By Larry Jones 
The Obama administration announced on July 1 that it plans to focus its immigration policy on a crackdown of employers who might have hired undocumented workers. According to the Houston Chronicle, Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) plans to “audit the immigration and employment paperwork of 652 businesses across the country.”
This new policy is the coming to fruition of the statement by Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, at her Senate confirmation hearing, which she put in classic capitalistic terminology. “You have to deal with illegal immigration from the demand side as well as the supply side. We do have employers who use the lack of enforcement as a way to exploit the illegal labor market to depress wages, to exploit workers in some cases, and that requires enforcement.”
Obama’s shift from the immigration policy of the Bush years is in large part aimed, and will have the effect, of making employment difficult to impossible to find or keep for an enormous number of immigrants in this country. In making a public show of targeting employers, the impact of the new policy will be to force uncounted millions of people out of their current jobs – often jobs in which they are hyper-exploited, and deeper into an underground of even greater vulnerability to both capitalist employers and police surveillance, arrest, and deportation.
Out of the Shadows, Into the Glare of a Police Lineup
On its face, it appears that Obama’s people are moving away from George W. Bush’s high profile raids against immigrant workers without papers which led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of deportations, many of which separated American born children from their families. Under Bush there were some 358,000 immigrants deported in 2008 alone.
Under Obama, however, things are not going to be a whole lot more humane. In his transmittal letter to Congress of his budget on May 7, the President did not write about his planned immigration expenditures. However, later in May his administration announced its plans to enlarge Bush’s $1.1 billion program to check the immigration status of almost all of the people locked up in jails over his first term in office.
The Obama regime will also continue building the $8 billion virtual fence on the border which uses sensors and cameras to cover the areas where there is no actual fence. An aide to Peggy Sherry, chief financial officer at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters in May that the Obama administration would not build more miles of the 12 to 18 feet high barrier. However, the Obama administration will continue efforts "to finish up the fencing to get as close to the 670 miles of fence that has been previously identified," the aide said. Parts of the existing fence cuts right through or totally walls off some border residents’ property, a la the Israeli settlement fences in Palestine.
Yet Napolitano doesn’t believe the fence will be very effective. Recently she said: “You show me a 50 foot wall and I’ll show you a 51 foot ladder.”
"If the American people don’t feel like you can secure the borders," Obama said at a news conference on April 29, "then it’s hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows and on a pathway to citizenship who are already here, because the attitude of the average American is going to be, ‘Well, you’re just going to have hundreds of thousands of more coming in each year.’ "
It has become politically necessary for Obama to say such things in order to try to pacify the anti-immigrant sentiment among conservatives in America whom he continues to try to mollify.
Stolen Land
The maddening thing about all the screaming over defending the border is that the territory along the border was virtually stolen from Mexico. After an alleged attack on U.S. troops, President James Polk instructed Gen. Zachary Taylor to invade Mexico under the American doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”, meaning it’s God’s will that the U.S. rules the Western Hemisphere. Howard Zinn reports in his People’s History of the United States that Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, while in Mexico, had complained of that war: “I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. … We have not one particle of right to be here. … It looks as if the government sent a small force to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses. … My heart is not in this business.”
So all the Lou Dobbs, the Glenn Becks, the Bill O’Reillys and their ilk should wake up and smell the chorizo. Or perhaps read a history book that tells some truth about how the U.S. expansion “from sea to shining sea” actually took place.
Obama plans to spend 8% more this year than under Bush’s budget to hire more border patrol agents and pay for more security at airports as well as seaports. He also calls for more money to do the jail screening.
So there is clearly not much change over the Bush immigration program. In fact, in many ways it’s a broadening of the very things we complained about under Bush, but with many progressive people still hanging onto the belief that Obama will “fix” things, the truly worrisome aspects of what’s now coming down from Obama and Napolitano are not seen for what they truly are.
Napolitano has tried to put a good face of her new immigration policies by saying there will be a decrease in worksite raids. That may or may not prove to be true. But, even more than in the Bush years, Obama is unleashing a “full court press” upon the immigrant population in this country.
Rough Political Road
Politically, Obama faces some huge obstacles. He wants to develop an extremely tough amnesty road to citizenship. In March he said, “We must say to the undocumented: Look you have broken the law. You did not come here the way you were supposed to. This is not going to be a free ride. You are going to pay a fine. You are going to learn English. You are going back to the end of the line so you do not get ahead of somebody who is in Mexico City applying legally. But after you have done these things over a certain period of time you have earned your citizenship. It is not something that is guaranteed or automatic. You got to earn it. Over time we give people an opportunity.”
Yes, over time, a long long time.
Part of Obama’s problem is that Americans are losing jobs at an enormous rate, yet few will work for the $6 an hour-no benefits wage the undocumented get. Xenophobic right wingers just want to round up all the 11 to12 million people who came here “illegally” and “send them back to whatever god forsaken country they came from.”
Businesses fear the inspection of their immigrant records that has been announced, yet economically they feel their profits can only be maximized by paying illegal wage rates to the undocumented. Sometimes they don’t pay them at all because they know the undocumented won’t dare report them. It’s a nasty business.
Obama has talked often about wanting to get Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill, but says he doesn’t yet have the votes. As usual he has been trying to please both sides from the middle and ends up satisfying none. But the measures initiated by Obama will cause immense suffering to a section of the people who already have been subjected to much abuse, and must be opposed.
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Is this time of great economic distress really the right time to argue for greater immigration? You want to bring more people in? Asks one incredulous GOP aide on Capitol Hill. That was a hard case to make when unemployment was 4 percent, much less when it’s almost 10 percent.