The New Republic

Like much of the nation, New Hampshire is in a frenzy over illegal
immigration. In 2005, a police chief from New Ipswich, a sleepy
small town near the Massachusetts border, arrested an illegal
immigrant, who had pulled over on the side of the road, on the
grounds that he was trespassing in New Hampshire. "We're applying a
state law to illegal aliens, instead of federal law, because the
federal government refuses to enforce its own laws. Someone needed
to bring it, so I brought it," the chief told the Concord Monitor.
The courts threw out the case, but the police chief became a
statewide celebrity.Last summer, in Merrimack, just north of Nashua, the city council
got into an acrimonious--and widely watched-- debate over whether
to print signs in Spanish in local Wasserman Park. Sitting at his
kitchen table in a white turtleneck, town councilor Michael
Malzone, the leader of the victorious opposition, explains, "There
was Spanish people breaking the law, and [the council] wanted to
put out new signs, and they wanted to put them out in Spanish."
Malzone, who is a secondgeneration Italian-American, saw the signs
as a threat to the America he knew and loved. "We must have one
flag, we must have one language," Malzone says. "When you start to
press one for English and two for Spanish, you know things were
getting very, very bad."

During the New Hampshire primary, both Democratic and Republican
candidates were peppered with questions about illegal immigration.
Senator John McCain, who won the state's January 8 primary, had to
modify his support for comprehensive immigration reform legislation
in the face of voter complaints. But that didn't appease some
residents. At a town hall meeting in Pelham in December, Bill, a
thirtysomething white-collar worker at United Health Care (who
asked that I not use his last name), said that he liked McCain but
that "he lost me on immigration." After McCain spoke, the first
three questions he got were about immigration. Roy Bouchard, a
retired worker at Raytheon, asked, "Senator McCain, there are a lot
of veterans in this hall, and we all believe that you are a
straight-talker and we want to vote for you. However, there is one
issue that bothers me and bothers a lot of people in this hall, and
that is illegal immigration." Bill and others in the audience
applauded.

There are many places in the country--and along the campaign
trail--where immigration is a top issue for a clear reason: It is
affecting the livelihoods of longtime residents and has visibly
transformed their locales. In Iowa, for example, when campaign
buses pulled into small towns like Storm Lake, Denison, and
Marshalltown, presidential hopefuls were confronted by voters
furious that big meatpacking firms had brought in Hispanic
immigrants, some of them illegal, to turn their towns' reasonably
paying blue-collar industry into a low-wage occupation that
couldn't support the average Iowan. In South Carolina, too,
candidates have had to face voters angry and bewildered by the swift
rise in Latino immigration to their state--the third-highest rate
in the nation between 2000 and 2005. "Certain sections of this
tri-county area look like little Mexico City," says John J. Cina, a
retiree who, angered over illegal immigration, plans to challenge
Senator Lindsey Graham this year in the Republican primary.

But in New Hampshire there is no meatpacking industry, or its
equivalent. In fact, there are almost no immigrants, illegal or
otherwise. According to the Census, only 2.2 percent of New
Hampshire residents are Hispanic. The Pew Hispanic Center rates New
Hampshire forty-second of 50 states in the number of unauthorized
immigrants. Yet the state's voters, like those in Iowa or South
Carolina, are up in arms over illegal immigration. According to exit
polls taken on primary night, almost one-quarter of those
Republicans and independents who voted in the GOP primary consider
immigration the most important issue facing the country, and 50
percent think that illegal immigrants should be deported rather
than given a path to citizenship or temporary visas.

In fact, if you look around the country, there are many places where
there are relatively few illegal immigrants, but where Americans
are nevertheless apoplectic about illegal immigration. In Kansas's
predominately white and rural second congressional district, for
example, Representative Nancy Boyda has been besieged with
questions and complaints about illegal immigrants. And, in a
special congressional election last month in northwest Ohio--where a
small number of Hispanic migrants, whose presence had never before
bothered anyone, pick tomatoes in the summer--Republican Bob Latta
ran incendiary ads charging Democrat Robin Weirauch with being soft
on illegal immigrants. Latta was able to put Weirauch on the
defensive and run away with what was supposed to be a close race.

Clearly, the furor over illegal immigration has spread beyond places
where jobs have been lost, wages reduced, and public services
strained, to places where migrants have not disrupted the local
economy. And, even in places like Iowa and South Carolina, the
anger was never solely a function of disappearing jobs or
overburdened social services; it has been about the use of Spanish
on signs and ballots and even grocery lines, and about the spread
of little Mexico Cities. Indeed, around the country, the furor is
not simply about illegal immigration; it's more often about Latino
immigration, legal and illegal--about what Pat Buchanan calls the
creation of "Mexamerica." Which leaves us with something of a
puzzle: How did so many Americans come to feel so vulnerable to
what for many of them is merely a phantom menace? How did an
economic problem that is concentrated in certain states and regions
become a national Kulturkampf?

The United States has long experienced bursts of anti-immigration
fervor--in the 1850s (the era of the infamous Know-Nothings), the
1880s and 1890s, the 1910s and 1920s, the early 1980s, and the
first half of the 1990s. The spell we are experiencing today is
only the latest iteration. It began with the September 11, 2001,
attacks, after which a Gallup poll showed a 17-point increase in
support for reducing immigration. A June 2002 survey for The
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations concluded that "concern about
terrorists entering the country ... appears to be contributing to
the high level of support for reducing immigration." But
respondents were not concerned about immigration per se--they were
worried about terrorists sneaking into the country.

During the 2002 elections, there was no debate over immigration. The
issue was entirely overshadowed by the war on terrorism.
Immigration barely surfaced in the 2004 elections, either--both
George W. Bush and John Kerry, seeking Latino votes, took a
conciliatory approach toward illegal immigrants. But widespread
concern was simmering at the state level just beneath the surface.

Just as the furor of the early 1990s began in California, this
period of anti-immigration activity began in Arizona in response to
a huge influx of legal and illegal Mexican immigrants driven to the
state by recent improvements to border security in California and
Texas. (See John B. Judis, "Border Wars," January 16, 2006.) By
2004, almost two million people were crossing Arizona's desert
border with Mexico every year, and some of them, attracted by the
state's booming economy, stayed. According to the Pew Hispanic
Center, the number of illegal immigrants in Arizona went from
115,000 in 1996 to almost 500, 000 in 2004, straining city and
state budgets for police, schools, and hospitals. In 2004,
antiimmigration activists put Proposition 200 on the ballot. It
denied "public benefits" to illegal immigrants and required public
employees to report anyone suspected of being in the country
illegally. Although almost the entire Arizona political
establishment opposed Proposition 200, it still passed, 56 to 44
percent.

The passage of Proposition 200 inspired a spate of legislation
across the country aimed at legal and illegal immigrants. According
to the National Council of State Legislatures, 570 pieces of
legislation dealing with legal and illegal immigrants were
introduced in 2006 and at least 1,562 in 2007. Many were aimed at
denying benefits to illegal immigrants, but others imposed onerous
voter-registration requirements for legal immigrants or banned
languages other than English from public documents, including
ballots. In 2007, immigration bills became law in 46 states,
including Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and West
Virginia, which have very few immigrants.

New anti-immigration organizations also emerged, including the
American Border Patrol, whose founder warns that "immigration ...
is allowing Mexico to colonize the American Southwest," and the
Minutemen, which boast chapters in almost every state. The
Minutemen even have two chapters and a state headquarters in
Wyoming, where the entire foreignborn population amounts to only
2.5 percent of the state's citizenry and illegal immigrants less
than 1 percent. Overall, there are more than 50 such organizations
spread across the country, appealing to anti-Latino sentiments.

As the argument against immigration has fanned out from Arizona to
other parts of the country, it has retained its original
ideological structure. Antiimmigrant activists--even in states with
little illegal immigration--claim that their livelihood and the
safety of their homes and family have been affected in some way by
illegal immigration. Bill from New Hampshire told me, "I did
landscaping while I was in high school. Now they are taking all the
landscaping jobs." Cina, whose county has been less affected by
illegal immigration than South Carolina's coastal and northwestern
counties, complains that he wouldn't be able to get a job stocking
shelves in a supermarket because he would have to compete with
other native-born workers who, if not for illegal immigrants, would
be repairing roofs or cutting grass. But anti-immigration activists
are equally insistent on the threat to the American way of life.
Says former Myrtle Beach mayor Mark McBride, who also plans to
challenge Lindsey Graham's reelection this year, "It's absolutely a
cultural problem. If you want to come here, I believe you want to
come here to be an American."

Nationally, the chief ideologues of the anti-immigration movement
usually give precedence to cultural arguments over economic ones.
CNN commentator Lou Dobbs warns that the United States is becoming
a "Third World country." Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo
laments that "we are undergoing a radical change in our national
character and social structure, not to mention language. " Pat
Buchanan (author of the best-selling State of Emergency) asks, "Will
the American Southwest become a giant Kosovo, a part of the nation
separated from the rest by language, ethnicity, history and
culture, to be reabsorbed in all but name by Mexico from whom we
took these lands in the time of Jackson and Polk?" Dobbs, Tancredo,
and Buchanan have helped to transform what might have been a
regional movement into a national one. Their names invariably come
up when talking to local activists. But their advocacy doesn't
entirely explain what happened.

To understand that, you have examine the movement's historical
antecedents-- a strain of political protest that begins in the late
Jacksonian era with the Know-Nothings and continues through the
Populists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to today's
anti-immigration movement. It is based on the
displacement--sometimes with cause, sometimes without--of
deep-seated social and economic anxieties onto an "out-group," and
it is voiced most often by the "intermediate strata," the social
and economic classes most threatened by the development of
capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the intermediate strata
comprised urban artisans and small farmers; in the twentieth
century, small businessmen, farmers, and craft workers undermined
by industrialization; and, more recently, workers who lack adequate
technical training or whose jobs are being sent overseas. These
workers have seen themselves as "producers" victimized by
"parasites"--by Wall Street and big business from above and by an
underclass of African Americans and immigrants from below.

Today's anti-immigration movement is rooted in these intermediate
strata and in this neo-populist ideology. According to an extensive
2003 survey sponsored by Hamilton College, opponents of immigration
are particularly concentrated among those who have no more than a
high school diploma, make less than $50,000, and live in small
towns or rural areas. According to a poll conducted in December by
Democracy Corps, those who believe that "immigrants take more from
our country than they give" are strongest among men between the ages
of 30 and 39 without a college degree. This is a rough
approximation of those Americans who work at a lower--but not the
lowest--rung of blue-collar or white-collar jobs, who own very
small shops or businesses, and who are most susceptible to losing
their jobs or income in economic downturns or through outsourcing.

Politically, these Americans are the heirs of the nineteenth-century
Populists, but, more immediately, they are the descendants of the
working-class Democrats who abandoned their party to vote for
George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. They are the
voters who were convinced that welfare was a giveaway by
pointy-headed bureaucrats to inner-city freeloaders. They were
relatively quiet during Bill Clinton's second term, but, in the last
six years, the members of the intermediate strata have taken to the
hustings. That's partly because, after faring well in the late
1990s, they have begun to see their jobs disappear and their income
fall, even as the economy ostensibly began to recover from the 2001
downturn. According to the Economic Policy Institute, people in the
second income quintile--roughly speaking, the lower middle
class--saw their income grow 10.8 percent from 1995 to 2000 but
then shrink by 4.4 percent from 2000 to 2004. Surveys show that
this group has been the most dissatisfied with their economic lot
and the most insecure about their future. In a poll taken in March
2006 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, three- quarters of Americans with
an income between $30,000 and $50,000 said they faced "increasing
uncertainty about employment, with stagnant incomes, paying more
for health care, taxes, and retirement, while those at the top have
booming incomes and lower taxes."

These intermediate strata have responded by targeting trade
agreements and immigration. In focus groups Democracy Corps ran
last summer in two competitive congressional districts, the
respondents, when talking about illegal immigration, echoed the
populist vision of themselves as producers being exploited by
parasites:

Concerns about immigration were overwhelmingly driven by public
benefits, and it quickly turned into a broader discussion of
welfare and the clear line drawn between those who contribute to
our society and those who abuse the system for their own selfish
gain. ... [T]here was also agreement that too many come to this
country to abuse our generosity--taking welfare benefits, using
emergency rooms for their routine medical needs, getting a free
education for their kids--without contributing to the system that
provides such generosity.

Most of the leaders of the antiimmigration effort come from these
intermediate strata and voice this neo-populist ideology. Michael
Malzone runs a tile-installation business out of his house and does
his own labor. He worries that, like someone he knows in
California, he will have to hire illegal immigrants in order to
compete, and he resents immigrants using public services. When he
broke his hand recently, he went to the Southern New Hampshire
Medical Center. "I am down there at nine o'clock, and there got to
be four or five families down there that can't speak one word of
English," he says. "I am praying to God that I don't need surgery
so I don't lose my house, and they are getting everything for free.
Where's the fairness of that?" Malzone blames the "business people"
and the "conglomerates" that want "Mexico, Canada and America to be
one country." Echoing the older populism, he rests his hopes on a
"middle- class revolution."

In South Carolina, Malzone's counterparts are Cina and McBride. Cina
is retired military with a community college degree. McBride owned
a restaurant in Myrtle Beach but had to close it down in 2003 when
his business faltered and is now waiting tables. The same year his
restaurant went under, he became an anti- immigration protester. He
ran unsuccessfully for Senate in the 2004 Republican primary on a
platform of building a fence to keep out new illegal immigrants and
deporting those already here. He also wants to reduce legal
immigration. "In the restaurant," he says, "when you seat a hundred
people, you can't take two hundred people for dinner. There is a
limit to what we can absorb in our schools, our police
departments."

If you look at the areas where antiimmigration sentiment is rife
even though there are few immigrants, they are filled with
native-born Americans who find themselves threatened by the new
global capitalism. The northwest Ohio district that Bob Latta won
was once dotted with factories working overtime, but, over the last
decade, the companies have either cut back or closed down. Many of
the residents are beleaguered blue collar workers looking for an
explanation for their plight. Latta gave them one in illegal
immigrants. Similarly, Boyda's Kansas district is filled with towns
that have seen better days. I accompanied her to Burlington, a sad
little prairie town of 2,700--only 28 of whom are not American
citizens. There, attendees at a town meeting complained
vociferously about "illegal aliens" and, in true populist fashion,
charged that big business "controls everything." Afterward, one of
them told me jokingly that I should come live in Burlington. "It'd
be like getting out of an Indy car and into a Model T that is going
backwards," he said.

These people in rural Kansas or northwest Ohio, who feel left behind
by capitalism, are susceptible to the darker side of populist
appeal--to blaming those less well off than themselves for their
plight. But why have they singled out immigrants, specifically
Latinos moving north? In the past, anti- immigration movements have
erupted in part because of an actual increase in immigration and an
economic downturn, whether an overall recession or depression or a
selective downturn, as happened in the first half of this decade.
But, in these periods, there has been an additional factor that has
fueled Americans' cultural concerns about immigration and led the
movements to take a nativist turn: Each period of antiimmigration
sentiment has coincided with a loss of confidence in the cohesion
and resilience of the American nation.

In the 1850s, Americans, increasingly fearful for the breakup of the
union over slavery, became alarmed that Catholic immigrants from
Ireland and Germany would undermine republican institutions. The
Know-Nothings were determined "to resist the insidious policy of
the Church of Rome and all other foreign influence against our
republican institutions in all lawful ways." The anti- immigration
movements of the early 1920s took root amid disillusionment over
the results of World War I and fear that the United States would be
dragged into another European conflagration. And, in the early
1990s, anti-immigration fervor was fed by fears that the United
States was becoming a second-rate economic power.

After the September 11 attacks, the fear of foreign terrorism
overshadowed, but also fed, the fear of immigration. And
anti-immigration forces have continued to charge that the Mexican
border is a gateway to terrorists. The Arizona Minutemen have
insisted (with little basis in fact) that many illegal immigrants
are swarthy Muslims disguised as Mexicans. "We have many
apprehensions of Pakistanis and Iraqis on the border," a Minuteman
spokesperson told me in August 2005. "They are coming in disguised
as Hispanics and blending in." Boyda's constituents were worried
that 5,000 illegal aliens who they believed had crossed the border
into Kansas could act as a terrorist "fifth column" in the state.
(In an equally nutty variation, presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee
warned, after Benazir Bhutto's assassination in December, that
Pakistani terrorists could cross the border. "In light of what's
happening in Pakistan," Huckabee said, "it ought to give us pause
as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.")

In recent years, this concern about Latino immigration has been fed
by a broader anxiety about America's place in the world. That has
been prompted by the failure of the Bush administration to complete
its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan; by the rapid rise of gas
prices (making it appear that the United States is at the mercy of
foreign oil producers); and by growing doubts about the buoyancy of
the U.S. economy. This perception of decline shows up, among other
places, in the polls that ask people whether "things in this country
are heading in the right direction, or ... off on the wrong track."
According to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, the percentage of
people thinking the United States is on the "wrong track" has risen
steadily over the last four years from 46 percent to 68 percent. In
surveys by Gallup and World Public Opinion, the percentage of those
who were "dissatisfied with the position of the United States in
the world today" rose from 30 percent in April 2003 to 51 percent
in February 2005 to 68 percent in October 2006.

Legal and illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America is
seen as accelerating the country's decline by undermining its
national identity and racial stock. Immigration, Tancredo declares,
is "the issue of our culture itself, and whether we will survive."
Buchanan invokes Toynbee and the collapse of civilizations: "We are
witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of
our civilization." He warns of "an immigrant invasion of the United
States from the Third World" and declares that "white America is in
flight." In the introduction to his book The War on the Middle
Class, Lou Dobbs writes, "Each night, as I conclude my nightly
broadcast on CNN, I have the gut- sick feeling that we have
chronicled another twenty-four hours in the decline of our great
democratic republic and the bankrupting of our free enterprise
economy."

These fears also crop up among local anti-immigration activists.
Malzone sees illegal immigration not just as an unwelcome
intrusion, but as a symptom of national decline. A wiry man with
graying short hair, a goatee, and a heavy New England accent, he
pounds his kitchen table for emphasis as he talks. "I love my
country, and I think it is important to keep it going, because I see
it failing rapidly," he says. "I'm only forty-seven years old, but
I never thought I would get to the stage where I sounded like my
grandparents. Oh my god, things were never this bad. Did you ever
think things would be this bad?" At a McCain rally in Conway, New
Hampshire, a woman asks McCain about making English the official
language. "I'm terribly concerned there's real danger we're going
to lose our country from within," she says. This concern about
national decline is what sustains the cultural argument against
Latino immigration.

These bursts of anti-immigration fervor are cyclical. They have
eventually abated. The anti-immigration movement of the 1920s
dissipated soon after Congress passed draconian restrictions on
immigration in 1924, although a residue of nativism persisted well
into the 1930s. In the 1990s, the antiimmigration movement, which
scored a victory with California's passage of Proposition 187 in
1994 and was embraced by the new Republican majority in Congress,
dissipated after the 1996 election largely because of the Clinton
economic boom. With income and employment rising, Americans no
longer felt as threatened by globalization. Fears of job
competition and strained social services persisted in affected
states, but they did not give rise to a national furor over illegal
immigrants. Immigration disappeared as a national issue.

What are the prospects that the current furor will abate in the near
future? Not good. Congress passed, and the Bush administration
signed, legislation increasing border security, but it will have no
bearing on the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in
the United States or on the source of 40 percent of new illegal
immigrants--those visitors who overstay their visas. And, with
American businesses continuing to demand low-wage workers and with
Mexicans and other Latinos eager to escape poverty, pressure to
allow immigration will only increase. At the same time, the United
States appears headed for a recession that will heighten Americans'
economic anxieties and fear of global decline and spark new
protests over immigration.

The clamor over illegal immigration can be expected to grow over
this year and to play a large role in this fall's election debate,
as it already has in the congressional by-elections that have taken
place since November 2006. Which party will benefit is unclear.
Will the Democrats, who have generally favored a liberal
immigration policy, make up in Hispanic votes what they might lose
in support from Reagan and Bush Democrats? Or will Republican
candidates be able to follow Latta's example and parlay the furor
over illegal immigration into political victories? It'll probably
depend on the kind of voters that reside in a particular state or
congressional district. What is certain is that the United States,
which has grown and prospered as a nation of immigrants, but which
must now urgently find ways to regulate their flow, will suffer from
this acrimony.

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