tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/mexicans-25184/articlesMexicans – The Conversation2020-08-28T17:12:53Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1451492020-08-28T17:12:53Z2020-08-28T17:12:53ZThe Republican National Convention: Even more dangerous than 4 years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355356/original/file-20200828-20-q8p3hh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C50%2C5570%2C3096&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">U.S. President Donald Trump joins Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Republican National Convention at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore on Aug. 26, 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 2016 Republican National Convention was filled with chants of “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/7/19/12232608/republican-convention-hillary-clinton-lock-her-up">lock her up</a>” and “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/22/politics/republican-convention-takeaways/index.html">build that wall</a>,” packed with <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/7/19/12225872/republican-convention-racism">fear-mongering and often openly racist messages</a>. </p>
<p>The 2020 convention has <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/republicans-counter-charges-trump-racism-night-rnc-200825183638904.html">clearly been designed to convey a different message</a>, highlighting speakers of colour and showcasing U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardons and his granting of citizenship to people of colour. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3050%2C2027&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A grimacing Trump speaks into a microphone wearing a blue suit and blue and red striped tie." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3050%2C2027&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355353/original/file-20200828-15-1o1xpnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">U.S. President Donald Trump speaks from the South Lawn of the White House on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 27, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As someone who studies racist rhetoric, I find this version even scarier than the previous one.</p>
<p>For several years now, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/25481050/Racial_Figleaves_the_Shifting_Boundaries_of_the_Permissible_and_the_Rise_of_Donald_Trump">I have been especially interested in what I call “racial fig leaves</a>,” utterances or actions that work to prevent people from recognizing the racism in front of them. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shitholes-and-figleaves-how-donald-trump-is-making-racist-language-ok-again-91705">Shitholes and figleaves: how Donald Trump is making racist language OK again</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>I use the term fig leaves because they serve to just barely cover something you aren’t supposed to show in public. Fig leaves are needed because most white people <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691070711/the-race-card">don’t want to think of themselves as racist</a>. Fig leaves work because some white people are <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/The+Everyday+Language+of+White+Racism-p-9781405184533">so keen to convince themselves that something apparently racist really isn’t racist after all.</a></p>
<p>In Trump’s famous <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-37230916">comment about Mexican rapists</a>, he went out of his way to indicate that he wasn’t talking about all Mexicans, and that some Mexicans are good people. These incongruous additions to the diatribe serve as fig leaves for those who falsely believe you can only be racist if you condemn all members of a group. </p>
<p>As I studied online discussions among Trump followers, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/25481050/Racial_Figleaves_the_Shifting_Boundaries_of_the_Permissible_and_the_Rise_of_Donald_Trump">I saw them</a> making precisely this case to one another, to convince themselves that Trump wasn’t racist. </p>
<h2>A litany of racist conduct</h2>
<p>Now turn to where we are now. Trump as president <a href="https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban">instituted a Muslim ban</a>, albeit after some changes to get it past the courts. He locked immigrant <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44518942">children in cages</a>. He quoted a violent segregationist, calling for the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/864818368/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts">shooting of peaceful protesters</a> seeking racial justice. He told four congresswomen of colour to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/us/politics/trump-twitter-squad-congress.html">go back to where they came from</a>. And that’s just off the top of my head.</p>
<p>And now, after all this, Trump and the Republican party chose to feature Black Republican Sen. Tim Scott and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, of Indian descent, along with other Black and brown speakers, to showcase their apparent embrace of people of colour.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Nikki Haley, wearing a pink suit and carrying a document in her hand, smiles as she begins to walk away from a podium that reads Trump/Pence." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355125/original/file-20200827-16-1e4bu5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is seen after speaking during the Republican National Convention from the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington on Aug. 24, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trump’s high-profile <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/rnc-trump-hatch-act-violations-white-house-20200826.html">pardon and naturalization ceremonies</a> at the White House are also aimed at showing his ostensible benevolence toward people of colour. </p>
<p>These are attempted fig leaves, probably directed squarely at the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/668726284/where-the-suburbs-moved-left-and-how-it-swung-elections">suburban voters the party missed out on in the 2018 mid-term elections</a>. </p>
<p>These fig leaves were meant to convince voters that Trump and his party are not racist after all. They may have done some things that seemed alarmingly “racially charged,” perhaps, but in their hearts they were not really racist, as shown by the kindness to people of colour now on display. </p>
<p>But to accept this, you have to accept that locking kids in cages, banning Muslims, telling people to go back to where they came from and calling for the shooting of peaceful protesters demanding racial justice isn’t racist. And that someone can institute these policies and hold these opinions without being racist.</p>
<p>This is what makes fig leaves so dangerous: they have the potential to change our views about what racism is and to make us accept increasingly racist policy and conduct as not racist after all. </p>
<h2>Blatant racism also on display</h2>
<p>The convention wasn’t all fig leaves. There was also actual, blatant racism in the form of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/24/mccloskey-convention-speech-guns-suburbs-401297">Mark and Patricia McCloskey</a>, famed for brandishing guns at peaceful protesters. They worried that Democrats would “bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighbourhoods.” This was surely meant to be what’s known as a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/46922909/dog-whistles-the-secret-language-politicians-are-using">dog whistle</a>, using coded language to express the fear that Black people might move into white neighbourhoods. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1298096585117663233"}"></div></p>
<p>But in our current circumstances, that message was likely heard loud and clear by all of us. And if anyone failed to catch the McCloskey’s message, it was hammered home again and again in much the same vocabulary by a wide range of speakers.</p>
<p>There was also Trump’s reference to COVID-19 as the “<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/republican-party-not-racist-declare-convention-speakers-the-china-virus-1049468/">China virus</a>.” There was the use of the phrase “<a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/08/25/rnc-day-1-trump-stokes-racial-division-claims-hes-not-racist-in-night-of-unhinged-dishonesty/">bodyguard of western civilization</a>,” a coded phrase commonly used by white supremacists. Even if you’d missed the last four years and just tuned into the Republican convention, deeming these comments as non-racist would require a shockingly limited definition of racism. </p>
<h2>Major crises ignored</h2>
<p>Then there were the choices about what to say and what to ignore. The COVID-19 pandemic, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/05/26/860913793/how-the-crisis-is-making-racial-inequality-worse">disproportionately killing people of colour</a>, was barely mentioned except as the “China virus” that was now behind Americans. </p>
<p>The protests against police killings of Black people were frequently mentioned, but only as scenes of violence and unrest, not racial injustice — a fig leaf if there ever was one. The killing of two peaceful protesters, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53934109">allegedly by a Trump-supporting teenager in Wisconsin,</a> as the convention was being held was scrupulously ignored. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="People wearing masks embrace by candlelight." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355352/original/file-20200828-14-1czxwaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protesters observe a moment of silence while marching Aug. 26, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis., near the scene of a fatal shooting of two fellow protesters who were demonstrating against the police shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake. A white, 17-year-old police admirer has been arrested.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/David Goldman)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speakers could easily have acknowledged the illegitimacy of <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/08/27/jacob-blake-kenosha-police-shooting-two-killed/3442878001/">shooting an unarmed man multiple times in the back, and they could have easily expressed concern about a heavily armed white teenager who’s accused of murder in the street</a>. </p>
<p>They chose not to. </p>
<p>To fill your convention with utterly blatant racism, as the Republicans did in 2016, is bad enough. But after four years of blatantly racist actions, a convention filled with fig leaves is perhaps even more dangerous. If the fig leaves work, then — for those who fall for them — the perception grows that the Trump administration’s racist actions weren’t really racist after all. </p>
<p>Recognizing racism has never come easily to white people. But if Trump’s actions and words are no longer seen as racist, the fight against hate, bigotry and racial injustice will be harder than ever.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145149/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I am a member of the Democratic Party. </span></em></p>To fill a convention with blatant racism, as the Republicans did in 2016, is bad enough. But, after four years of racist policies, a convention filled with subtle racism is perhaps more dangerous.Jennifer Saul, Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language, University of WaterlooLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1144792019-07-03T13:04:36Z2019-07-03T13:04:36ZMexicans in US routinely confront legal abuse, racial profiling, ICE targeting and other civil rights violations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281444/original/file-20190626-76722-1o2gl80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The civil rights of 11.3 million Mexican nationals who live in the US are routinely violated, according to a comprehensive new report on U.S. immigration enforcement since 2009.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Arizona-Immigration/191bc70a2f7a4f84a8cfc93dd7885e9d/37/0">AP Photo/Matt York</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Officially, the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv">Constitution of the United States</a> gives everyone on U.S. soil equal protection under the law – regardless of nationality or legal status. </p>
<p>But, as recent stories of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/john-sanders-cbp.html">neglectful treatment of migrant children in government detention centers</a> demonstrate, these <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/duklr59&div=52&id=&page=">civil rights</a> are not always granted to immigrants.</p>
<p>We are scholars focused on U.S.-Mexico migration. Our <a href="http://ccis.ucsd.edu/_files/conference_papers_present/CNDH-final-3.4.19.pdf">report on the enforcement of U.S. immigration law under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump</a>, presented in February to Mexico’s <a href="http://www.cndh.org.mx">National Human Rights Commission</a>, documented pervasive and systematic civil rights violations against Mexicans living in the United States. </p>
<p>Some of the abuses we documented – which include racial profiling, discriminatory treatment and due process violations – result from the <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy-still-violating-fundamental-human-rights-laws-98615">Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies</a>. Others <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-immigration-policies-will-pick-up-where-obamas-left-off-70187">began much earlier</a>, under Obama or well before. </p>
<p>All paint a troubling picture about the rule of law in the United States and the challenges facing America’s largest immigrant group.</p>
<h2>Discrimination and deportation</h2>
<p>An estimated <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-united-states">11.3 million</a> people born in Mexico now live in the United States – 3% of the total U.S. population. </p>
<p>About 5 million of them are unauthorized immigrants, meaning Mexicans <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthorized-immigrant-population-2017/">make up just under half</a> of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country. The other <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/">6.3 million Mexicans in the U.S.</a> are either lawful permanent residents or dual nationals who are naturalized U.S. citizens. </p>
<p>Based on these figures, we found, Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or ICE, the agency that carries out the nation’s immigration laws – arrests Mexican immigrants at levels that are <a href="http://ccis.ucsd.edu/_files/conference_papers_present/CNDH-final-3.4.19.pdf">disproportionate</a> to their share of the unauthorized immigrant population. </p>
<p>Roughly 70% of immigrants deported from the U.S. interior in 2015 <a href="https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/removehistory/">were Mexican</a>, the most recent year that such detailed deportation data are available. </p>
<p>Another 550,000 young Mexican American “Dreamers” – immigrants who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children – <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-deporting-the-dreamers-is-immoral-91738">became subject to deportation</a> when Trump in September 2017 rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave them temporary protection from deportation.</p>
<p>Not all deportations violate immigrants’ civil rights. The <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/legal-resources/immigration-and-nationality-act">Immigration and Nationality Act</a> says immigrants may be deported for violating a long list of criminal and administrative laws.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/lst.2013.14">evidence suggests</a> that Mexicans and other Latinos are sometimes targeted for arrest based on their race or ethnicity. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281443/original/file-20190626-76738-1h5yxo3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2013 a federal judge ruled that police in Maricopa County, Arizona, were racial profiling Latinos in traffic stops that targeted immigrants.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Racial-Profiling-Traffic-Stops/2c5a68d8a5634af7a96cd088f3ab8573/1/0">AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2014, <a href="http://phparivaca.org/?page_id=1174">independent monitors</a> at a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Arivaca, Arizona, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, found that vehicle occupants who appeared to be Latino were 26 times more likely to be asked to show identification than white-looking vehicle occupants, who are frequently waved through the checkpoint. </p>
<p>And in 2012, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation in Alamance County, North Carolina, found that the sheriff had <a href="https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article213085749.html">instructed deputies</a> to “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters” by targeting Latinos in traffic stops and other law enforcement activities.</p>
<p>The DOJ <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-releases-investigative-findings-alamance-county-nc-sheriff-s-office">concluded</a> that the county demonstrated an “egregious pattern of racial profiling” – a violation of the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv">14th Amendment</a>, which guarantees everyone equal protection under the law.</p>
<h2>Family separation</h2>
<p>Mexicans in the United States have seen their constitutional rights violated in other ways. </p>
<p>The most egregious example was the <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-and-sessions-can-end-immigrant-family-separations-without-congress-help-98599">forced separation of families found to have crossed the border illegally</a>. </p>
<p>Under this Trump administration policy, which began in April 2018, at least <a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and-detention/family-separation">2,654 migrant children</a> – and perhaps <a href="http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/01/17/oei-bl-18-00511.pdf">thousands more</a> – were taken from their parents and held in government custody while their parents were criminally prosecuted for crossing the border unlawfully. </p>
<p>Thirty of the children known to have been separated from their families were Mexican; the rest were from Central America. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/emails-show-trump-admin-had-no-way-link-separated-migrant-n1000746">Poor record-keeping</a> has made it difficult for all of them to be reunited with their families before their parents’ deportation. </p>
<p>Together, these actions violate the constitutional rights to legal due process, equal protection and, according to <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000169-603d-d102-a76d-ebbd03e30001">the Southern District of California</a>, the right of parents to determine the care for their children.</p>
<p>“The liberty interest identified in the Fifth Amendment provides a right to family integrity or to familial association,” wrote Judge Dana M. Sabraw in a June 2018 ruling. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281446/original/file-20190626-76701-oxey35.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A child from Guerrero, Mexico, clings to her mother as the family waits in Tijuana to apply for asylum in the U.S., June 13, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Immigration-The-Goal/c9eba4dce9d040308ec4cfef408ac1f6/13/0">AP Photo/Gregory Bull</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More routine civil rights violations happen to Mexicans in the U.S. every day, our report found. </p>
<p>Though children born in the U.S. are entitled by law to American citizenship regardless of their parents’ immigration status, hundreds of undocumented Mexican women in Texas have been <a href="https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-immigrant-birth-certificate-20151016-story.html">denied birth certificates</a> for their U.S.-born children since 2013, according to a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-texas-immigrant-birth-20150718-story.html">lawsuit filed by parents</a>. In 2016, Texas <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/25/texas-agrees-to-resolve-birth-certificate-case/">settled the lawsuit</a> and agreed to expand the types of documents immigrants can use to prove their identity.</p>
<p>And in both Arizona and Texas, so-called “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/09/texas-immigration-sanctuary-cities-law-arizona">show me your papers</a>” laws allow police to demand identification from anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” may be undocumented, which may lead to <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/file/785481/download">discriminatory targeting</a> of Latinos.</p>
<p>Once in government detention, <a href="https://www.colef.mx/emif/eng/">surveys conducted in Mexico</a> of recently deported immigrants show, Mexican deportees are often badly treated. </p>
<p>On average, in 2016 and 2017, about half of all recently deported Mexicans reported having no access to medical services or a bathroom while in government custody. One-third reported experiencing extreme heat or cold. </p>
<p>Mexicans are <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes">not alone in their negative experiences at border patrol facilities</a>. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2019-06/OIG-19-47-Jun19.pdf">recent report by the Office of Inspector General</a> found unsafe and unsanitary conditions at several U.S. immigrant detention centers, and immigration lawyers found <a href="https://time.com/5607608/migrant-conditions-holding-centers-border/">food shortages at some migrant children’s shelters</a>.</p>
<h2>A climate of fear</h2>
<p>While Mexicans in the United States have faced <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1163/156916306777835376">biased law enforcement</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3846170/">discrimination</a> for many decades, their treatment appears to have worsened since President Trump took office in 2017 with an openly <a href="http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">anti-Mexican agenda</a>.</p>
<p>A survey of Mexicans recently deported from the United States <a href="https://www.colef.mx/emif/eng/">found</a> that the number of people who reported experiencing verbal abuse or physical assault during their time in the U.S. increased 47% between 2016 and 2017. </p>
<p>The number of hate crimes against Latinos reported to the <a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-1;%20https:/ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-1.xls.">FBI</a> also rose 24% in 2017 compared to 2016 – increasing from 344 incidents to 427. </p>
<p>Mexico is concerned about its citizens in the United States. </p>
<p>In March, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard <a href="https://www.vidaenelvalle.com/news/politics-government/article227092954.html">announced</a> it would provide more consular services online to increase the reach of Mexico’s 50 brick-and-mortar consulates in the U.S. and provide more legal training to consulate officials. </p>
<p>To support Mexicans in the U.S. with deportation and other immigration cases, the Mexican government will also <a href="https://www.gob.mx/sre/prensa/nuevos-consules-generales-en-ee-uu-presentan-estrategia-para-fortalecer-defensa-de-connacionales?idiom=es">strengthen its official ties with U.S.-based legal aid providers</a>. </p>
<p>In theory, Mexico shouldn’t have to scramble to defend the rights of its citizens in the U.S. because the U.S. Constitution would. But, in practice, the civil rights of immigrants are simply not always guaranteed.</p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114479/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David FitzGerald has received research funding from Mexico's National Human Rights Commission.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Angela Y. McClean and Gustavo López do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new report on Mexicans in the US paints a troubling picture about the treatment of the country’s largest immigrant group.David FitzGerald, Theodore E. Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San DiegoAngela Y. McClean, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, Fellow and Graduate Researcher at Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San DiegoGustavo López, Graduate Researcher at Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San DiegoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/923242018-03-22T20:00:09Z2018-03-22T20:00:09ZForced sterilization programs in California once harmed thousands – particularly Latinas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210862/original/file-20180316-104663-1txsaha.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Postcard of the Napa State Hospital in Napa, Calif., circa 1905. Over 1,900 Californians were recommended for sterilization while patients here.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://alexwellerstein.com/collection/">The collection of Alex Wellerstein</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/los-programas-de-esterilizacion-forzada-en-california-perjudicaron-a-miles-especialmente-a-latinas-93768">Leer en español</a>.</em></p>
<p>In 1942, 18-year-old Iris Lopez, a Mexican-American woman, started working at the Calship Yards in Los Angeles. Working on the home front building <a href="https://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/116liberty_victory_ships/116liberty_victory_ships.htm">Victory Ships</a> not only added to the war effort, but allowed Iris to support her family. </p>
<p>Iris’ participation in the World War II effort made her part of a <a href="https://iptv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/american-shipyards-war-effort-ken-burns-the-war/american-shipyards-war-effort-ken-burns-the-war/">celebrated time</a> in U.S. history, when economic opportunities opened up for <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469622095/from-coveralls-to-zoot-suits/">women and youth of color</a>. </p>
<p>However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history. At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized. </p>
<p>Iris wasn’t alone. In the first half of the 20th century, <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/%7Elkaelber/eugenics/">approximately 60,000 people were sterilized</a> under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed “unfit” infertile. </p>
<p>California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people – one-third of the national total – were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled. </p>
<p>To better understand the nation’s most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, <a href="https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/ssj-mini-conference">our research team</a> tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people. We wanted to know about the role patients’ race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as “unfit”? </p>
<p>Racial biases affected Iris’ life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.</p>
<h2>‘Race science’ and sterilization</h2>
<p>Eugenics was seen as a “science” in the <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eugenics-the-early-days/">early 20th century</a>, and its ideas remained popular <a href="https://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-american-eugenics-movement-after-world-war-ii-part-1-of-3/Content?oid=2468789">into the midcentury</a>. Advocating for the “science of better breeding,” eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce. </p>
<p>Under <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/06/history_of_sterilization_in_california_pamphlet_from_the_human_betterment.html">California’s eugenic law</a>, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized. Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.</p>
<p>Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years. </p>
<p>Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/before-loving/">anti-miscegenation laws</a> and the <a href="https://cla.umn.edu/ihrc/news-events/other/eugenics-race-immigration-restriction">Immigration Act of 1924</a>. Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a “<a href="https://archive.org/details/surveysinmentald00caliiala">lower racial level.”</a> Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, “hyperfertile” and criminally inclined. </p>
<p>These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as “<a href="https://archive.org/details/surveysinmentald00caliiala">immigrants of an undesirable type</a>.” If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction. </p>
<h2>Targeting Latinos and Latinas</h2>
<p>In a study <a href="https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304369">published March 22</a>, we looked at the California program’s disproportionately high impact on the Latino population, primarily women and men from Mexico.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211410/original/file-20180321-165574-3rwgpw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A sample sterilization form for a 15-year-old woman in California.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, University of Michigan</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/mexican-americans-and-eugenic-sterilization-resisting-reproductiv">Previous</a> <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520271722">research</a> examined racial bias in California’s sterilization program. But the extent of anti-Latino bias hadn’t been formally quantified. Latinas like Iris were certainly targeted for sterilization, but to what extent? </p>
<p>We used sterilization forms found by historian Alexandra Minna Stern to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/california-sterilization-records/511718/">build a data set</a> on over 20,000 people recommended for sterilization in California between 1919 and 1953. The racial categories used to classify Californians of Mexican origin were in flux during this time period, so we used Spanish surname criteria as a proxy.
In 1950, 88 percent of Californians with a Spanish surname <a href="https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41601756v4p3ch07.pdf">were of
Mexican descent</a>. </p>
<p>We compared patients recommended for sterilization to the patient population of each institution, which we reconstructed with data from census forms. We then measured sterilization rates between Latino and non-Latino patients, adjusting for age. (Both Latino patients and people recommended for sterilization tended to be younger.)</p>
<p>Latino men were 23 percent more likely to be sterilized than non-Latino men. The difference was even greater among women, with Latinas sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas. </p>
<p><iframe id="fvDKs" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fvDKs/4/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>In their records, doctors repeatedly cast young Latino men as biologically prone to crime, while young Latinas like Iris were described as “sex delinquents.” Their sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy. </p>
<h2>Lasting impact</h2>
<p>The legacy of these infringements on reproductive rights is still visible today. </p>
<p>Recent incidents in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/21/tenn-judge-reprimanded-for-offering-reduced-jail-time-in-exchange-for-sterilization/">Tennessee</a>, <a href="http://time.com/2903158/california-to-investigate-illegal-sterilization-of-female-inmates/">California</a> and <a href="http://newsok.com/offender-awaiting-sentencing-in-counterfeit-check-case-gets-operation-making-her-sterile-at-judges-suggestion/article/5582478">Oklahoma</a> echo this past. In each case, people in contact with the criminal justice system – often people of color – were sterilized under coercive pressure from the state. </p>
<p>Contemporary justifications for this practice rely on core tenets of eugenics. Proponents argued that preventing the reproduction of some will help solve larger social issues like poverty. The doctor who sterilized incarcerated women in California without proper consent stated that doing so would save the state money in future welfare costs for <a href="https://www.revealnews.org/article/female-inmates-sterilized-in-california-prisons-without-approval/">“unwanted children.”</a></p>
<p>The eugenics era also echoes in the broader cultural and political landscape of the U.S. today. Latina women’s reproduction is repeatedly portrayed <a href="https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/gutfer">as a threat to the nation</a>. Latina immigrants in particular are seen as hyperfertile. Their children are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “<a href="http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2.2_9_Huang.pdf">anchor babies</a>” and described as a burden on the nation. </p>
<h2>Reproductive justice</h2>
<p>This history – and other histories of sterilization abuse of <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/seeking-justice/case-docket/relf-v-weinberger">black</a>, <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/15/ama-legacy-sterilization-indian-country/">Native</a>, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/no-mas-bebes/">Mexican immigrant</a> and <a href="https://www.cwluherstory.org/health/35-of-puerto-rican-women-sterilized?rq=Puerto%20rico">Puerto Rican</a> women – inform the modern <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-reproductive-justice-vital-in-this-political-moment-a-new-book-breaks-it-down/">reproductive justice</a> movement. </p>
<p>This movement, as defined by the advocacy group <a href="http://sistersong.net/reproductive-justice/">SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective</a> is committed to “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” </p>
<p>As the fight for contemporary reproductive justice continues, it’s important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past. The nonprofit <a href="https://californialatinas.org">California Latinas for Reproductive Justice</a> has co-sponsored
a forthcoming bill that offers financial redress to living survivors of California’s eugenic sterilization program. “As reproductive justice advocates, we recognize the insidious impact state-sponsored policies have on the dignity and rights of poor women of color who are often stripped of their ability to form the families they want,” CLRJ Executive Director Laura Jiménez said in a statement.</p>
<p><a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1190">This bill</a> was introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, along with Assemblymember Monique Limón and Sen. Jim Beall.</p>
<p>If this bill passes, California would follow in the footsteps of <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/all/eugenic-sterilization-victims-belated-justice">North Carolina</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/va-general-assembly-agrees-to-compensate-eugenics-victims/2015/02/27/b2b7b0ec-be9e-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html?utm_term=.f6b63e0a1f45">Virginia</a>, which began sterilization redress programs in 2013 and 2015. </p>
<p>In the words of Jimenez, “This bill is a step in the right direction in remedying the violence inflicted on these survivors.” In our view, financial compensation will never make up for the violation of survivors’ fundamental human rights. But it’s an opportunity to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-eugenics-california-20170122-story.html">reaffirm the dignity and self-determination</a> of all people.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92324/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole L. Novak has received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Natalie Lira has previously received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. </span></em></p>About 20,000 Californians were once sterilized under state eugenics laws. New research shows Latinos were disproportionately targeted. Is there any opportunity today to address these wrongs?Nicole L. Novak, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of IowaNatalie Lira, Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/888672017-12-13T23:53:44Z2017-12-13T23:53:44ZFascism’s return and Trump’s war on youth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199076/original/file-20171213-27568-1p6ih1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump’s policies represent a particular attack on American youth and children, particularly those who are disadvantaged</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fascism is all too often relegated to the history books.</p>
<p>The word conjures up a period in which civilized societies treated democracy with contempt, engaged in acts of systemic violence, practised extermination and elimination, supported an “apocalyptic populism,” suppressed dissent, promoted a hyper-nationalism, displayed contempt for women, embraced militarism as an absolute ideal and insisted on obedience to a self-proclaimed prophet.</p>
<p>But the seeds that produced such fascist horrors have once again sprung to life, returning in new social and political forms. </p>
<p>Today, a culture of fear dominates American society, one marked by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?utm_term=.b950ceeb70fd">massive inequities in wealth and power</a> that not only uphold structures of domination, but also view differences as threats, compassion as weakness and shared responsibilities —if not the common good itself — as pathology.</p>
<p>Fascist thought is on the rise all over the world, but its most blatant and dangerous manifestation has emerged in the Trump administration. </p>
<p>Fear and the ethos of mass consumerism —coupled with widespread insecurity and ignorance —now drive people into a malignant notion of security, self-inflicted cynicism and into the arms of demagogues like Trump. For too many Americans, critical thinking and hope have given way to emotional bonding and the revival of the discourse of ultra-nationalism and bigotry. </p>
<h2>Trump: Not Hitler, but dangerous nonetheless</h2>
<p>Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic.</p>
<p>But in the Trump era, remnants of fascism exist in different shapes and forms and include a celebration of the cult of the leader, systemic racism, the embrace of a toxic macho-populism and state support for ultra-nationalism, racism and <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-passion-for-cruelty-84819">the threat of violence against critics.</a> </p>
<p>All of these elements are evident in Trump’s rhetoric and policy initiatives. </p>
<p>Trump’s corporate brand of neoliberal fascism is highly visible in right-wing policies that <a href="https://www.aei.org/publication/taking-a-look-at-the-state-of-trumps-deregulation-efforts/">favour deregulation</a>, corporate power and the interests of the ultra-rich. </p>
<p>Instead of draining the corporate swamp, Trump has embraced the merging of corporate and political power, and in doing so has turned the state into a battering ram designed to serve the most powerful and wealthiest members of society.</p>
<p>Trump’s mode of fascism is a unique product of our times, our commercial culture, and a corporate controlled media, all of which saps the foundations of a viable democracy.</p>
<p>American culture is advertising-saturated and celebrity-based, and has permitted a rich self-promoter to abandon any pretense of civility, accountability or integrity in order to hype, scam and market his way to power.</p>
<p>Call it <em>Fascism, American-Style</em>. It’s returned in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755">shadow of neoliberalism</a>, with its celebration of the market as the template for governing all of society and its concentration of economic and political power in relatively few hands.</p>
<h2>Friendly with dictators</h2>
<p>How else to explain Trump’s unapologetic support and friendly attitude toward right-wing dictators such as the self-confessed killer, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/world/asia/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-donald-trump.html">Rodrigo Duterte,</a> president of the Philippines, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, all of whom have a fawning attraction to Trump given he exhibits little interest in their massive human rights violations.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198866/original/file-20171212-9404-wut9xs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte speak during a bilateral meeting at the ASEAN Summit in Manila in November 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trump’s fascism is also on full display in his ramping up of the police state, his relentless <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-racial-demagoguery-of-trumps-assaults-on-colin-kaepernick-and-steph-curry">racist rhetoric</a>, taunts and policies that cast Blacks, immigrants and Muslims as people unworthy of respect, compassion and dignity, and in his support for a war culture. </p>
<p>The latter is marked by his expansion of the U.S. military budget, his provocations aimed at North Korea and reckless policies such as recognizing Jerusalem the capital of Israel —<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/world-leaders-warn-trump-may-spark-violence-with-jerusalem-shift">widely condemned by almost all world leaders</a> — that destabilize the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world.</p>
<p>But there are more subtle, if not under-examined, indicators that point to resurgence of fascist principles in the United States. </p>
<p>One of the most powerful is Trump’s war on youth.</p>
<p>Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself. </p>
<p>In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.</p>
<h2>‘Foreclosed hope’</h2>
<p>Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/casino-capitalism">casino capitalism</a> or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.</p>
<p>Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/31/downward-mobility-europe-young-people">Zygmunt Bauman has argued</a>, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.” </p>
<p>American youth, especially <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2017/12/08/443972/preschool-prison-criminalization-black-girls/">those marginalized by race and class</a>, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/police-assault-black-students-kentucky-sparks-calls">their behaviour being criminalized in schools</a> and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.</p>
<p>Several states <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/states-anti-protest-legislation/index.html">are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime</a> that carries a huge fine, or subjects young people to possible felony charges? Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare.</p>
<p>The most recent example is evident in <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/trump-tax-plan-another-battle-class-war-745236">budget and tax reform bills</a> that shift millions of dollars away from social programs vital to the health of poor youth to the pockets of the ultra-rich, who hardly need tax deductions.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-america-may-go-to-hell_us_5a0f4dd4e4b023121e0e9281">As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out</a>, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”</p>
<p>She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”</p>
<h2>Cruel mindset</h2>
<p>The Trump administration is more than willing to pass massive tax cuts for the rich while at the same time refusing to fund the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/12/569953391/parents-worry-congress-wont-fund-the-childrens-health-insurance-program">Children’s Health Insurance Program,</a> which supports over nine million children. </p>
<p>Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, meantime, has argued that tax cuts shouldn’t benefit the poor because they will just <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/chuck-grassley-women-booze-movies">waste the money on booze and women.</a></p>
<p>So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re lazy. Really? Tell that to <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/363152-larry-summers-10000-people-will-die-annually-from-gop-tax-bill">the 10,000 people</a>, some of them children, who may die each year as a result of losing their health insurance due to the proposed Senate tax bill.</p>
<p>Such a mindset, and statements like Grassley’s, are more than cruel, they represent a political and economic system that has abandoned any sense of moral and social responsibility. </p>
<p>In this view, children are undeserving of aid because offering such government support flies in the face of a ruthless neoliberal ideology that insists that the only responsibility of government is to aid the rich and powerful corporations. </p>
<p>If the poor are suffering and subject to harsh conditions, according to Grassley’s logic, it is because of a lack of character. </p>
<p>Another under-analyzed example of Trump’s war on youth can be seen his cancellation of the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/politics/daca-options/index.html">DACA program</a> (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), instituted in 2012 by former president Barack Obama. </p>
<p>Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study and work in the United States without fear of deportation.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199073/original/file-20171213-27597-1wyn6x4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Loyola Marymount University student and dreamer Maria Carolina Gomez joins a rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program, in California in September 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In revoking the program, Trump enacted a policy that is both cruel and racist, given that 78 per cent of DACA residents are from Mexico. These are the same immigrants Trump once labelled <a href="http://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/">rapists, drug addicts and criminals.</a></p>
<p>Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe are more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by a market-driven survival of the fittest ethos. </p>
<h2>‘Systemic derangement’</h2>
<p>It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and emergence of fascist politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state with no regard for its children. </p>
<p>Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption, and he revels in a mode of governance that merges his never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with deeply authoritarian politics.</p>
<p>One of the most disturbing features of Trump’s fascism is his disregard for the truth and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-president-donald-trump-pathological-liar-undermine-democracy-a7624661.html">his embrace of an infantilism</a> that demonstrates, for young people, a lack of any viable sense of critical thought, agency and commitment to social and economic justice.</p>
<p>What’s more, Trump has unleashed a rancid populism and racist-fuelled ultra-nationalism that mimics older forms of fascism and creates a culture of cruelty that both disparages its children and cancels out a future that makes democracy possible for them — and therefore all of us.</p>
<p>At the same time, Trump has embraced a merging of corporate power and politics that is characteristic of all fascist regimes, and in doing so, he has shifted wealth and resources away from vital social programs for young people into the hands of the financial elite. </p>
<p>There is more at work here than regressive tax policies, there is also an attempt to disable the welfare state by eliminating its funding. </p>
<h2>Domestic terrorism</h2>
<p>One result is what might be called the unleashing of a form of domestic terrorism — terrorism practised in one’s own country against one’s own people —in which young people are subject to state violence and relegated to forms of terminal exclusion, spheres of social abandonment and set adrift in a state of disorientation and despair. </p>
<p>Under this new resurgence of fascism, thinking is dangerous, public spheres that promote critical thought are considered pathological and youth are viewed as a threatening disoriented class, especially those marginalized by race, sexual orientation and class. </p>
<p>And so under Trump, the winds of fascism have accelerated into a hurricane and pose a haunting crisis for youth, the future and democracy itself. </p>
<p>That crisis of youth under the Trump regime is a political disaster of the first order and threatens every vital cultural and political ideal, principle, social formation and public sphere that makes a democracy possible. It’s best illustrated by Trump’s support for Moore, a homophobe, unabashed racist and an accused child predator, sexual harasser and sexual abuser. </p>
<p>Yes, fascism us making a comeback and is with us once again — yet Moore’s defeat in the deep-red state of Alabama to his Democratic challenger gives us reason to hope. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/politics/black-women-alabama-election/index.html">Black voters, particularly black women, and young voters</a> stood up to say “no more.” </p>
<p>Fascism requires those among us who value equity, fairness, justice and morality to defeat it. To stop fascism, it is crucial that we show that democracy is the only alternative, and that the grotesque elements of fascism will be challenged. Here’s hoping Alabama is just the beginning of such a struggle.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88867/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Giroux does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Call it Fascism, American-Style. Donald Trump’s embrace of authoritarian ideals has extended to a veritable war on America’s youth.Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/766862017-05-30T01:39:52Z2017-05-30T01:39:52ZThe US and Mexico: Education and understanding<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171146/original/file-20170526-6402-1eubcmv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The University of California-Mexico Initiative Education Working Group created Project SOL, an online curriculum program that teaches students in their native language.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/30308/teacheredithissakhanian-helps-bryanlima">University of California, Riverside</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week, officials from the U.S. and Mexico revitalized their commitment to fight cross-border smuggling of drugs, arms and money. U.S. officials recognized America’s demand for drugs as “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/tillerson-mexico-drug-trade/">the magnet</a>” that feeds drug smuggling, and Mexico committed to tackle jointly the elements of the cartels’ business model.</p>
<p>While illegal immigration and drugs dominate much of the public discourse around U.S.-Mexico relations, the partnership between these countries is vital and dynamic in many other ways. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/growing-together-economic-ties-between-the-united-states-and-mexico">two neighbors</a> trade over US$1 million a minute, employ many millions in good jobs on both sides of the border, have over a million legal border crossings each day and have over 35 million citizens of shared heritage.</p>
<p>We have devoted years of our professional lives (in government, academic and social sectors) to developing and implementing strategies for improving our countries’ relationship. As such, we’ve been taken aback by the sharply critical U.S. rhetoric about Mexico in recent months and the anti-American sentiment that quickly rekindled in Mexico.</p>
<p>Our most recent work, however, shows that educational and research exchanges can bridge the widening divide, while also building workforces that can help the two nations thrive in the technological revolutions ahead.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171046/original/file-20170525-23251-1hxzabl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Attendees of the Anaheim Convention Center rally in 2016 show support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/anaheim-california-may-25-2016-thousands-426989245?src=1lXnivognR_nJxudfQwQJg-1-2">Mike Ledray/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Academic exchanges as long-term bridges</h2>
<p>We have seen firsthand the impact of programs on young Mexicans who returned from U.S. stays with pride, enthusiasm and improved English. We’ve also witnessed how American students interacting with their counterparts in Mexico enhance the appreciation and respect for each others’ countries.</p>
<p>Yet, <a href="https://www.iie.org/en/Research-and-Insights/Project-Atlas/Explore-Data/United-States">student exchange numbers</a> are not encouraging. Mexico ranks 10th for the number of full-time students studying in the U.S., placing it far behind China and India, and also trailing Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Vietnam, and northern neighbor Canada. The story is worse in <a href="http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/Data/US-Study-Abroad/Leading-Destinations/2013-15">the other direction</a>: Only 4,712 U.S. students were studying in Mexico in 2014-15, 12th among destinations for U.S. students.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for the low numbers, but here is the bottom line: Two such interconnected neighbors should be doing better.</p>
<p><iframe id="OFTy7" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/OFTy7/3/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>In 2013, we were a part of launching an initiative aimed at tackling this problem. The <a href="https://mx.usembassy.gov/education-culture/education/the-u-s-mexico-bilateral-forum-on-higher-education-innovation-and-research/">Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation and Research</a> (known by its Spanish acronym, FOBESII) gathers educators, private citizens, companies and officials from universities and government. Their aim is to expand long-term investments in education and research partnerships between the U.S. and Mexico.</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://mex-eua.sre.gob.mx/images/stories/PDF/AchievementsUSMexicoBilateralForumonHigherEducationInnovationandResearchFOBESII.pdf">past four years</a>, FOBESII has fostered more than 115 new agreements between Mexican and U.S. universities.</p>
<p>Mexico’s federal government allocated an unprecedented $42.9 million for these programs during 2014-16. More than 100,000 Mexican students – many of them from low income families – came to the U.S. as full-time graduate students, as single-semester researchers or in summer programs designed to improve English proficiency. These experiences changed the way students (and their families) viewed <a href="https://comexusfulbright-garciarobles.tumblr.com/">their future potential</a> and, importantly these days, their opinion about the United States was greatly improved.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the U.S. public funds to support these exchanges were more limited than the investments made by Mexico. Private sector sponsors, however, have worked with the U.S. government to develop <a href="http://www.100kstrongamericas.org/">32 academic projects with Mexican universities</a>, ranging from engineering, physics, geology and health to environmental sciences.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171037/original/file-20170525-23245-1nw93ql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2015, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne visits students, who participated in the Fulbright-Garcia Robles program in the U.S., from The Technological University Retoño.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.facebook.com/USCGGuadalajara/photos/pcb.10153205193770129/10153205192465129/?type=3&theater">Consulate General of the United States Guadalajara</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Building things together</h2>
<p>While targeting such exchanges provides opportunities to young scholars and promotes cultural understanding, it can also produce better educated workforces.</p>
<p>Mexico and the United States literally and figuratively <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/growing_together_economic_ties_between_the_united_states_and_mexico.pdf">build things together</a>, with pieces crossing the border many times before a finished product emerges. American parts and products make up, on average, about <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/growing_together_economic_ties_between_the_united_states_and_mexico.pdf">40 percent of the value</a> of a finished manufactured product from Mexico. That’s much more than the U.S. contributes to other countries’ manufacturing and positively impacts U.S. jobs and profits.</p>
<p>The “<a href="https://theoutline.com/post/1316/fourth-industrial-revolution-developing-economies">fourth industrial revolution</a>” is unfolding: digital technologies are leading to faster and more complex advances in practically all facets of life. Both countries are going to need better equipped labor forces to maintain this highly integrated production network and to compete with others in the world.</p>
<p><iframe id="lRaMG" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/lRaMG/3/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Several ongoing initiatives within the framework of FOBESII will support the goal of better-equipped labor forces. The University of California has raised around $15 million to support <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-napolitano-mexico-20170323-story.html">programs linking their universities with Mexican institutions</a>. Universities in <a href="http://www.contex.utsystem.edu/">Texas</a> and <a href="https://global.arizona.edu/unam-ua">Arizona</a> have developed similar programs, focusing on research in energy, the environment and other common topics in science and technology. The U.S. <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/">National Science Foundation</a> and Mexico’s <a href="http://www.conacyt.mx/">National Council of Science and Technology</a> have created 12 more joint projects.</p>
<p>Michael M. Crow, President of Arizona State University, described the rationale behind <a href="https://mexico.asu.edu/">his school’s partnerships</a> this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We share a border and many common interests with Mexico. It’s natural that we seek stronger ties through education, research and innovation so we can help each other prepare for the challenges and the changing nature of the advanced workforce of the 21st century.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every year, we’ve seen many more students and universities who want to participate than the current funding allows.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/171045/original/file-20170525-23241-far5e6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2016, The University of Texas and Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology launched ConTex as a collaborative effort to foster scientific training and research between the U.S. and Mexico.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/university-texas-ut-against-blue-sky-221247628?src=Zs_09zwewWXn9z1ZcvH_ww-1-14">f11photo/shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Investing in the future of North America</h2>
<p>Historically, other neighbors in the world have made similar strategic decisions to invest in educational partnerships. The <a href="http://www.erasmusprogramme.com/">European Erasmus</a> program, for instance, has been supported by billions of dollars of funding since it was established in 1987. Over <a href="http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-1110_en.htm">three million students</a> have studied in other countries at over 4,000 post-secondary institutions. Aside from the academic value of the program, it has contributed to crafting <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2016.1210911">a more robust European vision</a> among the youth.</p>
<p>As with European cooperation, the comparatively modest U.S.-Mexico efforts are not about charity – or even just education. They concern the strategic interests of neighbors in the face of global competition, technological revolutions, and persistent prejudices that strain relations between neighbors.</p>
<p>Mexico and the United States will remain neighbors. Their shared challenges will not disappear, but shared opportunities could be missed. We should double down on overcoming our misunderstandings and solving concrete problems together. Learning and researching together will definitely help.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76686/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Earl Anthony Wayne is affiliated with the Wilson Center, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the American Foreign Service Association. He is an advisor to HSBC bank on countering illicit finance.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sergio M. Alcocer is affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), México Exponencial, the Mexican Council for International Affairs (COMEXI), the US National Academy of Engineering and the Mexican Academy of Engineering. </span></em></p>Despite hard work by both governments to overcome mistrust, more is needed to build mutual understanding between Americans and Mexicans. Educational partnerships may hold the answer.Earl Anthony Wayne, Visiting Professor of International Affairs, Hamilton CollegeSergio M. Alcocer, Research Professor, Institute of Engineering, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/771412017-05-12T02:00:57Z2017-05-12T02:00:57ZBefore Trump, Mexicans really liked the US<p>Donald Trump’s antagonistic rhetoric toward Mexico has caused an increase in anti-American sentiment among Mexicans.</p>
<p>Today, many in Mexico reject Trump’s policies and fear his administration, citing it as fascist, <a href="http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/entrada-de-opinion/articulo/jorge-camil/nacion/2015/11/20/la-gestapo-de-trump">authoritarian</a>, populist, dictatorial, xenophobic, misogynist or simply <a href="http://www.excelsior.com.mx/opinion/jose-cardenas/2015/06/19/1030279">an aberration</a>.</p>
<p>It wasn’t always this way. Since the mid-1980s, Mexican politicians, intellectuals, journalists and business professionals promoted a positive view of the U.S. Pro-American sentiment was handed down through generations.</p>
<p>As a scholar of how other countries view the United States, I believe Mexican anti-Americanism is bad news for bilateral relations. Considering the U.S. exported more then US$19 billion to Mexico just <a href="https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2010.html">in January 2017</a> and 1 million people <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/07/19/opinion-million-people-cross-border-legally-every-day-and-that-good-thing.html">legally cross the border</a> every day, this political and social turbulence should be concerning. A return to the pre-Trump Mexican sentiment regarding the U.S. could take many years, if not decades.</p>
<h2>Relations and trust in decline</h2>
<p>In January 2015, the Mexican polling company Parametria <a href="http://www.parametria.com.mx/carta_parametrica.php?cp=4933">published a survey</a> showing that 49 percent of Mexicans considered U.S.-Mexican relations to be either good or very good. Two years later, only 21 percent considered relations to be good or very good. And, 49 percent of Mexicans said U.S.-Mexican relations were either bad or very bad.</p>
<p>A poll by the Mexican newspaper Reforma conducted <a href="https://gruporeforma-blogs.com/encuestas/?s=trump">in August 2016</a> revealed that 86 percent of Mexicans had an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump. Only 5 percent maintained a favorable one. In the same poll, 95 percent of the Mexicans rejected Trump’s position on immigration and the proposal of building a wall along the Mexican border.</p>
<p>Likewise, 85 percent of Mexicans agreed that if Trump implements the changes he has been advocating, Mexico will be at least somewhat affected. About 73 percent showed significant concern for the future of Mexico. And, 62 percent of the population agreed with the statement that Mexico should strongly defend its own interests, even if that leads to a confrontation with Trump.</p>
<h2>Mexico’s once-stable view</h2>
<p>A positive view of the United States among the Mexican people has, in recent history, actually been quite stable. Starting in 2004 the Center for Teaching and Research in Economics in Mexico conducted <a href="http://libreriacide.com/librospdf/DTEI-156.pdf">a series</a> of <a href="http://www.libreriacide.com/librospdf/DTEI-257.pdf">surveys</a> every two years, with help from the Mexican Council on Foreign Affairs in 2004 and 2006. They asked Mexicans to rate how favorably they viewed the U.S. and 24 other countries on a scale from 0 to 100. Countries were then ranked most to least favorable by their scores. Results from 2016 will be released in June.</p>
<iframe src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/hmIYC/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" width="100%" height="415"></iframe>
<p>For 10 years – from <a href="http://www.libreriacide.com/librospdf/DTEI-257.pdf">2004</a> to 2014 – the United States, with the exception of 2008, remained the first or second most favorable country for Mexicans. The only year the U.S. fell <a href="http://libreriacide.com/librospdf/DTEI-188.pdf">below second place</a> was 2008, but even then it scored 62 out of 100. The lower ranking was likely related to low approval ratings of the American invasion to Iraq and Afghanistan, in Mexico and around the world.</p>
<p>Several forces contributed to a pro-American perspective. Officially, the government promoted a pro-American agenda in order to highlight the benefits of an economic alliances with the U.S. </p>
<p>Unofficially, the presence of <a href="http://www.jstor.org.zeus.tarleton.edu:82/stable/pdf/2567048.pdf">American culture</a> in music, TV and cinema is also contributed. The constant movement of Mexican immigrants to and from the United States brought not only American goods to Mexico, but also American traditions, practices and ideals.</p>
<p>Affinity toward the U.S. <a href="https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/filelegacydocs/Jwhi811.pdf">also grew</a> with the success of the American economy during the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, Mexico was <a href="https://economics.rabobank.com/publications/2013/september/the-mexican-1982-debt-crisis/">experiencing economic crisis</a> and devaluation of the peso. In 1992, Mexico formalized the integration of their economy with the United States by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).</p>
<h2>Beyond reaction?</h2>
<p>The change in numbers solidify the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Mexicans have protested in front of the American Embassy in Mexico City. Walks have been <a href="http://www.animalpolitico.com/2017/01/mexico-embajada-protesta-trump/">organized</a> to <a href="http://www.excelsior.com.mx/nacional/2017/02/13/1145977">disavow Trump</a> and his policies. Many in the <a href="http://www.milenio.com/firmas/hector_aguilar_camin_dia-con-dia/donald_trump-100_dias-politica_interna-comercio_internacional-frontera-muro_18_849095110.html">intellectual community</a> have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/01/04/mexico-stood-up-to-reagan-it-can-stand-up-to-trump-too/?utm_term=.27be643ccf48">condemned Trump’s views</a>. </p>
<p>Enrique Krauze, a Mexican intellectual, has <a href="http://aristeguinoticias.com/0203/entrevistas/donald-trump-es-un-perfecto-fascista-enrique-krauze-en-cnn/">repeatedly called Trump</a> “a perfect fascist” and has <a href="http://elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/03/opinion/1486142760_089776.html">declared Mexico</a> to be at war, though not militarily, with the United States. </p>
<p>For Mexicans, being immune to the offensive statements of Trump is difficult. Unfortunately, their reactive resentment may obscure a thoughtful critique of the United States, its policies, constituents and the structural reasons for Trump’s ascent to the White House. </p>
<p><em>Author’s note: Research assistant Bailey Ross contributed to the writing of this article.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77141/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jesus Velasco is Joe and Teresa Endowed Chair is Social Science at Tarleton State University and Non-Resident scholar of the Mexican Center at Rice University.</span></em></p>Can the U.S. recover its once positive image among Mexicans? Trade, immigration and cultural ties stand to suffer.Jesus Velasco, Joe and Teresa Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, Tarleton State University, Tarleton State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/746042017-05-01T02:00:36Z2017-05-01T02:00:36ZHow crossing the US-Mexico border became a crime<p>It was not always a crime to enter the United States without authorization. </p>
<p>In fact, for most of American history, immigrants could enter the United States without official permission and not fear criminal prosecution by the federal government.</p>
<p>That changed in 1929. On its surface, Congress’ <a href="http://people.sunyulster.edu/voughth/immlaws1929_48.htm">new prohibitions</a> on informal border crossings simply modernized the U.S. immigration system by compelling all immigrants to apply for entry. However, in my new book “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q28Q5NGlASY">City of Inmates</a>,” I detail how Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.</p>
<p>Knowing this history is important now. On April 11, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his plan to step up prosecutions of unlawful entries, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-keynote-remarks-international-association-chiefs">saying</a> it’s time to “restore a lawful system of immigration.” This may read like a colorblind commitment to law and order. But the law Sessions has vowed to enforce was designed with racist intent.</p>
<h2>The Mexican immigration debate</h2>
<p>The criminalization of informal border crossings occurred amid an immigration boom from Mexico. </p>
<p>In 1900, about 100,000 Mexican immigrants resided in the United States.</p>
<p>By 1930, nearly 1.5 million Mexican immigrants lived north of the border. </p>
<p>As Mexican immigration surged, many in Congress were trying to restrict nonwhite immigration. By <a href="http://www2.fiu.edu/%7Erevellk/pad3802/Ngai.pdf">1924</a>, Congress had largely adopted a “whites only” immigration system, <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-immigration-order-is-bad-foreign-policy-72053">banning all Asian immigration</a> and cutting the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States from anywhere other than Northern and Western Europe. But whenever Congress tried to cap the number of Mexicans allowed to enter the United States each year, southwestern employers fiercely objected.</p>
<p>U.S. employers had eagerly stoked the era’s Mexican immigration boom by recruiting Mexican workers to their southwestern farms, ranches and railroads, as well as their homes and mines. By the 1920s, western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers. </p>
<p>However, they also believed that Mexican immigrants would never permanently settle in the United States. As agribusiness lobbyist <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/seasonal-agricultural-laborers-from-mexico-hearings-before-the-committee-on-immigration-and-naturalization-sixty-ninth-congress-first-session-january-28-and-29-february-2-9-11-and-23-1926-on-hr-6741-hr-7559-hr-9036/oclc/82498588"> S. Parker Frisselle explained to Congress in 1926</a>, “The Mexican is a ‘homer.’ Like the pigeon he goes home to roost.” On Frisselle’s promise that Mexicans were “not immigrants” but, rather, “birds of passage,” western employers successfully defeated proposals to cap Mexican immigration to the United States during the 1920s.</p>
<p>The idea that Mexican immigrants often returned to Mexico contained some truth. Many <a href="https://academic.oup.com/maghis/article/23/4/25/935227/Mexican-Immigration-to-the-United-States">Mexican immigrants</a> engaged in cyclical migrations between their homes in Mexico and work in the United States. Yet, by the close of the 1920s, Mexicans were settling in large numbers across the Southwest. They bought homes and started newspapers, churches and businesses. And many Mexican immigrants in the United States started families, raising a new generation of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Mexican-American-Ethnicity-1900-1945/dp/0195096487">Mexican-American children</a>. </p>
<p>Monitoring the rise of Mexican-American communities in southwestern states, the advocates of a whites-only immigration system charged western employers with recklessly courting Anglo-America’s racial doom. As the work of historian <a href="http://nataliamolinaphd.com/">Natalia Molina</a> details, they believed Mexicans were racially unfit to be U.S. citizens.</p>
<p>Western employers agreed that Mexicans should not be allowed to become U.S. citizens. “We, in California, would greatly prefer some set up in which our peak labor demands might be met and upon the completion of our harvest these laborers returned to their country,” Friselle told Congress. But western employers also wanted unfettered access to an unlimited number of Mexican laborers. “We need the labor,” they roared back at those who wanted to cap the number of Mexican immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year. </p>
<p>Amid the escalating conflict between employers in the West and advocates of restriction in Congress, a senator from Dixie proposed a compromise.</p>
<h2>Blease’s law</h2>
<p><a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hO1gAAAAIBAJ&sjid=uWMNAAAAIBAJ&pg=3029,5898411**">Senator Coleman Livingston Blease</a> hailed from the hills of South Carolina. In 1925, he entered Congress committed, above all else, to protecting white supremacy. In 1929, as restrictionists and employers tussled over the future of Mexican immigration, Blease proposed a way forward.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165929/original/file-20170419-2410-1u3u9tq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Senator Coleman Blease.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c05189">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>According to U.S. immigration officials, Mexicans made nearly one million official border crossings into the United States during the 1920s. They arrived at a port of entry, paid an entry fee and submitted to any required tests, such as literacy and health. </p>
<p>However, as U.S. immigration authorities reported, many other Mexican immigrants did not register for legal entry. Entry fees were prohibitively high for many Mexican workers. Moreover, U.S. authorities subjected Mexican immigrants, in particular, to kerosene baths and humiliating <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/27/opinion/oe-romo27">delousing</a> procedures because they believed Mexican immigrants carried disease and filth on their bodies. Instead of traveling to a port of entry, many Mexicans informally crossed the border at will, as both U.S. and Mexican citizens had done for decades.</p>
<p>When the debate stalled over how many Mexicans to allow in each year, Blease shifted attention to stopping the large number of border crossings that took place outside ports of entry. He suggested criminalizing unmonitored entry. </p>
<p>According to Blease’s bill, “unlawfully entering the country” would be a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could be turned on and turned off at will at ports of entry. Any immigrant who entered the United States outside the bounds of this stream would be a criminal subject to fines, imprisonment and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants, in particular.</p>
<p>Neither the western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blease’s bill, the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, and dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the United States. </p>
<h2>Caged</h2>
<p>With stunning precision, the criminalization of unauthorized entry caged thousands of Mexico’s “birds of passage.” By the end of 1930, the U.S. attorney general <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521490">reported</a> prosecuting 7,001 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, U.S. attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases.</p>
<p>According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the vast majority of immigrants imprisoned for breaking Blease’s law were Mexicans. Throughout the 1930s, Mexicans never comprised fewer than 85 percent of all immigration prisoners. Some years, that number rose to 99 percent. By the end of the decade, tens of thousands of Mexicans had been convicted of unlawfully entering or reentering the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons built three new prisons in the U.S.-Mexico border region: La Tuna Prison in El Paso, Prison Camp #10 in Tucson and Terminal Island in Los Angeles.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167300/original/file-20170501-12994-1ily4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">La Tuna detention farm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/129.html">U.S. Bureau of Prisons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Only the outbreak of World War II halted the Mexican immigrant prison boom of the 1930s. The war turned the attention of U.S. attorneys elsewhere, and Mexicans workers were desperately needed north of the border.</p>
<p>With <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1c90/a990eaacc1547420ce3c7dad9d58c39dca71.pdf">few exceptions</a>, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry remained low until 2005. As a measure of the war on terror, the George W. Bush administration directed U.S. attorneys to adopt an <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/iv-u-s-immigration-enforcement/">“enforcement with consequences”</a> strategy. In 2009, U.S. attorneys prosecuted more than <a href="http://grassrootsleadership.org/sites/default/files/reports/indefensible_book_web.pdf">50,000 cases</a> of unlawful entry or reentry. The <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2686276">Obama</a> administration continued the surge, betting that aggressive border enforcement would help bring a recalcitrant Congress to adopt comprehensive immigration reform. It did not. </p>
<p>By 2015, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry accounted for 49 percent of all federal prosecutions and the federal government had spent at least <a href="http://grassrootsleadership.org/sites/default/files/reports/indefensible_book_web.pdf">US$7 billion</a> to lock up unlawful border crossers. </p>
<p>Throughout this most recent surge, the disparate impact of criminalizing unlawful entry and reentry has endured. Today, Latinos, led by Mexicans and Central Americans, make up <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4392">92 percent</a> of all immigrants imprisoned for unlawful entry and reentry. </p>
<p>Attorney General Sessions still wants more. Traveling to southern Arizona to announce his plan to even more aggressively prosecute unlawful entry, he signaled that, in the years to come, most prosecutions will happen on the U.S.-Mexico border and will target <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/25/as-mexican-share-declined-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-fell-in-2015-below-recession-level/">Mexicans and Central Americans</a>. </p>
<p>When the number of Mexicans as well as Central Americans imprisoned on immigration charges soon booms, there will be nothing unwitting or colorblind about it. Congress first invented the crimes of unlawful entry and reentry with the purpose of criminalizing and imprisoning Mexican immigrants and it has delivered on that intent since 1929. The Sessions plan will bear a similar result and, in the process, discharge the racist design of Blease’s law.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74604/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kelly Lytle Hernandez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Trump’s administration plans to ramp up prosecution of unauthorized border crossings. Here’s the story of how it became illegal in the first place.Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/736512017-03-09T04:20:25Z2017-03-09T04:20:25ZLargest deportation campaign in US history is no match for Trump’s plan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160076/original/image-20170308-24204-q6uhjs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=112%2C646%2C2779%2C1562&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Border Patrol officers detaining immigrants in a field after a few local raids.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">U.S. Border Patrol Museum</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the campaign trail, Donald Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7UuuEFPGN0">vowed</a> that if he was elected president, he would resurrect Operation Wetback of 1954. Operation Wetback, the story goes, was the single largest deportation campaign in U.S. history, resulting in more than one million deportations to Mexico and a dramatic reduction in the number of unlawful entries at the U.S.-Mexico border.</p>
<p>As president, Trump has begun to make good on his pledge by issuing two executive orders that promise to <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/presidential-executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united">ramp up deportations</a> and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/executive-order-border-security-and-immigration-enforcement-improvements">expand fencing</a> along the U.S.-Mexico border. </p>
<p>But mass deportation never happened during Operation Wetback of 1954. And border enforcement did not follow. As I detail in my book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Migra-History-Border-American-Crossroads/dp/0520266412">Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol</a>,” Operation Wetback was, in fact, a mass legalization campaign chased by an easing of immigration law enforcement in the U.S.-Mexico border region. </p>
<p>Operation Wetback is often cited as a moment when mass deportation and border enforcement reduced the size of the undocumented population living in the United States and ended unlawful entry at the U.S.-Mexico border. They did not. It is time to put this false history to bed.</p>
<h2>Texas uprising</h2>
<p>In 1942, the U.S. and Mexican governments negotiated a labor agreement, known as the <a href="http://americanhistory.si.edu/bracero/introduction">Bracero Program</a>, which allowed millions of Mexican immigrants to temporarily work in the United States. </p>
<p>U.S. and Mexican authorities created the Bracero Program as a way to control Mexican migration. In the U.S., anti-Mexican sentiment generally opposed mass Mexican immigration. In Mexico, political leaders wanted Mexican workers to go to the United States, learn modern farming techniques and bring that knowledge home. </p>
<p>But many agricultural employers rebelled against the program. They preferred the unregulated labor practices they had used for decades to squeeze profits from Mexican workers marginalized by their undocumented status. The Bracero Program, among other things, guaranteed Mexican contract workers a minimum wage and sanitary housing. In South Texas, in particular, farmers and ranchers not only refused to use the Bracero Program but took up arms against the U.S. Border Patrol when they came to apprehend their workers. </p>
<p>Operation Wetback of 1954 was a campaign to crush the South Texas uprising and force their compliance with the Bracero Program. However, Mexican workers paid the greatest price.</p>
<h2>Operation Wetback</h2>
<p>Operation Wetback’s first iteration began in 1953 when Harlon B. Carter, the head of the U.S. Border Patrol in the southwestern United States, concocted a plan to use the U.S. military to round up and deport undocumented Mexicans. The plan, called Operation Cloudburst, made it all the way to President Eisenhower’s desk. Eisenhower considered it but nixed the idea since the <a href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1251/MR1251.AppD.pdf">Posse Comitatus Act</a> largely prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Instead President Eisenhower appointed Joseph Swing, a former military general, to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service.</p>
<p>Carter was a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/06/us/leader-of-rifle-group-affirms-that-he-shot-bot-to-death-in-1931.html">convicted murderer</a>. In 1931, at the age of 17, he killed Ramon Casiano, a Mexican-American teen, in Laredo, Texas. Carter had been upset that Casiano and his friends had been hanging out in front of the Carter home. So Carter hunted them down, aimed a shotgun at Casiano’s chest and pulled the trigger. A jury convicted Carter of the killing, but the conviction was later overturned on a procedural technicality. Several years later, Carter joined the U.S. Border Patrol. </p>
<p>In May of 1954, the U.S. attorney general, Swing and Carter issued a press statement announcing Operation Wetback. Soon, they promised, an unprecedented, paramilitary surge of Border Patrol officers would sweep across the southwestern United States to find, detain and deport unauthorized Mexican immigrants. As Carter explained to the <a href="http://documents.latimes.com/june-12-1954-wetbacks-detention-camp-slated/">Los Angeles Times</a>, “an army of Border Patrol officers complete with jeeps, trucks, and seven aircraft” would soon unleash an “all-out war to hurl… Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”</p>
<p>Panic whipped through Mexican immigrant communities in southwestern states. Deportations and forced removals had been on the rise for a decade, spiking from 10,613 expulsions in 1942 to 905,236 in 1953. Carter and Swing promised more. So many more that the Border Patrol was already converting public parks into <a href="http://documents.latimes.com/eisenhower-era-deportations/">“concentration camps”</a> for detaining at least 1,000 people at a time. </p>
<p>The officials’ rhetoric forecast a callous, dehumanizing and warlike campaign, priming immigrants, employers and the American public in general for a spectacular show of force.</p>
<p>The show began at dawn on June 10, 1954 when Border Patrol officers set up checkpoints across southern California and western Arizona. During the next seven days, officers nabbed almost 11,000 unsanctioned Mexican immigrants. By June 30, 1954, 22,000 more were apprehended. In the following three months, Border Patrol task forces swept through California, Arizona, Texas, Chicago, Illinois and the Mississippi Delta, unleashing fast raids on farms, restaurants and Mexican majority communities.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160083/original/image-20170308-24192-2bink7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The U.S. Border Patrol packed Mexican immigrants into trucks when transporting them to the border for deportation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">U.S. Border Patrol Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Everywhere the Border Patrol went, reporters followed, snapping photos and broadcasting stories of Mexicans being rounded up, detained and deported back to Mexico. In many cases, the deportees were crammed onto buses, trains, planes or boats to be forcibly relocated into the interior of Mexico and abandoned far from both home and the border. A congressional inquiry into conditions on one of the deportee boats would later describe it as an “18th-century slave ship” and a “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/132988/operation-wetback-revisitedcalled">penal hellship</a>.” </p>
<p>By October 1954, large numbers of Mexicans had been publicly rounded up, detained and deported. INS Commissioner Joseph Swing declared that the historic campaign had hurled more than one million Mexicans deep into Mexico.</p>
<p>It is true that U.S. Border Patrol reported apprehending more than one million people for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1954. But the patrol apprehended only 33,307 people between the start of Operation Wetback on June 10, 1954, and the close of the fiscal year on June 30, 1954. And they apprehended only 254,096 people between July 1, 1954 and June 30, 1955. In other words, the Border Patrol apprehended, at most, fewer than 300,000 people during the 1954 campaign. </p>
<h2>The unreported story</h2>
<p>There’s a story that General Swing did not invite journalists to cover. Without reporters in tow, Carter dispatched teams of Border Patrol officers to hold meetings with employers across the Southwest during the summer of 1954. </p>
<p>In particular, they met with South Texas employers, promising them constant raids if they refused to use the Bracero Program. And to appease the employers’ complaints about the program’s requirements, the officers offered two stripped-down versions of the Bracero Program. They were known as the the I-100 and Specials programs, which met some of the employers’ demands for fewer provisions for Bracero workers, and more control over the hiring and firing process.</p>
<p>If employers still declined to use the program, Border Patrol officials threatened to permanently station a two-man team on the grower’s farm until the grower signed a pledge to use braceros instead of unauthorized workers. It worked. The number of Mexican workers signed up with the Specials and I-100 programs in Texas surged from 168 in July of 1953 to 41,766 in July of 1954, around the same time Operation Wetback was underway. Across the country, the number of Mexicans participating in the Bracero Program also rose.</p>
<p>As more employers used the Bracero Program, which became increasingly broken and corrupt, the number of deportations fell. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1954, the U.S. Border Patrol reported 1,035,282 apprehensions. In 1955, that number plunged to 254,096, and in 1956, it plummeted to 58,792. The number of Mexican nationals apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol remained under 100,000 until 1967. </p>
<p>But the declining number of deportations was about more than the use of the Bracero Program, which, until terminated in 1964, provided a form of legalization for many Mexican men working in the southwestern United States.</p>
<p>The U.S. Border Patrol also radically changed its police practices. Between 1944 and 1954, the Border Patrol routinely used 12-man task forces bolstered by planes and buses to ramp up apprehensions in the U.S.-Mexico border region. </p>
<p>After Operation Wetback of 1954, the Border Patrol retired the task forces and deescalated its activities in border states, resulting in far fewer apprehensions and deportations. In particular, the Border Patrol assigned officers to two-man patrols, and most were on foot or horseback. As one Border Patrol officer put it, the two-man patrols struggled to just “grab one or two and hang on to ‘em.”</p>
<p>In other words, after General Swing declared “conquest” at the border, he kept apprehensions low at the U.S.-Mexico border by changing patrol tactics. </p>
<p>To date, President Trump is pulling from the 1954 playbook. The executive orders and Department of Homeland Security <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/executive-orders-protecting-homeland">memos</a> announced sweeping plans to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. And although swiftly retracted, a <a href="https://www.apnews.com/5508111d59554a33be8001bdac4ef830">leaked memo</a> regarding the possibility of the National Guard assisting in mass deportation churned fears that the federal government is preparing a warlike campaign on undocumented immigrants, namely Mexicans and Central Americans. </p>
<p>But there is no precedent for President Trump’s immigration plan. If Congress fully funds President Trump’s executive orders, including 10,000 new ICE agents, 5,000 new Border Patrol officers and an expansion of the border wall, they will hurl us into uncharted territory, unleashing an era of mass deportation and border enforcement to which not even Operation Wetback of 1954 will compare.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73651/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kelly Lytle Hernandez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 1954, US Border Patrol’s Operation Wetback promised to deport millions of undocumented Mexicans. It fell far short of its target, but made a mark in the minds of immigrants who lived in fear.Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/734262017-02-27T00:43:36Z2017-02-27T00:43:36ZAmerica’s mass deportation system is rooted in racism<p>A rowdy segment of the American electorate is hell-bent on banning a specific group of immigrants from entering the United States. Thousands upon thousands of other people – citizens and immigrants, alike – oppose them, choosing to go to court rather than fulfill the electorate’s narrow vision of what America should look like: white, middle-class and Christian. </p>
<p>Soon a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings could grant unrestrained power to Congress and the president over immigration control. More than 50 million people could be deported. Countless others might be barred from entering. Most of them would be poor, nonwhite and non-Christian.</p>
<p>This may sound like wild speculation about what is to come in President Donald Trump’s America. It is not. It is the history of U.S. immigration control, which is the focus of my work in the books <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Migra-History-Border-American-Crossroads/dp/0520266412">“Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol</a>” and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/City-Inmates-Conquest-Rebellion-1771-1965/dp/1469631180">“City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles</a>.” </p>
<p>Historically speaking, immigration control is one of the least constitutional and most racist realms of governance in U.S. law and life.</p>
<h2>Made in the American West</h2>
<p>The modern system of U.S. immigration control began in the 19th-century American West. Between the 1840s and 1880s, the United States government warred with indigenous peoples and Mexico to <a href="http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org/">lay claim</a> to the region. Droves of Anglo-American families soon followed, believing it was their <a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b52137/">Manifest Destiny</a> to dominate land, law and life in the region. </p>
<p>But indigenous peoples never disappeared (see Standing Rock) and nonwhite migrants arrived (see the state of California). Chinese immigrants, in particular, arrived in large numbers during the 19th century. A travel writer who was popular at the time, <a href="https://archive.org/stream/visittoindiachin00taylrich#page/354/mode/2up/search/debased">Bayard Taylor</a>, expressed the sentiment settlers felt toward Chinese immigrants in one of his books:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth… their touch is pollution… They should not be allowed to settle on our soil.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520029057">discriminatory laws</a> and <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520256941">settler violence</a> failed to expel them from the region, the settlers pounded Congress to develop a system of federal immigration control.</p>
<p>In response to their demands, Congress passed the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47">1882 Chinese Exclusion Act</a>, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country for 10 years. The law focused on Chinese laborers, the single largest sector of the Chinese immigrant community. In <a href="http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/tu_exclusion_doc_3.html">1884</a>, Congress required all Chinese laborers admitted before the Exclusion Act was passed to secure a certificate of reentry if they wanted to leave and return. But, in <a href="http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/tu_exclusion_doc_4.html">1888</a>, Congress banned even those with certificates from reentering.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158359/original/image-20170224-22981-34v6zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration, ‘How John may dodge the exclusion act’ shows Uncle Sam’s boot kicking a Chinese immigrant off a dock.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.25972">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was set to expire in 1892, Congress passed the <a href="http://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1892GearyAct.pdf">Geary Act</a>, which again banned all Chinese laborers and required all Chinese immigrants to verify their lawful presence by <a href="https://calisphere.org/item/4d59c4cfdf78dc205399f14a1f0e53a1/">registering</a> with the federal government. The federal authorities were empowered by the law to find, imprison and deport all Chinese immigrants who failed to register by May 1893. </p>
<p>Together, these laws banned a nationally targeted population from entering the United States and invented the first system of mass deportation. Nothing quite like this had ever before been tried in the United States.</p>
<p>Chinese immigrants rebelled against the new laws. In 1888, a laborer named Chae Chan Ping was denied the right of return despite having a reentry certificate and was subsequently confined on a steamship. The Chinese immigrant community hired lawyers to fight his case. The lawyers argued the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court but lost when the court ruled that “the power of exclusion of foreigners [is an] incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States” and “cannot be granted away or restrained on behalf of anyone.” </p>
<p>Simply put, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/130/581/case.html">Chae Chan Ping v. U.S.</a> established that Congress and the president hold “absolute” and “unqualified” authority over immigrant entry and exclusion at U.S. borders.</p>
<h2>Chinese exclusion cases</h2>
<p>Despite this loss, Chinese immigrants refused to comply with the 1892 Geary Act, submitting themselves for arrest and risking both imprisonment and deportation rather than registering with the federal government.</p>
<p>They also hired some of the nation’s best constitutional lawyers. Together, they swarmed the courts with challenges to the Geary Act. In May 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear its first deportation case, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/149/698/case.html">Fong Yue Ting v. U.S.</a> and quickly ruled that deportation is also a realm of “absolute” authority held by Congress and the president. The court wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The provisions of the Constitution, securing the right of trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures, and cruel and unusual punishments, have no application.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, the U.S. Constitution did not apply to deportation. Immigration authorities could develop practices to identify, round up and deport noncitizens without constitutional review. </p>
<p>It was a stunning ruling even by 19th-century standards. So stunning that three of the justices issued scathing dissents, arguing that the U.S. Constitution applies to every law enforced within the United States. As Justice Brewer put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The Constitution has potency everywhere within the limits of our territory, and the powers which the national government may exercise within such limits are those, and only those, given to it by that instrument.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But such dissent held no sway. Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court tripled down on immigration control as exempt from judicial review. In that 1896 ruling, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/228/case.html">Wong Wing v. U.S.</a>, which was issued on the same day as the court upheld racial segregation laws in its infamous <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/case.html">Plessy v. Ferguson</a> decision, the court held that the Constitution does not apply to the conditions of immigrant detention.</p>
<p>By 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had granted Congress and the president nearly unrestrained power over excluding, deporting and detaining noncitizens, both at U.S. borders and within the national territory. To date, they have used that authority to deport and forcibly remove more than <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15653.html">50 million people</a> and ban countless others from entering the country. Most of them are nonwhite, many of them poor and a disproportionate share non-Christian.</p>
<h2>Making America great again</h2>
<p>Over time, Congress and the courts placed several limits on what is allowable in immigration control. For example, the <a href="http://library.uwb.edu/Static/USimmigration/1965_immigration_and_nationality_act.html">1965 Immigration Reform Act</a> prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, gender, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” And several court <a href="http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/uploads/immigration/immig_west/E.pdf">rulings</a> have added a measure of constitutional protections to deportation proceedings and detention conditions. </p>
<p>But, in recent weeks, Trump and his advisers have tapped into the foundational architecture of U.S. immigration control to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-live-updates-9th-circuit-arguments-judge-rebuke-administration-claim-that-1486683892-htmlstory.html">argue</a> that the president’s executive orders on immigration control are “unreviewable” by the courts. As Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/12/trump-administration-considering-narrower-travel-ban">put it</a>: The president’s executive powers over immigration control “will not be questioned.” </p>
<p>On <a href="http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2017/02/09/17-35105.pdf">Feb. 9</a>, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit turned down the administration’s “unreviewable” argument regarding the so-called Muslim ban. But Trump’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/presidential-executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united">immigration enforcement order</a> still stands. This includes a provision that subjects even those unauthorized immigrants who are simply suspected of crime to immediate removal. It also denies many of the immigrants who unlawfully cross our borders the due process protections recently added to deportation proceedings. </p>
<p>If implemented as promised – that is, with a focus on “<a href="http://time.com/4657474/donald-trump-enrique-pena-nieto-mexico-bad-hombres/">bad hombres</a>” and the U.S.-Mexico border – Trump’s immigration plan will exacerbate the already <a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9781479843978/">disproportionate impact</a> of U.S. immigration control on Latino immigrants, namely Mexicans and Central Americans. U.S. immigration may no longer target Chinese immigrants, but it remains one of the most highly racialized police projects within the United States.</p>
<p>Trump’s executive orders are pulling U.S. immigration control back to its roots, absolute and racial. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pushed back against this interpretation, affirming the reviewability of the seven-country ban. But the decisions made during the Chinese exclusion era are likely to protect many of the president’s other orders from judicial review. That is, unless we overturn the settler mentality of U.S. immigration control. </p>
<p><em>To learn more about the history of U.S. immigration control, see <a href="http://editions.lib.umn.edu/immigrationsyllabus/">#immigrationsyllabus</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73426/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kelly Lytle Hernandez currently receives funding from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UCLA Institute on Democracy and Inequality, and the UCLA Social Sciences Division.</span></em></p>From Chinese laborers to ‘bad hombres,’ the US settler mentality has perpetuated an immigration system that pushes out unwanted groups and bypasses the Constitution.Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/701872017-01-03T01:54:16Z2017-01-03T01:54:16ZTrump’s immigration policies will pick up where Obama’s left off<p>In 2017, the Trump administration will likely continue and expand the Obama administration’s focus on removing immigrants convicted of crimes. Whether Trump will break ground for a <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trump-i-would-force-mexico-build-border-wall">wall</a> along the U.S. border with Mexico is far less certain.</p>
<p>Ramping up immigration enforcement by focusing on the criminal justice pipeline for removals has proven to be an efficient strategy. Immigrants in jail are not hard to find. And, removing criminals raises far fewer civil rights concerns than, for example, locating and removing laborers through the use of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-immigration-enforcement-could-affect-families-and-communities-69019">workplace raids</a>. </p>
<p>Immigrants with criminal arrest records and convictions have few political allies and defenders. Resistance to their removal has not been as great as resistance to removing other groups of immigrants, such as <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/why-us-colleges-should-welcome-undocumented-immigrants/385049/">undocumented college students</a>. </p>
<p>That may explain why Donald Trump began <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-undocumented-asians-adv-20161206-story.html?utm_source=Today%27s+Headlines&utm_campaign=a38df6438b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b04355194f-a38df6438b-76278113">his presidential campaign</a> by claiming that Mexico was sending criminals to the United States, and promising to deport them en masse.</p>
<p>To increase crime-based removals, the Trump administration will probably seek greater state and local assistance in federal immigration enforcement. Under President Obama, these efforts led to the removal of a disproportionate number of Latino immigrants. <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2046328">My scholarship</a> sheds light on how Trump’s immigration proposals may similarly affect Latinos.</p>
<h2>‘Latino removal system’</h2>
<p>President Obama’s administration prioritized removing immigrants who had been convicted of crimes. However, the U.S. criminal justice system is notorious for producing racially disparate results. African-Americans and Latinos continue to be disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated as they have throughout U.S. history, as described in Michelle Alexander’s powerful book <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">“The New Jim Crow</a>.” </p>
<p>As <a href="https://casetext.com/posts/doubling-down-on-racial-discrimination-the-racially-disparate-impacts-of-crimmigration-law#!">a result</a>, the U.S. immigrant removal system yields similarly unequal results.</p>
<p>The Obama administration created programs that allowed state criminal justice systems to directly feed immigrants into the federal immigration removal system. That, in turn, made it possible for his administration to set removal <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661">records</a>. In <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/16/u-s-immigrant-deportations-fall-to-lowest-level-since-2007/">some</a> years as many as 400,000 people were removed. During the eight years of his presidency, more than 2.5 million noncitizens were deported – more than during any other U.S. presidency.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ice.gov/removal-statistics/2016">Immigration and Customs Enforcement data</a> show that, in fiscal year 2016, crime-based removals represented more than 90 percent of the noncitizens removed from the interior of the United States.</p>
<p>Under a program called <a href="https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities">Secure Communities</a>, state and local law enforcement agencies shared arrest information with federal immigration authorities, and detained immigrant criminal offenders. Criminal offenders were then taken into custody by federal immigration authorities. In November 2014, the Obama administration replaced Secure Communities with the <a href="https://www.ice.gov/pep">Priority Enforcement Program</a>, which was somewhat narrower in scope.</p>
<div style="width:100%;margin:10px 0;">
<iframe src="https://w.graphiq.com/w/g6qNoJJ6mdD" width="100%" height="490" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:static;vertical-align:top;margin:0 auto;display:block;width:600px !important;max-width:100%;min-height:490px !important;max-height:none !important;border:none;overflow:hidden;"></iframe>
</div>
<p>Today, more than 95 percent of removals in the United States are of Latino noncitizens, despite the fact that the total immigrant population in the United States is much more diverse. Latino immigrants <a href="http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/caselrev/vol66/iss4/8/">comprise</a> only about 50 percent of lawful immigrants, and around 70 percent of undocumented ones. Because removals are so heavily skewed toward Latinos, some refer to the modern U.S. removal system as the “Latino removal system.” </p>
<h2>Mandating state and local assistance</h2>
<p>Trump is likely to encounter the same resistance that Obama did in working with state and local governments on immigration enforcement. </p>
<p>The Trump administration may seek to mandate state and local assistance in federal immigration enforcement. To do so, it might challenge “<a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-the-history-of-sanctuary-spaces-and-why-do-they-matter-69100">sanctuary cities</a>,” as Donald Trump <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/sanctuary-cities-trump-immigration-232449">has done</a> rhetorically. However, there is no firm definition of what sanctuary cities are – only the suggestion that they are not fully cooperating in enforcing immigration laws. Trump has <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-address-on-immigration">threatened</a> to defund such cities, a step that would seemingly <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/dec/01/bill-de-blasio/new-york-city-mayor-says-president-cant-defund-san/">require</a> congressional authorization. </p>
<p>If Congress were to pass such legislation, state and local governments may be able to challenge it as infringing on the constitutionally protected authority of the states.</p>
<p>Needless to say, any challenge to sanctuary cities is likely to meet formidable resistance from some quarters. The California legislature already has been <a href="http://sd24.senate.ca.gov/news/2016-12-05-california-legislature-takes-immediate-action-protect-immigrant-communities">preparing</a> a game plan for a showdown with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. For example, legislators have proposed legislation that would limit information sharing with the federal government about immigrants.</p>
<p>Some state and local law enforcement leaders worry that immigrants lose trust in local police when they are perceived to be deeply involved in federal immigration enforcement. Loss of trust, in turn, can reduce the <a href="http://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/INSECURE_COMMUNITIES_REPORT_FINAL.PDF">willingness</a> of immigrants to help authorities combat crime. This concerns local police who say they need the cooperation of all people in the community, including <a href="http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/chapman-law-review/vol18/iss2/6/">lawful and undocumented</a> immigrants, in reporting crime and aiding criminal prosecutions.</p>
<p>To that end, the Los Angeles Police Department’s <a href="http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/SO_40.pdf">Special Order 40</a> limits police inquiry into the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses and suspects. The idea is to separate criminal law enforcement from federal immigration enforcement. Such separation is consistent with the Supreme Court’s finding in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-182">Arizona v. United States</a> in 2012 that the federal government has the authority to admit and remove immigrants. And, ordinary law enforcement primarily is handled by local law enforcement agencies. </p>
<p>The new administration will also need to grapple with how local police involvement in immigration enforcement impacts the civil rights of Latinos. Such impacts are real. This year, a <a href="https://www.aclu.org/cases/ortega-melendres-et-al-v-arpaio-et-al">federal court</a> found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona, in the guise of assisting federal immigration enforcement, had engaged in a pattern and practice of discrimination.</p>
<p>These civil rights abuses show the potential costs of state and local law enforcement assistance in federal immigration enforcement efforts. The same risks will exist for the new Trump administration in 2017.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his first year of office, Trump’s immigration policy will likely focus not on building an expensive wall, but rather on the work that earned Obama the nickname ‘Deporter in Chief.’Kevin Johnson, Dean and Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, DavisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689592016-11-28T01:25:59Z2016-11-28T01:25:59ZMexicans are migrating, just not across the US border<p>Mexican migration to the U.S. is <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-mexicans-are-leaving-the-us-than-coming-across-the-border-51296">in decline</a>. The <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/">Pew Hispanic Research Center</a> has found that since 2009, more than one million native-born Mexicans living in the U.S. returned to Mexico. But many other Mexicans never crossed the U.S.-Mexican border in the first place.</p>
<p>Why are some Mexican migrants choosing to stay home? What does it mean for the U.S. border with Mexico? </p>
<p>The decline in migration to the U.S. is not simply linked to building more <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-crumbling-wall-plan-1460320010">barriers at the border</a>. Changing demography, economy, the difficulties of living in the U.S. and a growing sense of <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ff-mexican-immigration-20151118-story.html">opportunity at home</a>, among many other factors, are <a href="http://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246&context=carsey">shifting Mexican migration to the U.S.</a></p>
<p>Every year millions of Mexicans travel from their hometowns to other parts of the country for work, education and personal freedoms that domestic life and traditional expectations often limit. Migrants who decide to travel to Mexican cities, tourist sites like Cancun, factories and farms may not earn the wages that lie just across the border. Yet, they also avoid the difficulties that often come with adapting to the U.S.</p>
<p>Internal migration is not new, and moving within Mexico <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2011/08/drug-war-refugees-violence-asylum-mexico.html">has a rich history</a>. It is something that rural folks have done for generations, while migration to the U.S. grew only in the 1980s and 1990s.</p>
<p>Based on <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207659.2016.1197721">our research</a> published in the International Journal of Sociology, we argue that internal migration is an important and viable alternative for people who are in search of security and opportunity and will not or cannot cross the U.S. border.</p>
<h2>Oaxacan migrants in Mexico</h2>
<p>We spent time with families in rural villages in the southern Mexican state of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca">Oaxaca</a>, and learned that internal migration has a long history in the region. Through the mid-20th century, Oaxacans found opportunities as itinerant vendors traveling throughout the region and working on coastal plantations during the harvest season. </p>
<p>Don Betto, who lives in the Sierra Madre del Sur, told us about his trips to southern Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. (Our study was designed to ensure our subjects remained anonymous, so Don Betto is not his real name. All subjects’ names have been changed.) Following the planting season, he carried cookware on his back, selling door-to-door to earn the cash that his family could count on during the year.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146844/original/image-20161121-4528-7uex0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oaxacan vendor selling wares.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeffrey Cohen</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the later half of the 20th century, many Oaxacans ventured a bit farther from home and settled in Mexico City. They found jobs, opportunities for education and, for at least a few men, brides. Through the 1990s and into the 21st century, Oaxacans <a href="https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/cohcul">continued to migrate</a>. And while many Oaxacans sought opportunities in the U.S., a minority stayed in Mexico and settled in tourists cities like Cancun, or the agricultural fields of Baja California.</p>
<p>The incomes earned by migrants who stay in Mexico do not compete with the wages paid in the U.S. Nevertheless, many Mexicans are quite clear as to why they prefer to stay close to home. Don Alejandro, a young Oaxacan from the state’s central valleys region, described why he traveled to find work in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas in Baja California rather than crossing into the U.S.:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Up north you work then pay bills, then work more to pay more bills… it’s okay here; it’s not much but it’s mine.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Don Maurico, an older wood carver from the village of San Miguel, was even clearer, balancing his critique with a bit of sarcasm: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Look, if I go over there [the U.S.] I’ll make a lot of money, but it is so expensive. If I stay here, well that’s okay. Why would I want to go and have to pay hundreds of dollars for a toaster? I’m happy earning a little right here.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Migrating without leaving home</h2>
<p>The Oaxacans we worked with during our research are a few of the many Mexicans who migrate within national boundaries. The National Institute for Statistics, Geography and Information <a href="http://www.inegi.org.mx/default.aspx">estimates</a> these migrants are 4 to 5 percent of the nation’s total population of about 130 million people. In other words, about six million Mexicans are moving within the nation’s borders. And while some of these migrants might elect to cross into the U.S. in the future, it’s unlikely given the legal challenges of border crossing, as well as what <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/a-lonely-life-for-immigrants-in-americas-rust-belt/394082/">Alana Semuels</a> of The Atlantic describes as a lonely life for immigrants. Mexicans travel within the boundaries of their nation to find opportunity and to keep the stresses of crossing into the U.S. at arm’s length. </p>
<p>In Mexico, they are not questioned over the status of their citizenship. They share a common language, culture and history. Staying within Mexico does not lead to riches, but as Don Valeriano described his situation, “he can be a leader at home” and participate fully in the civil life of his village.</p>
<p>Migrants balance risk and opportunity as they decide to move. Fostering the continued growth of those possibilities within Mexico, and the continued strengthening of the Mexican economy can help build a future without building a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/business/economy/the-crumbling-case-for-a-mexican-border-wall.html?_r=0">wall</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68959/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeffrey H. Cohen received fieldwork and research funding from The National Science Foundation for some of the data reported on here.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bernardo Ramirez Rios does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>US elections surfaced fears of Mexicans crossing into the US. But their numbers are actually in decline. Why are they choosing to stay in Mexico? Two migration experts went there to find out.Jeffrey H. Cohen, Professor of Anthropology, The Ohio State UniversityBernardo Ramirez Rios, Professor of Anthropology, Skidmore CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/679212016-11-02T01:48:08Z2016-11-02T01:48:08ZCounting 11 million undocumented immigrants is easier than you think<p>News organizations widely report that there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. But where does this figure come from?</p>
<p>Donald Trump has <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/01/donald-trump/donald-trump-repeats-pants-fire-claim-about-30-mil/">falsely</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/us/politics/transcript-trump-immigration-speech.html?_r=0">asserted</a>: “It could be three million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is.”</p>
<p>In the third debate, Hillary Clinton <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/full-transcript-third-2016-presidential-debate-230063#ixzz4OffyXX4a">said</a>, “We have 11 million undocumented people. They [undocumented parents] have 4 million American citizen children. 15 million people.”</p>
<p>The confusion is warranted. After all, the U.S. Census Bureau does not ask people about their immigration status, so how can we know much about the unauthorized foreign-born population?</p>
<p>Well, demographers have figured out a simple and effective way to estimate the number of unauthorized immigrants. In the last five years, my colleagues Frank D. Bean, James D. Bachmeier and I have conducted a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/imre.12059/full">series</a> <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-014-0280-2">of</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783022/">studies</a> that evaluate this method and its assumptions. Our research on the methods used to estimate the size of this group indicates that these estimates are reasonably accurate. </p>
<p>Here’s how it works.</p>
<h2>A simple formula</h2>
<p>Beginning in the late 1970s, a group of demographers consisting primarily of Jeffrey Passel, Robert Warren, Jacob Siegel, Gregory Robinson and Karen Woodrow introduced the “residual method” for estimating the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the country. At the time, Passel and his collaborators were affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Warren with the Office of Immigration Statistics of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Much of this work was published in the form of internal reports, but some of it <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1353/dem.2001.0023">appeared</a> <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.2307%2F2061304?LI=true">in</a> <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.2307/2060964">major</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744247/">journals</a>. </p>
<p>The residual method uses an estimate of the total foreign-born population in the country (F), based on U.S. Census data. Researchers then subtract from it the number of legal immigrants residing here (L), estimated from government records of legal immigrants who receive “green cards” minus the number that died or left the country. The result is an estimate of the unauthorized population (U):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>F – L = U</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Various adjustments are typically made to this formula. Most adjustments are minor, but a particularly important one adjusts for what researchers call “coverage error” among the unauthorized foreign-born. Coverage error occurs when the census data underestimate the size of a group. This can occur when people live in nonresidential or unconventional locations – such as on the streets or in a neighbor’s basement – or when they fail to respond to the census. Coverage error could be particularly high among unauthorized immigrants because they may be trying to avoid detection. </p>
<p>Currently, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center are the two major producers of estimates of the unauthorized foreign-born population. <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20/overall-number-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-holds-steady-since-2009/">This report</a>, compiled by Passel, who now works at Pew, summarizes many of the estimates. It shows that the estimated number increased steadily from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million in 2007, but declined between 2007 and 2009 and has since stabilized at around 11 million. </p>
<h2>How accurate are the estimates?</h2>
<p>The residual method has been widely used and accepted since the late 1970s. Within a reasonable margin of error, it predicted the number of unauthorized immigrants to legalize under the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0ahUKEwj5zuLz04XQAhWK5YMKHakIAtUQFghDMAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.migrationpolicy.org%2Fpubs%2FPolicyBrief_No3_Aug05.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFOVPKqsUXZgTniF1X2LeHb4KkKWQ&sig2=skLrfWMkId1ZSVgUBNqUAw&cad=rja">Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986</a>, which, among other things, granted permanent residency status to unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the country since 1982. The residual method predicted that about <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283644989_DA_Evaluation_Project_D2_Preliminary_Estimates_of_Undocumented_Residents_in_1990">2.2 million</a> met the residency requirement and the actual number to come forward was about 1.7 million.</p>
<p>Both Department of Homeland Security and Pew have used the residual method to produce estimates of the unauthorized population since 2005. Despite using slightly different data and assumptions, <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/21/unauthorized-immigrant-population-stable-for-half-a-decade/">Pew’s</a> and the <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ois_ill_pe_2012_2.pdf">Department of Homeland Security’s</a> estimates have never differed by more than 600,000 people, or 5.5 percent of the total unauthorized population.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, many skeptics question a key assumption of the residual method, which is that unauthorized immigrants participate in census surveys. Both Pew and the Department of Homeland Security inflate their estimates to account for the possibility that some unauthorized immigrants are missing from census data. Pew inflates by 13 percent and the Department of Homeland Security by 10 percent. But is this enough?</p>
<p>My colleagues and I <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4029097/">estimated coverage error</a> among Mexican immigrants, a group that composes 60 percent of all unauthorized immigrants. Even if they are not counted in a census, populations leave “fingerprints” of their presence in the form of deaths and births. Because people give birth and die with known regularity regardless of their legal status, we were able to use birth and death records of all Mexican-born persons to determine the number of the Mexican-born persons living in the U.S. We also looked at changes in Mexican census data between 1990 and 2010 to gauge the size of Mexico’s “missing” population, most of whom moved to the United States. </p>
<p>We then compared these estimates based on births, deaths and migration with the number of estimated Mexican immigrants in census data.</p>
<p>Based on this analysis, we found that the census missed as many as 26 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the early 2000s. We speculated that this could have been due to the large numbers of temporary Mexican labor migrants who were living in the United States at the time. Because many worked in construction during the housing boom and lived in temporary housing arrangements, it may have been particularly difficult to accurately account for them in census surveys. However, when the Great Recession and housing crisis hit, many of these temporary workers went home or stopped coming to the U.S. in the first place, and coverage error declined. By 2010, the coverage error may have been as low as 6 percent. </p>
<p>If current levels of coverage error for all unauthorized immigrants were as high as 26 percent, then the number living in the country could be as high as 13 million. But if coverage error were as low as 6 percent, then the figure could be as low as 10.3 million.</p>
<p>What this boils down to is that we have a pretty good idea of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. It most likely falls within a narrow range somewhere between 10.3 million and 13 million. If coverage error has declined as much as we think it has, then the truth is at the lower end of this range. Despite widespread beliefs, unauthorized immigration is not increasing out of control and certainly is not as high as 30 million. Instead, it has probably really has stabilized somewhere around 11 million.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67921/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Van Hook received funding for her research on coverage error from the National Institutes of Health and the Science and Technology Directorate of Department of Homeland Security through the BORDERS Research Center at the University of Arizona. She is affiliated with the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University and is a non-resident fellow of the Migration Policy Institute. </span></em></p>How can we possibly know how many millions of people are living in the U.S. illegally? Demographers have actually refined a simple formula that’s worked pretty well since the 1970s.Jennifer Van Hook, Liberal Arts Research Professor of Sociology and Demography, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/646562016-09-01T03:22:27Z2016-09-01T03:22:27ZImmigration: Five essential reads<p><em>Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of archival stories related to immigration and the presidential campaign.</em></p>
<p>Donald Trump took a last-minute trip to Mexico on Wednesday. He met with President Enrique Peña Nieto before appearing at a rally in Arizona, in which he sought to clarify his positions on immigration. </p>
<p>Those who were hoping to hear him soften his tone in an attempt to expand his base were disappointed. Trump talked tough:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We will break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration. We will break the cycle. There will be no amnesty. Our message to the world will be this: You cannot obtain legal status or become a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But, do his ideas about immigration make sense in light of what experts say? Here are highlights of The Conversation’s coverage of immigration issues.</p>
<h2>The wall, the ban</h2>
<p>If elected, Trump said he will build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it. But a wall may not be necessary, according to migration data. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/david-cook-martin-144025">David Cook Martín</a>, a professor of sociology at Grinnell College, writes that thousands of Mexicans are leaving the U.S. of their own accord and <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-mexicans-are-leaving-the-us-than-coming-across-the-border-51296">returning to Mexico for a variety of reasons</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The study shows a net loss of 140,000 Mexican immigrants from the United States. One million Mexican migrants and their children left the U.S. for Mexico, while just over 860,000 left Mexico for the United States.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, Mexicans are certainly not the only people crossing the U.S. border. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/caitlin-fouratt-292248">Caitlin Fouratt</a>, a professor of international studies at California State University, Long Beach writes about the thousands of Central Americans <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-u-s-wants-costa-rica-to-host-refugees-before-they-cross-the-border-heres-why-63989">fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador</a> – a region known as the Northern Triangle.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Trump has also previously called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. Scholars <a href="https://theconversation.com/scholars-trumps-call-to-ban-muslims-is-un-american-52065">deemed this position un-American</a>, as <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/sahar-aziz-191351">Sahar Aziz</a>, professor of law at Texas A&M University writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“At a time when most Americans are taught that our nation is post-racial and that we have moved beyond Japanese internment or Chinese exclusion laws, Trump’s statements and consequent rise in the polls remind us that our nation has not advanced as much as we’d like to believe.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The 11 million here</h2>
<p>Another major focus of U.S. immigration debate has been finding a solution for the estimated 11 million immigrants who already live in the U.S. without a visa or a pathway to citizenship.</p>
<p>Trump criticized President Obama’s use of executive action to create a program to shield immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. Obama also created a similar program for parents of children who are U.S. citizens in 2014 – Deferred Action for Parents of Americans.</p>
<p>In U.S. vs. Texas, 26 states refused to enforce the program and challenged Obama’s use of executive action. The case went to the Supreme Court, and in June, the Court reached a 4-4 deadlock decision. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/shana-tabak-205983">Shana Tabak</a>, professor of law at Georgia State University <a href="https://theconversation.com/deadlocked-what-a-nine-word-decision-means-for-five-million-undocumented-immigrants-61550">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Now, the millions who would have been eligible remain stranded, fearful of deportation and unable to legally work… This executive action represented an opportunity for many to finally come out of the shadows. President Obama’s previous executive action, DACA, has dramatically improved the lives of many who were brought to the U.S. as children, allowing them to attend college, work, hold driver’s licenses – to contribute to the societies of which they are a part.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Trump’s plan also highlighted enforcing deportation of undocumented immigrants by tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and creating a special deportation taskforce. What would be the effect of such a policy?</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/miliann-kang-203360">Miliann Kang</a>, professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst points out that mass deportation has and would have continued negative effects on millions of <a href="https://theconversation.com/deportations-punish-children-most-50648">children who are born in the U.S. and are legal U.S. citizens</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Sammy is a teenager I recently met who was born and raised in the Southwest. His parents were living in the U.S., working and raising their children, until they were stopped for a traffic violation, or audited for taxes, or turned in by a teacher or medical provider, or any of the mundane ways that undocumented status gets uncovered. Now Sammy is living with foster parents.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Donald Trump gave a major speech on immigration this week. This roundup looks at some of his ideas for reform and explains what the experts have to say about this complex issue.Danielle Douez, Associate Editor, Politics + SocietyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/553042016-02-24T18:19:46Z2016-02-24T18:19:46ZTrump’s winning streak reveals bigotry’s appeal in GOP<p>Donald Trump’s path to the Republican nomination gained crucial momentum in Nevada on Tuesday night. </p>
<p>Trump <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/nevada-caucus-gop.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0">won the Nevada caucuses</a> with 46 percent of the vote and defeated his closest challengers by more than 20 points, his largest victory margin yet. Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-nevada-caucuses-are-trumps-to-lose--and-he-still-could/2016/02/23/687a3550-da44-11e5-891a-4ed04f4213e8_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_trump-nevada-1225pm_1%3Ahomepage%2Fstory">third straight win</a> in the GOP presidential race makes clear that the New York billionaire has <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/nv/Rep">broad and deep support</a> from all wings of the party. </p>
<p>A sense of inevitability is settling over Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination. The latest polls show <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/">he will likely win nearly all of the 10 states</a> that will vote in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1. He also benefits from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/upshot/how-trump-could-pile-up-delegates-with-modest-percentages-of-the-vote.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_up_20160219&nl=upshot&nl_art=0&nlid=69180613&ref=headline&te=1">the complex and front-loaded nature</a> of the Republican delegate apportionment process, which gives him a clear path for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/23/donald-trump-is-on-course-to-win-the-1237-delegates-he-needs-to-be-the-gop-nominee/?tid=pm_politics_pop_b">securing the GOP nomination</a>. </p>
<p>The fact that a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/08/donald-trump-repeats-crowd-members-ted-cruz-insult-hes-a-pussy/">vulgar</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-banning-muslims-from-entering-u-s/">xenophobic</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/02/22/why-donald-trumps-glitzy-style-is-attracting-evangelical-voters/">twice-divorced</a> New York <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc.html?rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=Blogs">real estate developer</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/arts/television/donald-trump-campaign-the-apprentice.html">TV celebrity</a> with no conservative credentials is on the verge of <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-24/trump-gets-third-win-in-nevada-as-rubio-cruz-battle-for-second?cmpid=BBD022416_POL">winning the GOP nomination</a> is highly revealing. It shows how deep <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-supporters-for-intolerance.html">racial and religious prejudice</a> runs in the Republican Party of 2016.</p>
<h2>Trump is not a traditional conservative</h2>
<p>By any traditional measure, Donald Trump is the least conservative candidate in the GOP race. </p>
<p>On one issue after another, Trump <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/us/politics/the-more-trump-defies-his-party-the-more-his-supporters-cheer.html">defies conservative orthodoxy</a>. During the most recent GOP debate, Trump <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/15/donald-trump-escalates-rhetoric-before-south-carolina-primary/">condemned George W. Bush</a> for invading Iraq and for not preventing the September 11 terrorist attacks. Trump also opposes the longstanding conservative goal of reforming <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/02/17/trump-blasts-bush-on-iraq-and-911-and-gop-voters-shrug/">Social Security</a>, and he has even <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/us/politics/ted-cruz-ad-goes-after-donald-trumps-stance-on-planned-parenthood.html">defended Planned Parenthood</a>, a women’s health organization despised by social conservatives. He advocates protectionist policies, such as a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/donald-trump-says-he-favors-big-tariffs-on-chinese-exports/">huge tariff on imports from China</a>, that would reverse decades of Republican support for free trade.
He has signaled <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/trump-team-struggles-with-candidate-who-wont-adjust-218983">support for state Medicaid expansion</a> that GOP governors across the country oppose. And he supports <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/donald-trump-2016-tax-plan-214139">tax hikes on the wealthy</a>. </p>
<p>It is not surprising that Trump’s populist policies attract support from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html">working-class voters</a> who oppose trade liberalization and tax policies that benefit the rich.</p>
<p>But Trump’s appeal extends far beyond blue-collar Republicans. He is winning among both <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/sc/Rep">high-income voters and low-income voters</a>. He is winning <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/sc/Rep">evangelical Republicans</a> and non-evangelical Republicans. Most striking of all, he is carrying <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/nv/Rep">all educational levels</a>, including college graduates, professionals and voters with no education beyond high school. In his Nevada victory speech, Trump declared: “<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2016/02/24/80842732/">I love the poorly educated</a>.” But the truth is, highly educated Republicans support him too. </p>
<p>So what is the common theme that binds Trump’s supporters together? </p>
<p>The disturbing but undeniable answer is entrenched xenophobia, racial prejudice and religious <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/02/17/trump-blasts-bush-on-iraq-and-911-and-gop-voters-shrug/">bigotry among a large segment of Republican voters</a>.</p>
<h2>GOP voters opting for prejudice over conservatism</h2>
<p>As the 2016 election demonstrates, Republicans <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/us/politics/the-more-trump-defies-his-party-the-more-his-supporters-cheer.html">no longer have a shared set of political ideas</a> or a coherent ideological philosophy.</p>
<p>Instead, the only thing that seems to hold the party together is a deep-rooted fear of the social, economic, cultural and <a href="https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32701.pdf">demographic change</a> the United States has experienced in recent decades. </p>
<p>It is certainly true that the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/120370/five-graphics-show-why-post-white-america-already-here">pace of change</a> in American life is occurring at an accelerating rate. In 2008, the United States elected its first African-American president, an enormous step forward for a nation that upheld racial segregation as recently as the 1960s. Social attitudes are changing, too. A majority of Americans now <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/">support same-sex marriage</a>, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/29/nation/la-na-nn-poll-women-military-combat-20130129">combat roles for women in the military</a> and implementation of international treaties to battle <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/world/americas/us-climate-change-republicans-democrats.html">climate change and protect the environment</a>. Meanwhile, immigration from Latin America and Asia is transforming the racial demographics of the nation. In <a href="https://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf">1980</a>, over 83 percent of Americans were white; today only <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html">62 percent of Americans are white</a>. The percentage of whites will fall rapidly in the decades ahead. Already a majority of American children are <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/06/its-official-the-us-is-becoming-a-minority-majority-nation">nonwhite</a>, and racial minorities will constitute a majority of the nation’s population as a whole by <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/04/390672196/for-u-s-children-minorities-will-be-the-majority-by-2020-census-says">the 2040s</a>. </p>
<p>From any objective perspective, these developments should be welcomed. America’s extraordinary capacity for change is an enormous source of national strength. </p>
<p>But that is not how Republicans see the changes under way in the nation. As America becomes a more diverse and tolerant nation, Republicans have embraced apocalyptic views of the nation’s future. Almost <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-americans-optimism-is-dying/2014/08/12/f81808d8-224c-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html">90 percent of Republicans</a> believe the country is in <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/27/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-sanctions-cnn-orc-poll/">poor shape</a>. In an effort to pander to Republican pessimism, nearly all of the GOP candidates have described the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/politics/transcript-of-the-republican-presidential-debate.html">state of the country</a> in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/28/7th-republican-debate-transcript-annotated-who-said-what-and-what-it-meant/">alarming</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/13/the-cbs-republican-debate-transcript-annotated/">catastrophic terms</a>. </p>
<p>But none of the candidates peddle fear as well as Trump. When he <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/transcript-donald-trump-2016-presidential-announcement-article-1.2260117">announced his presidential candidacy</a> last summer, he declared that “the American dream is dead” and “we’re becoming a Third World country.” Since getting into the race, Trump’s rhetoric has only gotten grimmer. He mixes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/23/early-data-suggest-an-angry-nevada-electorate-that-should-favor-donald-trump/">anger</a>, paranoia and xenophobia more skillfully than any modern presidential candidate. </p>
<p>Trump is thus the perfect vehicle for expressing the poisonous spirit that animates Republicans in 2016. He wants to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2015/12/07/e56266f6-9d2b-11e5-8728-1af6af208198_story.html">ban Muslims</a> from the United States. He calls Mexican immigrants <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016-donald-trump-defends-calling-mexican-immigrants-rapists/">“rapists”</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/">“drug dealers”</a> and he has declared that immigrants “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/28/politics/donald-trump-immigration-gay-marriage-2016/">from all over</a>” are <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9-outrageous-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-latinos_us_55e483a1e4b0c818f618904b">“killers and rapists</a>.” He even wants to strip the constitutional right of <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform">birthright citizenship</a> from American-born children of foreign parents.</p>
<p>In short, the billionaire TV star is not running on a coherent set of political ideas. He is running on irrational fear, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/23/early-data-suggest-an-angry-nevada-electorate-that-should-favor-donald-trump/">rage</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-supporters-for-intolerance.html">prejudice</a>. And, to an appalling degree, that’s exactly what a critical mass of Republican voters want, as Trump’s victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada demonstrate. </p>
<h2>Party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump</h2>
<p>Trump’s divisive campaign reflects how far the GOP has drifted from its roots. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, saved the Union and ended slavery. In the process, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/the-words-that-remade-america/308801/">he argued</a> in eloquent fashion that freedom and equality for all constituted America’s most important founding principles.</p>
<p>Today the Republican Party is in a very different place. Dividing Americans, not uniting them, is the dominant mood within the GOP. The momentum gathering behind Donald Trump’s campaign makes it starkly apparent that Lincoln’s legacy has no home in the modern Republican Party.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony J. Gaughan is a registered independent. </span></em></p>Nevada gave Trump his third victory and a widening lead over his GOP rivals. It’s not his conservative values winning votes.Anthony J. Gaughan, Associate Professor of Law, Drake UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.