citizen, she became an immigration rights organizer. She developed a reputation for her fierce intelligence, energy and media savvy — and appetite for the national stage. She was elected to Congress as a Democrat on the same night that Donald Trump won the presidency.
Trump’s incendiary immigration policies have afforded Jayapal a spotlight seldom made available to freshman legislators. But in pledging to “stop funding a rogue agency,” Jayapal directed the spotlight onto the Democratic Party’s ambivalent feelings about immigration. Jayapal represents a new breed of liberal politician who is — along with some of this year’s other congressional candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — more wedded to social-justice movements than to the slow grind of governance. For years, a number of immigration advocates had been agitating to abolish ICE. Now Jayapal was on record as the first member of Congress to openly endorse doing so.
On June 25, her colleague Mark Pocan of Wisconsin — the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, of which Jayapal is first vice chairwoman — announced that he would soon be introducing a bill that would form a new agency to replace ICE within a year; Jayapal joined as a co-sponsor. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, believed by many to be positioning herself for a presidential run in 2020, jumped on the bandwagon, telling Chris Cuomo on CNN, “I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission.”
But the party’s most prominent immigration policymakers in the House — Luis V. Gutiérrez of Illinois and Zoe Lofgren of California — were not at all happy with the Abolish ICE bill. “I talked to Mark and told him, ‘I don’t think this is a good bill,’ ” Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer, told me. “It lets President Trump off the hook. ICE is doing what he told them to do.” Gutiérrez, a note of bewilderment in his voice, said: “I mean, you want to change the conversation from the inhumanity of caging children to abolishing ICE? They must have been jumping for joy at the White House.” (Indeed, Trump subsequently scoffed: “Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want to abolish the brave men and women of ICE. What I want to do is abolish the killers in ISIS.”)
The bill’s proponents also seemed oblivious to how it would play in districts less liberal than, say, Seattle. In late June, while the notion of abolishing ICE was first being voiced by elected Democrats, Representative Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana expressed his consternation during a caucus meeting. “I’ve been here a long time,” he said, according to one person who was present as well as notes taken by a second attendee. “At one time, there were eight Democrats from Indiana” in the House. “Now there are two.”
The economic conditions in Indiana remained a source of overriding concern for his constituents, Visclosky said. In meetings with them, “they said that they will vote for me — implying that they won’t vote for other Democrats. I’m trying to help them with their jobs.” He went on: “I support everything that this caucus is doing on immigration, and on the Syrian population. But I just hope that someday this caucus shows the same energy and passion” when “we talk about jobs.” Several in the caucus applauded.
When Representative Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican and the House majority leader, got wind of the Abolish ICE bill, he gleefully offered to schedule it for an immediate vote. Jayapal and Pocan saw the bind they were in with their caucus and indicated that they would vote against their own bill if it were brought to the floor. McCarthy retaliated with a bill declaring support for ICE. “It’s a political vote,” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader, advised Democrats. “Treat it politically.” Jayapal and most of her fellow Democrats simply voted “present,” though several from conservative districts — including Visclosky — voted for the resolution.
McCarthy’s stunt may have been cynical, but the Democrats were in no position to claim the moral high ground. Hardly for the first time, the party had entered the immigration debate with palpable misgivings — and then, at the brink of action, scattered. “Democrats don’t even agree with their own bill they introduced,” McCarthy triumphantly crowed on the House floor. “They lack the courage of their so-called convictions.”
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Few issues have been made more black and white by the Trump administration than the highly complex matter of immigration. A quarter-century ago, both political parties had the same room-temperature appraisal of immigrants. But while Republicans have reacted to the question of whether immigrants strengthen the United States in a mostly static way over time — 30 percent responding positively in 1994 and 35 percent doing so in 2016, according to a Pew Research study — the favorable view among Democrats has risen sharply over the same period, to 78 percent from 32 percent.
Today the Democratic Party is generally pro-immigration. And yet many of its elected officeholders remain deeply wary of saying so and especially conflicted about how to address the flaws in the country’s immigration system — or whether to address them at all. Their reasoning may be as simple as this: Unlike Republican voters, who routinely punish their politicians for being insufficiently anti-immigrant, Democratic voters do not reward theirs for being forthrightly pro-immigrant.
“Fifteen years ago, we viewed the immigration-reform community as the redheaded stepchild of the Democratic coalition,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group. “Unions were skeptical, if not opposed. Environmentalists were conflicted. And civil rights groups didn’t see us as central to their cause.”
There are other reasons immigration has yet to reliably animate Democratic lawmakers. One of them was evident when I met Sharry in his office in a WeWork rental space in downtown Washington. Relative to other progressive special interests, the immigrant rights movement has traditionally been a pauper’s crusade, lacking in billionaire benefactors and financially outmatched by ideological rivals like the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation of American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA.
Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs and George Soros have recently begun donating to specific immigration causes like family reunification and giving seed money to migrant entrepreneurs. But in general, said Kevin Appleby, a senior director at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, a nonpartisan immigration think tank affiliated with the Catholic Church, “some of the immigration funders can blow hot and cold, because they’re as frustrated as we are when there’s not a lot of progress on the immigration-reform front.”
Immigrants, meanwhile, are a less than formidable electoral force. Undocumented immigrants (there are roughly 22.1 million, according to a new Yale study) cannot vote. The country’s estimated 27.3 million eligible Latino voters, a subset of whom constitute the dominant demographic group among legal immigrants, consistently turn out in low numbers. Never was this more apparent than in the 2016 presidential election, when Hillary Clinton’s welcoming stance toward undocumented immigrants failed to generate any increase in Hispanic turnout, even against an opponent who began his campaign with a speech characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
But there is another explanation for why immigration has long been relegated to the Democratic Party’s back burner. Until recently, Americans have tended to view immigration less as a moral issue and more in crass economic terms. “Though everyone says the system is broken, there’s also a nod-nod wink-wink belief that it is broke, so don’t fix it,” Appleby said. “The crops are being picked. The tables are being bused. The only wronged party are the undocumented immigrants with little political power, and no one’s ever been voted out of office because immigration reform failed to pass.”
Instead, since long before Trump, Democratic politicians have feared that supporting immigrants would result in being voted out of office — specifically by conservative constituents who fear Muslim terrorists or undocumented Latinos taking advantage of public services, overrunning schools and hospitals. President Bill Clinton understood this dynamic well. During his triangulating quest for re-election in 1996, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which added more border fencing and piled on further penalties for those illegally crossing into the United States.
Immigration advocates were pleasantly surprised when Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, made good on his campaign rhetoric to prioritize immigration reform. Bush’s White House advisers spent the summer of 2001 contriving a pathway to citizenship for some three million undocumented immigrants, with legislative support from fellow Republicans like Senator John McCain and Representative Paul D. Ryan. That effort extended to the early morning of Sept. 11, when White House officials had scheduled a gathering in a Capitol office building to discuss immigration policies, up to and including amnesty, that “were a lot more liberal than anything we’re seeing today,” says Mike Gempler, the executive director of the Washington Growers League, a nonprofit advocacy group for farmers in Washington State.
Pramila Jayapal was living in Seattle and directing a technology transfer fund in September 2001 when a local schoolteacher friend informed her that Muslim and Arab children were skipping school because they were being bullied by classmates. Jayapal formed the Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington, an organization that led a pro bono legal effort that halted the deportation of more than 2,700 Somali immigrants — part of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 immigration crackdown that also started deportation proceedings against 14,000 Muslims under a “special registration” policy designed by Attorney General John Ashcroft’s immigration adviser, Kris Kobach. (Kobach would later, as Kansas secretary of state, advocate aggressive voter-ID laws as well as a Muslim registry and serve as the vice chairman of Trump’s short-lived commission to investigate election fraud.)