Perhaps I am not giving my fellow Americans enough credit, however, it seems to me that the Democratic presidential field last night just committed suicide en masse, with Hillary Clinton the last to swallow the poison by holding out until this afternoon to endorse New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer‘s proposal to give illegal immigrants some form of driver’s licenses.
First, let us recall that the reason comprehensive immigration reform failed this past year was not because the president blocked it, but because the people rose up and opposed it. Recall also that Spitzer’s initial plan on driver’s licenses failed, for similar reasons. John McCain‘s candidacy crumbled in the face of his support for immigration reform. And a new Democracy Corps study (PDF) finds that the issue of unprotected borders/illegal immigration is the No. 1 issue cited by independents. They warn:
Democratic candidates for president and Congress are polling at 51 to 53 percent in the various races, but if 2008 is to bring a tidal wave, Democrats and progressives must become more fully the voice of what is wrong with these times. It is not enough to be anti-Iraq and anti-Bush. The conservative attack machine will soon launch nuclear war against the Democrats’ nominee when he or she emerges, and a lot of the discontent in the country could fragment and push voters to third-parties and some even back to the Republicans, particularly if progressives fail to tackle key grievances, like immigration and taxes. Seats and states that Democrats now covet could be lost without a clearer articulation of the Democrats’ critique of the times and their willingness to be agents of change….
The centrality of illegal immigration to the current discontent about the direction of the country may be taking us back again to a [1992-style] welfare moment. Just as many workers with moderate incomes, uncertain employment and health insurance could not understand why they were being taxed to subsidize the long-term idleness of those on welfare, many Americans are just perplexed that this country has lost control of the borders and winks at illegal employment, taxing the resources of local schools and hospitals and much more….
Voters want control of the borders and workplace and recreating an immigration system that works and oppose driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants – positions supported by about two-thirds of the country. For them, that is the starting point, the common sense of the issue. If political leaders do not start there, they are not likely to be heard on other steps.
In July, after a trip to Iowa that mainly involved interviewing Republicans, I outlined for The Guardian Online all the other issues that were getting wrapped up into the immigration debate:
when people talk about immigration, they are talking about an issue that contains elements of at least five separate anxiety-inducing campaign issues, four of which have historically favoured Republicans.
1. National security. The issue of illegal immigration is closely tied in the minds of conservative voters with the issue of border security. John McCain, despite his support for Bush’s war in Iraq and the surge of additional troops into Baghdad over 2007, has lost support from Republican national security voters because of his sponsorship of the twice-rejected immigration bill. Many conservatives are furious as well at being cast as anti-Mexican when, they say, they just want to stop potential terrorists from coming into America.
2. Law and order. Over and over, Iowa conservatives objected to people who they do not see as law-abiding when it comes to immigration. Supporting a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is, they feel, a decision to reward criminals – what they have done is “illegal”, after all – at the expense of law-abiding regular citizens: one Indian-American immigrant was cheered at a forum I attended for coming into America “the right way”.
3. Welfare. Conservatives also repeatedly expressed worries about illegal immigrants using taxpayer-funded US government services, and on several occasions, people expressed objections to immigrants getting a free ride from the government – such as food stamps or student aid for education….Washington Post columnist E J Dionne captured this dynamic exactly when he described America as “a cranky nation in a crabby mood,” with middle class voters so worried about their own future that they cannot imagine generosity to others. I see this as an extension of the kind of anxiety that underlay anti-welfare sentiment in the early 1990s, where the mix of racial or ethnic otherness and government support for the poor became a potent mobilising factor for anxious whites struggling to remain middle class, and with few to no government services at their own disposal.
4. Values. The heartland concerns about cultural and linguistic difference have been well documented, and it seems to me that concern about illegal immigrants has at least temporarily displaced worries over Hollywood liberals as the primary anxiety about outside challenges to local cultural norms.
5. Populism. Many communities already hate the meat packing plants that have drawn immigrants to their states because they are smelly, corporate, and pay such low wages that local children have to leave town and sometimes even the state to find decent-paying work. The plants certainly don’t provide opportunities to the communities where they are located, and often work for giant companies that similarly have little to do with the daily life of smaller scale farmers. Some of the objections to the immigration bill were similarly expressed to me as a kind of anti-corporate sentiment, as the bill was seen as a sop to the companies that refuse to pay American citizens decent wages and so have to import cheap labour from overseas to survive.
If the Democratic field unites around the position of supporting driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, as they now appear, with the notable exception of Sen. Chris Dodd, to have done, they risk being unable to meet the threshold values test of the contemporary electorate.
Further, some thought after election 2006 that being “soft on illegal immigration” was especially damaging to female Democratic candidates, which means that Clinton could be particularly vulnerable during the general election to a G.O.P. mobilization effort that yoked Hillary-hatred and doubts about a woman’s strength to the new anti-immigration grassroots message groups. Barack Obama, as the son of an immigrant, would be similarly vulnerable, and his message of cross-partisan unity could collapse as the very independents otherwise drawn by his message were repelled by a concerted Republican attack that painted him as too foreign to handle the immigration crisis. Which leaves us with John Edwards — who has decided to take public financing for the primary contest which would leave his campaign dark for the critical post-primary months of summer 2008, after he runs through his primary cash.
It’s possible that there is a political genius somewhere within the Democatic establishment who can figure out some kind of fix — a position on immigration and border security that satisfies the electorate while still leaving an opening for a Democrat to bring America’s illegals into the light. Or perhaps the political winds will shift enough by Nov. ’08 that illegal immigration will no longer be the G.O.P.’s only remaining powerfully mobilizing hot button issue. But I wouldn’t bank on it.
