The politics of illegal aliens, Part II: The Aughts

The beginning of the 21st Century seemed to be one in which the illegal alien isssue would continue its late-1990s fade from the public consciousness. Pete Wilson, whose dramatic amplifcation of the issue split the American right and spooked most American Catholics, had retired in 1999.  Neither his successor, Democrat Gray Davis, nor defeated Republican nominee Dan Lungren, took up the issue. A similar silence largely descended upon the Bush-Gore presidential election of 2000.

Within thirteen months of Election Night 2000, however, three events occured that would eventually push the illegal alien issue to a level of interest not even Wilson could achieve: a new President in Mexico, 9/11/01, and Communist China entering the World Trade Organization.

To understand how each impacted things, we’ll take each in turn.

In December of 2000, Vicente Fox was inaugurated as President of Mexico, and thus ended the 71-year-reign of the center-left Institutional Revoultionary Party (PRI). Fox was elected on the ticket of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), yet he only won 43% of the vote (a hard-left Democratic Revolutionary Pary – PRD – split the left). Fox was also the first Mexican president to openly call for illegal aliens in the United States – most of them poor Mexican nationals who left looking for work - to become citizens. That this would mean said Mexican nationals-turned-American-citizens would be far less likely to keep their Mexican citizenship or vote in Mexican elections was largely ignored in the United States, let alone the fact that such a “path to citizenship” would encourage more poor Mexicans to “vote with their feet” (for the US), rather than with their ballots (against Fox’s PAN).

Fox also made it much easier for President Bush the Younger (who had far more success with Mexican-American voters than any other national Republican) to make his own pushes for amnesty and citizenship paths. By the time Bush tried to bring it to Congress, however (2004), the second event made people think very differently about the border and aliens.

It’s hard to remember these days, but when the attacks of 9/11/01 first happened, the greatest border concern was Canada, not Mexico. Ahmed Ressam had plotted to bomb LAX while he lived in Montreal, and was stopped by Customs officials at the Canadian-US border. Within Canada itself, the attacks spawned a wide-ranging argument about that nation’s own refugee laws and administration.

It was the porous border with Mexico itself, rather than any apparent threat from the other side, that brought said border back into American political discourse. As more “open borders” supporters came to support Bush’s initiatives on aliens, more opponents of open borders panned it. The belief that any kind of amnesty could encourage more border-crossing (and the fact that the border-strengthen that was supposed to happen with the 1986 amnesty never came to pass), led many to distrust any effort to deal with illegal aliens short of deportation or attrition (cracking down on the border, cracking down on illegal hiring, and letting the illegal aliens go back home as the jobs they sought became closed off to them).

So Fox and Bush were pushing the citizenship option; more Americans were hardening against any amnesty; the race card was played everywhere; Wilson’s ghost continued to spook many on the right; . . . and Mexico’s economy nosedived as a result of an agreement with Communist China that brought the latter into the World Trade Organization.

The last of those occured in December 2001. The ChiComs wasted no time flooding Mexico with currency-depreciated cheap goods, and several Mexican industries buckled.  Within three years, China passed Mexico as the second largest exporter to the United States (and according to the Washington Post, some of those goods were snuck over the border into Mexico to skirt Mexican tariffs on ChiCom goods that remained after the WTO deal).

So the Mexican economy – losing 100,000 jobs a year thanks to this – was looking more sour, meaning the chances for Fox’s PAN to maintain power was in trouble, too. The left remained badly divided in 2006, but PAN nominee Felipe Calderon still fell seven points from Fox’s 2000 percentage and snuck into Los Pinos by a whisker over the PRD. Since then, the PRD has collapsed, and the PRI has recovered and reestablished itself as the prominent left-wing party (winning control of Congress in 2009).

Not surprisingly, Calderon is just as eager to give impoverished Mexicans the chance to vote for Democrats and Republicans (instead of the PRI) as Fox was.

While all this was going on, the American debate hit a stalemate. Attrition still has gotten little hearing, and neither open borders nor deportationism has garnered majority support among the electorate. Meanwhile, any discussion of illegal aliens leads to the left playing the race card, the right divided between those haunted by Pete Wilson’s ghost and those who have never heard of him, and some tax-hiking RINO seizing upon the issue to confirm the fears of all those who do remember Wilson (step right up, Jan Brewer).

Keep in mind, I backed Arizona’s SB1070, but a RINO is a RINO.

So this is where we are in 2011, with a border than an overwhelming majority want closed, blocked by the minority that doesn’t thank to the latter’s ability to play up the divisions within the majority and the myth of the “Hispanic vote” (there is no such thing, BTW).

Yet, despite all the invective, political calculation, and other assorted nonsense, I remain optimistic that this will all sort itself out . . . but that’s for yet another post.

Cross-posted to BD