Central America
Who’s afraid of the Latino vote?
The migration reprieve Obama announced in November
suspends deportation of over 5.2 million people,
some 850,000 of them Central Americans.
But his measures left out well more than half
of the undocumented migrants in the US.
What will happen afterwards?
For Latino immigrants, getting the right to vote
will determine their future in the United States.
And when it happens, who’ll be afraid of that vote?
José Luis Rocha
The US midterm elections were held on November 4. Their bureaucratic goal was to reelect the 435 members of the House of Representatives, who serve a two-year term, and 36 of the 100 Senate members, who enjoy a six-year term. The voters also elected governors in 36 states, appointed officials to 46 legislative bodies and other mid-range posts, and in some states decided on referendums on the minimum wage, abortion, gun control and the legalization of medicinal or even recreational marijuana.
Midterm elections decide critical issues and define a new correlation of legislative forces that can leave the incumbent President governing with a two-house congressional majority, a divided Congress, or, as happened this time confirming all predictions, struggling against the current of a Congress whose both houses are ruled by the opposition. Nonetheless, they invariably have a lower voter turnout than presidential elections. At a cost of US$3.7 billion, these were the most expensive elections in US history, yet only 36% of registered voters turned out, 22% less than in the 2012 presidential elections and 26% less than in the 2008 ones. It was the lowest turnout since the midterm elections of 1942 (34%), when World War II was raging, and was an ominous drop from the 41% who voted in 2010.
What’s the electoral clout of Latinos?
At the state level, 146 referendums were put on the respective ballots to decide on issues as diverse as legalizing marijuana and the minimum wage. Yet there wasn’t a single referendum on immigrants’most of whom are Latino’even though that issue ranks fifth (7%) among issues that matter most to those queried in polls, following the economy (17%), poor governance (16%), unemployment (10%) and access to healthcare (8%). Maybe those polls’which politicians don’t fail to study’serve as the referendum on Latino immigrants. A June 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute titled ’What Do Americans Want from Immigration Reform in 2014?’ showed that 79% want some kind of regularization for the undocumented, 62% want them granted citizenship, 17% want their residence legalized and 19% want them deported. Or perhaps the referendum takes place on the street, all the time: with everyday rebuffs, lukewarm nominal pats on the back, defense of their rights, acceptance among the faithful in the different churches, etc.
In any case, for better or worse, the fate of Latino immigrants and the road to regularization of the undocumented ones is marked by the fact that as an ethnic group they’re not only an issue to be voted on, but have gradually become a visible and audible sector of the electorate. Their potential as a sector to be addressed on specific proposals has been increasing because it can pay off in votes. In these elections 25.2 million Latinos were eligible to vote, 11% of the total, which is more than twice as many as in 1994 (10.3 million) and more than triple the number in 1986 (7.5 million). Since 2010, when they hit 10% of the electorate, Latinos have increased by 3.9 million. They represented between 9.5% and 17% of the electorate in four of the states where they were elected governor: Florida, Colorado, Connecticut and Illinois.
And the Central Americans’ clout?
The 1.6 million voting-age US citizens of Central American origins are still a tiny fraction of the total US electorate (0.76%) but their relative weight among potential Latino voters has grown to over 7%. The reduced electoral clout of Central American immigrants is partly due to their smaller numbers but also to their lack of documents and reduced access to citizenship.
If 70% of the total US population and 45% of Latinos living in the United States are entitled to vote, only 39% of the Central American component is entitled: 54% of the Nicaraguans, 40% of the Salvadorans, 36% of the Hondurans and 35% of the Guatemalans.
Despite their low numbers, some Central Americans have been given prominent positions in federal and local government. Outstanding among them is Hilda Luc’a Sol’s Sequeira, a Mexican-Nicaraguan who first represented East Los Angeles in the California Senate and then spent eight years in the US House of Representatives, later becoming secretary of labor in Obama’s first administration. David Campos, a Guatemalan born in Puerto Barrios, immigrated without documents in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old. During his tenure as a legislator, among other notable positions in local government, he drafted and supported bills amending San Francisco’s City Sanctuary policy (to protect undocumented youth held by the police from deportation), free public transport for low income youth and the CleanPowerSF program (aimed at providing San Francisco more electricity from renewable sources).
Do Latinos vote or abstain?
The fate of Latino immigrants is linked to their political preferences and the possibility of their tilting the balance one way or another. Their low turnout at the polls is notable: of those registered to vote in 2010 only 31.2% did so, a much lower rate than African Americans (44%) and whites (48.6%). The Pew Hispanic Center has identified two main causes for Latino abstention: young people are usually less likely to vote but have a higher demographic weight in the Latino population (33% of eligible Latino voters are between 18 and 29 years old, compared to only 18% of white voters, 21% of Asians and 25% of Afro-descendants). Moreover, almost half of potential Latino voters live in California and Texas, states that haven’t been decisive battlegrounds in recent presidential elections, thus resulting in a relative dearth of attention to the Latino electorate in those states.
Other elements have also taken politicians’ attention away from the Latino vote. For example, it was decided to legalize marijuana in Florida, where more than 17% of potential voters are Latino, but their position on this issue is evenly divided, as is the electoral average. A similar situation is recorded in Colorado on the abortion issue, where 14.2% of the potential voters are Latino. Alabama and Washington voted on gun control this year, which Latinos favor much more than the average electorate (62% to 45%), but Latinos represent only 1.6% and 6.1% of potential voters in these two states. It also didn’t make sense to invest in winning over the Latino vote in several other states for different reasons.
But while this analysis is focused on political choice, i.e. on the electorate’s reactions to the products and incitements of the major parties and their leaders, voters may have motives to vote or not that have nothing to do with the politicians’ incentives. These motives may be guessed at when average electoral behavior is analyzed to trace differences by nationality of origin. Almost half of the registered Cuban-Americans use their right to vote, but only 28.7% of Mexican-Americans do so. Presumably the Central American average is lower than Mexican average, considering that only 34% of Mexicans who have US citizenship were born abroad, compared to 47% of Nicaraguans, 60% of Salvadorans, 65% of Guatemalans and 78% of Hondurans. The greater or lesser legal inclusion of a national group as a whole may be a factor that affects the use of its legal members’ right to vote and this insertion probably also affects their political preferences.
Who gets their vote:
Democrats or Republicans?
An estimated 62% of Latinos voted Democrat, clearly a trend when we consider that only 38% of whites did, but it falls far below the 89% of African Americans, who have been the Democrats’ loyal base for many years.
In recent years the South has inverted the traditional polarization: whites for the Republicans and blacks for the Democrats. The Latino vote is divided between a’perhaps waning’gratitude to Republicans for the distant amnesty granted them by Reagan in the 1980s and a hesitant preference for Democrats based on a benevolent discourse about immigrants and opting to believe in their current pledges about immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented.
The closer Latino voters are to the undocumented, the more they tend towards the Democrats. This is partly due to the fact, according to surveys, that Latinos perceive Democrats as able to do a better job regarding immigrants, the economy and foreign policy, and blame Republican congress people for stalling on immigration reform. It’s a sympathy seen in the polls to decide on state governors, where Latinos voted over the average for Democrats in each state: 73% v. 59% in California, 58% v. 47% in Florida, 53% v. 45% in Georgia, 69% v. 54% in New York and 55% v. 39% in Texas. But it’s also a sympathy that shows some visible fragility in the 63% of Latinos who disapprove of Obama’s deportation policies, understandable in a group where one in every four knows someone who was deported or detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year.
Republicans view this Latino support for the Democrats with extreme suspicion and divergent, even polarized attitudes between those opting for reversing it, and doing so with Latino support, and those who want to diminish it through deportations.
Migrants’ party alignment by national origin and religion has been a constant in the US political system. Scottish and Irish Presbyterians joined Virginia Republicans in an inseparable trinity in 1800-24, ushering in three Presidents: Jackson, Polk and Buchanan. Irish Catholics have been the Democrats’ loyal social base for over a century. A vast majority of Germans supported the Democrats before 1850, when in a give and take sprinkled with roughness but with anti-slavery as a common denominator, Lincoln won them over to the Republican cause. Between 1881 and 1890, 1,452,970 Germans arrived and, along with many of their predecessors, became loyal supporters enabling the Republicans to hold onto the White House from 1896 to 1930. The Scandinavians’especially Norwegians and Swedish’were grassroots Democrats but the Civil War tipped them towards the Republicans for the same reasons as the Germans: opposition to slavery, choosing country life and diligent courtship by Republican politicians.
Two moralities: ’Strict father’
and ’nurturant parent’
The question is where the Latinos’ sympathy for the Democrats comes from; what medium-term elements of sus’tainability it has; and what it means for the millions of undocumented peoples’ hopes for regularization.
George Lakoff, a US expert in cognitive linguistics, believes that addressing immigration issues has imposed a more conservative mood among Republicans and more liberal tendencies among Democrats. The polarization of the Southern vote can be taken as an indicator of these biases. What does this mean, according to Lakoff? He distinguishes between the ’strict father model’ vs. the ’nurturant parent model’: the morality of a strong, dominant father and that of a nurturing parent.
Positions on public policies are shaped by the type of morality that frames it. Lakoff works on conceptual models that frame the thinkable. Addressing the issue of immigration in Moral Politics. How liberals and conservatives think, he said that those who think within the Strict Father cognitive framework start from what is for them the indisputable fact that ’illegal immigrants are lawbreakers who should be punished. People who hire them are just pursuing their self-interest, as they should, and so are doing nothing wrong. From the metaphorical perspective of the Nation as a Family, illegal immigrants are not citizens hence they are not children in our family. To be expected to provide food, housing and healthcare for them is like being expected to feed, house and care for other children in the neighborhood who come into our house without permission. They weren’t invited, they have no business being here, and we have no responsibility to take care of them.’ Roughly speaking, this reflects the perspective of many US Americans and particularly the white sector that has become the Republicans’ social base, a sector that opposes federal benefits for the newcomers and firmly believes that Central American adolescents benefited by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or other measures went to the US just to settle in their states.
Lakoff explains that ’from the perspective of the Nurturant Parent morality powerless people with no immoral intent are seen as innocent children needing nurturance. For the most part, illegal immigrants fall into this category. Illegal immigrants are seen as innocent poor people looking for a better life and who are often exploited, for example, when they are lured or brought into the US by employers willing to break the law to increase their profit.’ Furthermore, they make it possible to increase the tax base by enabling middle-class homes to have two incomes because they provide low-cost house cleaning, childcare, gardening and fast food. And, ’since illegal immigrants have historically become citizens, they should be seen as citizens in the making.’ In the rationale of the metaphor that sees the nation as a family, it would be immoral to throw these ’children’ out into the street.
Reagan and Bush were strict fathers
while Obama is a nurturing parent
What Lakoff wants to emphasize through this distinction is that politicians aren’t just making a cost-benefit calculation or simply letting it mark the way for those who cling to this calculation, but that the conservative and liberal agendas are deeply rooted in certain mindsets.
Lakoff shows how politicians fabricate then sell to the general public images that appeal to these mindsets but often have little or nothing to do with what these politicians themselves practice. For example, assuming the role of strict fathers, Reagan and Bush protested the Democrats’ wastefulness while adding three trillion dollars to the national debt by increasing military spending. The liberalizing outcry got taxes reduced for the wealthiest. Strictly speaking, overspending the military budget and tax cuts were inconsistent with their insistence on a policy of austerity and fiscal regulation but these inconsistencies didn’t make Reagan feel immoral, a charlatan, because from his perspective they were guided by his role as a strict father adopting drastic measures to protect his family-nation, threatened by communism. It now seems that this family-nation is threatened by terrorism and drug-traffickers. Nothing is more consistent than strict parents building walls on the borders and reinforcing vigilance. Their concern is nourished by ’studies’ showing mara (gang) members as groups trained by terrorists in Afghanistan and builders of a conduit to transport drugs and migrants from South America to Los Angeles.
The ideological battle in party politics is partly waged in the competition over who’s selling the electorate a more buyable image (situated within the framework of prevailing thought). While it’s true that neither Democrats nor Republicans can be fully identified with either of these frameworks, Obama’s speeches are obviously those of a nurturing father and the words coming from many Republicans are those of a strict, domineering father. To this we must add that the Republican camp has produced the most Hollywood-style champions of xenophobia: Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Governor Jan Brewer and Senator Russell Pearce, all of Arizona. These and others represent the sourest face of the strict father, a face that presumably comforts those who elect them (Arpaio is now going for his sixth term as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona).
The problem is that voters have diverse mindsets. Speeches in the language of the strict father can garner many votes among conservative White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) but very few in other sectors. This discourse perhaps seeks to retain the Republicans’ Southern conservative base and also to crystallize into policy measures that head off growth of the Democratic base.
Fear of small numbers
In terms of retaining the Southern conservative base, this discourse appeals to a fear that was analyzed eight years ago by Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in ’Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger.’ This incisive book analyzes the fear ethnic minorities bring out in dominant groups that see these ’others’ as a threat to ethnic, racial and cultural purity, assaulting the nation’s very existence. Predatory narcissism seeks to put an end to these differences, these blemishes on the pristine national fabric.
Appadurai analyzes the violent elimination of these differences but ethnocide is only the most drastic recourse of these cleansing operations. There are many more: curbing migration, geographical confinement (ghettoizing) of ethnic groups, assimilation, etc. Some Republican politicians aim their anti-immigrant discourse at those who cling to this nationalistic narcissism.
Republicans may be experiencing fear about keeping the Democrat base steady or decreasing it. In this case, the fear is not of small numbers but of the very large and growing number of Latino voters and their future potential.
Let’s look at some evidence fueling these fears. Latinos comprise only 11% of registered voters in the US but 17% of its population. Texas is one of the states with a huge percentage gap between the total of Latino registered voters (27.4%, only exceeded by New Mexico, where they hit 40.1%) and Latinos in the total population (38.2%). Since Texas represents 7.5% of the country’s voting-age citizens, massive regularization could increase Latinos’ electoral clout to the point that they could become pivotal.
California and Nevada are the only other states with a difference exceeding 10 percentage points between Latino residents and Latino registered voters. But Nevada has fewer than two million voters all told, and California is already a Democrat stronghold.
Could the Latino vote turn
Congress Democrat blue for years?
With its 26 million inhabitants, 16.5 million voters and 9.96 million Latinos, Texas is the shimmering battle field. It’s the second most populous state in the union and perhaps the only one where massive legalization of Latinos would make a substantial difference, if all other factors’above all, Latinos’ Democratic leanings’remain constant.
If 70% of Texas’ Latinos became potential voters, as they are on a national level, regulation would mean 2,432,000 more Latinos with the right to vote. A hypothetical result of immigration amnesty would be an increase of potential Latino voters from 4,540,000 to 6,972,000 in about five years. If to this we add new Latino voters as existing residents come of age, the impact of the amnesty is multiplied. Let’s suppose that only 60% of those newly regularized Latinos use their electoral rights; we’d still have 1,459,200 new voters, more than enough for Texas to stop being a safe Republican state and become a contested one, like Florida, Colorado and Arizona, to mention only significantly populated states with a strong Latino presence. In turn, applying the same changes, these states would cease being contested to become Democrat strongholds.
The effect this Democratic revolution would have on electoral districts is predictable: as current Latino sympathies stand, Congress would turn Democrat blue for years, perhaps decades. The situation would become desperate for the Republicans if the new voters’through gratitude, for example’were to elect Democrats in even greater proportion than Latinos now do. The two most populous states’California and Texas’would be the Democrats’ indisputable political property.
12 million... Republicans or Democrats?
Let’s take the 2012 presidential elections, which the Democrats won with 65.9 million votes as against the Republican 60.9 million. If, after the immigration amnesty and the years needed to acquire citizenship, 65% of the country’s almost 53 million Latinos became registered voters instead of the current 44.6%, we’d have 10,773,800 more potential voters. Let’s suppose that only half of them decided to exercise their right to vote. Based on the preferences shown by Latinos in 2012 (69% for Obama and 21% for Romney), those new votes would have meant 69.6 million for the Democrats and 62 million for the Republicans.
A projection of this future electoral scenario predicts that the Republicans could spend decades without occupying the Oval Office. Clearly many elements would have to come together for this scenario to go from potential to reality but politics is the art of the possible and what’s really important here isn’t what will actually take place but the possible scenarios that politicians envision and manipulate as raw material in their calculations. And it’s a scenario that could have a lot of pull amongst the most conservative Republicans given that it arises from’and proliferates’the fear of being reduced to small numbers.
Perhaps more than other professions, politicians live in Plato’s cave, forming opinions based on appearances. It’s a characteristic of political life that perceptions value as much, or more than, objective conditions: perceived crime rather than the crime rate, opinion about management rather than verifiable achievements, the image of corrupt people more than corrupt acts. As Voltaire so well knew, and said: slander always leaves something behind. This world of perception is the arena in which some WASPs’ panic of becoming a minority converge with Republicans’ fear of remaining confined to a secondary role for a long time or even of their extinction as a party.
In 2007, during a debate with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Who Sings the Nation-State?, US philosopher Judith Butler said that one of the scary things about the legalization movement as structured then was that it could create 12 million Republicans, which she didn’t think would happen, but there was nothing that would prevent it from happening.
Republicans fear that this movement will create 12 million Democrats, which is unlikely but has historical precedents and may be the scenario Republicans want to avoid at all costs. The approach of some Republicans has been to reinforce ’nativism,’ (the political position of demanding favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants), replicating the close-minded style of the Know-Nothings, one of the most curious movements in US history.
The Know-Nothing Party was
an anti-Catholic movement
US immigration used to be continuous and voluminous. The novel and alarming fact for the WASP sector back then was the enormous proportion of Catholics among the immigrants. Over a third of the immigrants between the late 1830s and 1840 and almost half of the 1,700,000 who came from 1841 to 1850 were Irish Catholics. Those plus new arrivals in the 1860s painted a picture in which almost three-fifths of the immigrants were Catholic.
The panic generated by this incipient trend in the religious map and its skillful manipulation sparked a nativist anti-Catholic movement that officially called itself the American Party, which began as a sort of secret society. It earned the scathing nickname the Know-Nothing Party because when questioned about its activities its members invariably answered ’I know nothing.’ Its second-level members pledged under oath to do all they could to remove all foreigners and all Catholics from public office. Its avowed purpose was to control foreign influence, purify the polls and reverse efforts to exclude the Bible from public schools.
Historians have identified three components in US nativism: xenophobia, anti-Catholicism (rooted in European religious and national rivalries) and racism nourished by a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy. To those are added to its recurrent characteristic, founded in the belief that society could and should assimilate immigrants, a faith used and abused by the radical Right. At the dawn of the 19th century, assimilation in many places meant respecting the Presbyterian majority’s Sabbath, which not only disapproved of drinking beer on Sundays, but declared it illegal. The newly arrived Germans’ fondness for beer went against the grain of this Puritan ordinance. What are known as Blue Laws, which ban not only the sale or imbibing of alcoholic beverages but also other practices such as commercial activities on Sunday based on religious standards, still exist today in some states.
Assimilation also meant Germans should stop celebrating Mass in their own language and the Irish should give up their emblematic Catholic processions. Until the mid-19th century, vandals would hang up an effigy of St. Patrick on March 17 with a rosary of potatoes around its neck and a bottle of whiskey in its pocket to ridicule their reluctance to set aside their customs, particularly the now world-famous procession in honor of that saint.
Samuel Morse and
his anti-Catholic rage
That nativist fury common among the dominant sector of the population wasn’t new. In 1754, during the peak of nativist intensity in Philadelphia, bills were drafted to exclude virtually all German immigrants.
Some subsequent xenophobic initiatives focused on demanding 21 years of residence in the US before granting nationality’that was the Nativist Party’s electoral campaign slogan in 1834. One of the first nativist outbursts in New York was led by Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872), remembered today as a painter and inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code but more famous in his day as the politician who sought to limit immigration from Catholic countries. He was the worthy son of Charlestown Massachussetts’ Reverend Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) who, terrified by the arrival of German Catholics, delivered three sermons against the ’Bavarian Illuminati.’ In 1834, Samuel Morse published 12 letters in The New York Observer using the pseudonym ’Brutus’ which he later recycled in a widely read book titled ’Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.’ In it he attacked the Leopold Foundation of Austria for its decided support for missionaries and the destitute of the Catholic Church in the New World. He urged Protestant unification against Catholic schools and associations and ’tolerant’ immigration laws.
The Catholic Church was presented as a body of priests and prelates, where the laity must only obey and pay but exercise no authority. We can be sure, warned Morse, that men as skillful as the Jesuits will not fail to use the power put in their hands to cause great harm to the Republic. His pamphlet fell on the fertile ground of animosity already stirred up by the influx of Irish in the Big Apple, and was the ideological fuel for the actual fire by which inflamed mobs murdered Catholics, burned down Irish homes, reduced several convents and churches to ashes and threw monuments’including an historical papal gift’into the River Potomac.
In 1855 Know-Nothing Congressman William Russell Smith from Alabama addressed his colleagues thus: ’I would not exclude the foreigner from these shores, but I want the privilege of picking the class that comes. I do not want the vermin-covered convicts of the European continent’ I do not want those swarms of paupers, with pestilence in their skins and famine in their throats to consume the bread of the native poor. Charity begins at home’charity forbids the coming of these groaning, limping vampires. The enemy is formidable. Then let every native go to work’let every Protestant be a sentinel on the watchtowers of liberty.’
Americanizing and
Christianizing Catholics
A vigorous and enterprising civil society was behind these initiatives, founded in those groups Alexis de Tocqueville praised as the necessary safeguard against the tyranny of the majority. The Louisiana Native American Association was almost two decades ahead of Congressman Smith’s denouncements. In 1826 East Coast Protestants founded the American Home Missionary Society to spread the values and traditions of the Eastern United States and save the West from Catholicism, fearing that agents of Rome were determined to extend papal domains and their royalist creed at the expense and to the detriment of Protestantism’s Republican ideals.
In 1844 the Boston Ladies’ Association for Evangelizing the West expressed concern about the Irish, Germans and Scandinavians. They wondered whether New England’s morality, religion and culture could flourish in the Western prairies, where the noxious weeds of the newcomers’ atheism, radicalism, Catholicism and intemperance were proliferating and their purely negative notions contrasted with American libertarian ideas. Catholics had to be Americanized and Christianized. New England pastors and missionaries had no qualms in painting a picture of Eastern settlements inundated with barbarity in order to make their parishioners open their purses. The former colonies exhibited their feeling of superiority to the newcomers. Everyone talked about them, no one to them, according to observations by the historian George M. Stephenson in 1922.
A symptom of the panic of
being reduced to small numbers
We can find recent echoes of these fears and Manichaeism in the two most renowned works of the late Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and Who are we? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
According to the Palestinian post-colonial intellectual Edward Said, the first work is an ill-fated inflation of an article where Huntington argues that the fundamental sources of world conflicts don’t come from the ideological or economic but from the cultural, and that the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics marked by confrontations between the liberal, democratic and largely Christian North with secularized politics and the autocratic and largely Islamic South and East, with direct or indirect theocratic governmental models. The second is a reflection about the WASP identity of US Americans who present refined and systematic fears about Latino immigrants because they are predominantly Catholic, poor in a country with an extensive middle class, and have shown so little ability or willingness to adapt that they don’t even stop speaking Spanish or renounce endogenous marriages and their exotic customs.
The massive presence and growth of Latinos is a challenge for the fundamental US creed and cultural core: a challenge to the national identity. Even Latin American conservatives such as Enrique Krauze, in his Huntington: The false prophet, challenged this vision as being more Sibylline than scientific. Krauze rebuts Huntington’s thesis point by point’although conceding that ’migration must be stopped at some time and even reversed’’with a zeal worthy of a better cause. Huntington’s allegations make up a discourse that uses the images and categories of the conservative frame of reference and appeals to the ’cognitive unconscious’ of the fearful to create goals, plans, actions and judgments. This discourse is symptomatic of a social group’and an academic sector’guided by its panic of being reduced to small numbers, of being submerged and diluted in an ocean of foreigners.
The 19th century nativists appealed to these frames of reference with notable success. Their efforts resulted in the Native American Party, which began in 1843 as the American Republican Party. Two years later the Know Nothings’ American Party gained notoriety and gradually engulfed the Order of United Americans, its ideological twin. It rose and fell like a bad souffl’. In 1850 every state and territory had an American Party executive council. In just four months’October 1854 to February 1855’the party’s membership jumped from 50,000 to 120,000. In New York, leaning towards forbidding or permitting Catholic schools could make or break a political career. In 1854 the governors of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were Know-Nothings, as were all the members of the Massachusetts Senate and 375 of its 379 House members. The following year, the Know-Nothings ruled in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, California and Kentucky, and added Tennessee and Louisiana soon after. No less than 100 Congressmen on Capitol Hill shared the American Party’s views.
Why did the Nativists
succeed in Massachusetts?
The overwhelming victory of these ideas in Massachusetts has become proverbial for historians. Among the factors that explain it is the fact that only New York and New Orleans on the East coast rivaled Boston as ports of entry for new immigrants. In just five years (1850 to 1855) the percentage of foreigners, most of them Irish, among the total white population in that state grew from 16.6% to 21.79%, because while the Irish-born were 43% of all foreigners in the US as a whole, they represented 71.41% in Massachusetts.
For the first time, the Irish vote gave Democrats an opportunity in what had been a comfortable preserve for the Whigs, the party that rivaled the Democrats and whose disintegration in the mid-19th century left the field open to new combinations of nativist players and pilgrims, conservatives and opponents of slavery. Precisely because of its enormous size and wide range of programs, the Whigs’ party split into different currents to address the burning issues of the day: socioeconomic changes resulting from rapid industrialization and urbanization, clashes between the different branches of the party (pro-slavery in the South and pro-free labor in the North) and the reconciliation of capitalism’s free labor with grassroots self-government, all within the context of a plebeian immigrant boom. The Know-Nothings offered a simple platform, focusing on immigration as a scapegoat, which enabled them to unify anti-Catholic and xenophobic Protestantism, and thus to absorb the Whigs’ most conservative base. There was plenty of suspicion and evidence against that scapegoat, particularly in Massachusetts: workers who forgot they had once been immigrants themselves feared that the Irish workers would threaten Massachusetts’ industrial wages, which were usually above the national average.
In 1851 Massachusetts invested a fortune ($212,000) in relief for poor families without legal residence. Of the 10,267 applicants, 8,527 were foreigners or the children of foreigners. The 1850 census showed that no other state equaled the burden Massachusetts assumed in aiding impoverished foreigners. And while they only represented 16.6% of the population they were 53.5% of the lawbreakers. All these circumstances came together to foster anxiety, which tied in with the Know-Nothings’ nativist oratory.
The triumphs of the Know-Nothings in Louisiana and their ability to devour the Whigs’ social base there, which had splintered into chaotic myriads through debates over slavery, were also impressive. They are attributed to the nativist message’s resonance in the state with the highest percentage of foreigners in the South.
The Tea Party incarnates
those ideas today
But their importance on the political scene was short-lived. By 1857-60, the Know-Nothings had beaten a sudden and stealthy retreat. The American Party’s discourse lost relevance when the main watershed of public opinion and the platform of the political parties became the slavery issue, and its desire to please the major players involved in the contest ended by fragmenting them.
They joined the various surviving parties. Even a significant 28% of the votes Lincoln won in Massachusetts in 1860 came from former Know-Nothings, although some argue that they were a small fraction of the Know-Nothings’ votes. Nonetheless, it’s a proven fact that there were renowned nativists among the first Republicans, although the tactical rapprochement with the American Party wasn’t free of tensions. Another interpretation of its decline argues that it died from too much success: the Know-Nothings had been identified as one of the main factors in the drastic decline in immigration in the second half of the 1850s’in 1855 it dropped to half the previous year and in 1859 fell from 425,833 to 121,282.
Nativism has had many reincarnations. The wave of anti-Japanese hatred in the early 20th century caused historians to write about a revival of the Know-Nothing spirit as nativism still had various 19th century remnants at that point. The United Order of American Mechanics, the Junior Order of American Mechanics and the Patriotic Order of Sons of America all had an exclusively native membership and platforms that coincided with that of the Know-Nothings.
Today’s Tea Party is seen as the latest reincarnation of the American Party. It has dusted off the vintage requirement of 21 years residence as a citizenship requirement and the denial of citizenship to undocumented immigrants’ children born on US soil. The Tea Party’s support for the anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and Alabama was crucial. The strength of the anti-immigrant feeling it embodies isn’t negligible.
Despite its inflammatory rhetoric, some of the Know Nothings’ aspirations seem rather modest: one of its activists, a slave owner, declared that ’our mistake was not having made bringing in an Irishman a crime when we called it piracy to bring in an African.’ History has put some decades between us and the Know-Nothings but some of their most rose-tinted dreams have come true. Current legislation against illegal trafficking of persons’which refers to the coyotes who charge undocumented migrants to bring them in to the US illegally, not to those who either deceive or kidnap people, mainly women and children, for the sex trade and the like’is the realization of this xenophobic slave-owners’ dream and receives rigorous backing from the International Organization for Migration.
The moral of the Know-Nothings’ fable is that the political platform opposing immigration is very fragile. Its success has very narrow spatial and temporal boundaries. Xenophobia as a platform may be political hara-kiri. Nativist parties end up disappearing but the harm caused during their brief appearance can be immense.
Denying the right to vote is
legalized discrimination
Nativism survives in one of strategies Republicans are still using today to prevent their fears of being reduced to small numbers becoming reality. In 2012, US historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein was mistaken when he repeated and agreed with one of Jeb Bush’s opinions: ’Unless Republicans cooperate with immigration reform, they can’t be sure of winning the national elections (and those of many states).’
Why were Bush and Wallerstein wrong? Because Republicans have resorted to old ways of manipulating numbers so that immigrants are both counted and not counted.
It’s a strategy with a long tradition. In 1849, according to the provisions of the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty, the California government had the power to decide who is entitled to vote: all white male citizens of the United States and all white male citizens of Mexico. That same year, the Latino elite in New Mexico, which at that time included Arizona, restricted citizenship on US soil to free white men. The suffrage issue has also been resolved in Texas through distinguishing between ’white Mexicans’ and ’Indian Mexicans,’ the former being considered descendants of Spaniards and the latter the children of Montezuma.
Of course, such very blatant forms of discrimination are a thing of the past, but they persist under different guises. It’s still happening to African Americans, especially in Florida, although in another form and with the difference that it’s quite clear who’s the real target, as we know that 89% of African Americans tend to vote Democrat.
Florida’s legalized racism
One in three African Americans has a criminal record in Florida, which is one of seven states denying ex-convicts immediate restoration of their voting rights. In Florida, 400,000 to 600,000 adults have been deprived of their right to vote because of their criminal record whereas Maine and Vermont even allow prisoners to vote. If ex-convicts in Florida had voted in 2000, Al Gore would have won that state with a margin of 60,000 votes and, with it, the presidency.
Here we have another kind of benefiting from punitive populism in action. To deny ex-convicts the right to vote, especially knowing that they belong to a discriminated social group, is tantamount to partially suppressing citizenship. This brings to mind the dialogue of the Chester Himes character in Cotton comes to Harlem (1988): ’Man, I ought to go in there and say to that ol’ colonel, ’You wants me to go back south, eh?’ and he says ’That’s right, boy’ and I says ’You gonna let me vote?’ and he says, ’That’s right, boy. Vote all you want, just so long you don’t cast no ballots!’
That’s why in her article ’Reflections on Little Rock,’ first published in Dissent in 1959, Hanna Arendt wondered what exactly distinguishes the so-called US Southern way of life on the racial issue. And the answer is, simply, that although discrimination and segregation are the norm throughout the country, it’s only legally imposed in the Southern states. Legalized discrimination is, in fact, present throughout the country under different disguises. It goes hand in glove with the US electoral system and it’s hard to tell which is the hand and which the glove.
Gerrymandering
the electoral districts
Let’s look at how this system works. US Congress is divided into two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Every state is represented by a fixed quota of two senators, while the 435 representatives in the House are proportionately distributed among the states according to their population size based on a national census taken every 10 years.
As each state is divided into districts with an equal number of inhabitants (and one representative for each district), the number of representatives per state varies as does the number of districts and their boundaries and geographical dimensions. The state legislators, whose number of representatives itself rises or falls, must determine the location, surface area and borders of the new districts based on each new census. Throughout US history, district redefinitions have been subject to abuse. When a party controls the two state houses it’s very likely to make a redistribution that takes seats away from its rival party.
The most famous example of party careerism in district delineation was led by US Vice President Elbridge Gerry, formerly governor of Massachusetts, who called democracy ’the worst of all political evils.’ In 1812 his party exploited its control of both Massachusetts houses to outline the districts to their advantage. One district in Essex country was so twisted it looked like a salamander, leading a Federalist newspaper to satirize it in a cartoon titled Gerry-mander. Manipulating these districts has been called gerrymandering ever since.
Gerrymandering enables politicians to choose their potential voters and, in fact, there have been cases of politicians who have blatantly avoided whole neighborhoods and drawn in others where they have unconditional supporters. Compared with the designs now possible with computer technology, that first salamander district was a modest experiment. A notorious gerrymandering effort in California was nicknamed the ’Jesus district’ because you literally had to walk on water to get from one part of the district to the other.
Gerrymandering is most perfectly represented in ’The Solution,’ where Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht says: ’’that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?’
The art of gerrymandering results in the disconnecting of the total number of votes in a state and the country from battles for districts and representatives’ seats. Democrats obtained more votes than Republicans in 2000 but only won 179 districts, 12 less than the Republicans. In 2004, the Republicans obtained 53.3% of the seats with half the number of votes.
When the undocumented count
in the census, but not the ballot
Gerrymandering is a strategy that uses undocumented immigrants’and even those who only have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or residence permits’as dead weight for adding on new districts and representatives as non-citizen residents count in the census but not in the ballots. Texas illustrates this very well: its own House of Representatives was ruled by Democrats for 130 years but fell to the Republicans in 2002 thanks to a $5 million campaign. From that vantage point, the Republicans controlled district demarcation. Their gerrymandering in 2004 resulted in the 32-member Texas delegation to the House of Representatives no longer being split between 15 Republicans and 17 Democrats but rather 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats. By snatching six congressional seats from the Democrats that year, the Republicans were able, among other things, to approve the Central American Free trade Agreement (CAFTA) by a margin of 217 votes to 215.
Texas had the country’s fastest growing population in the 2000-2010 inter-census period, in part due to the 1,464,000 new undocumented migrants’92% of them Latinos and 9% specifically Central Americans’who settled there within that decade. Between documented and undocumented, Latinos constituted 65% of the 3,360,071 new people increasing the population of Texas that same decade, giving the state another four seats in the House this decade.
While the state’s population grew by 20.5%, Latinos in general grew by 42%, non-citizens by 39% and Central Americans by a whopping 186.7% (from 146,723 to 420,683). Gerrymandering did the rest, resulting in the 2014 Texan delegation having 25 Republicans and 11 Democrats. The four more seats the Republicans won in a decade were thanks to Texas.
A Republican strategy
that could backfire
It’s true that Republicans garnered more popular votes in Texas but merely redrawing the districts meant that they obtained 69.4% of the seats in the federal lower house with 59.2% of the votes.
The presence of undocumented had a similar, although less spectacular, effect in Florida which gained two more seats in the 2010 apportionment, one for each party. Central Americans there represent 24% of the 632,000 undocumented. It also has this effect in districts like Laredo, where Latinos are the majority in the population but not amongst voters.
Texas had 2,816,530 non-citizens in 2010. They were counted to calculate the representatives, taxes, subsidies and other items, but not for voting purposes. While Texas’ Latino population increased by 42% its voters only grew by 28%. Some Republican politicians are taking advantage of this gap and gerrymandering.
The irony of these various increases is that xenophobic politicians are the ones who tend to legislate them: the more immigrants settle in states where gerrymandering parasitizes the gap between those counted in the censuses but not in the ballots, the more politicians advocate policies that punish their settling. Politicians penalize the very migration they parasitize by playing with small, medium and large numbers. But the presence of undocumented migrants is a double-edged sword: today’s benefits will be reversed in the future unless, if only for tactical reasons, the Republicans impose a more immigration-friendly trend.
A Connecticut Yankee
in the Southern court
The situation is very complicated for Republicans. Its control of Congress in the mid-20th century was underpinned by voters in the North. Four decades later, most of their seats in Congress were Southern evangelists.
The Grand Old Party had Dixified its conservatism. The most conservative Baptists recognized in this party a platform with which to defend biblical fundamentalism and oppose premarital sex and homosexuality. They were profiled as the ideal social group’by compact’as a source of votes. Bush courted them, presenting himself as the champion of the traditional values sullied by Clinton’s promiscuity and the cultural Left. Bush, a Connecticut Yankee, changed his Prada shoes for pointy boots and was born-again as a Southern Christian to seal his alliance with what US political scientist Susan George called the Christian Right. It in turn subsequently rewarded his favors by granting him influential judiciaries.
The Christian Right’s social base had paid in advance: 80% of White Southern Evangelists voted Republican in 1994. The Southern Baptist Convention alone brought in 30% or more of the population in six of the Southern states, and no less than 25% in another three. In a political system with growing theocratic overtones and 40% of US Christians believing in imminent Armageddon, Bush’s moral and warmongering project had considerable pull.
But those options didn’t mean the Bush family rejected Latinos. During his electoral campaigns, Bush Jr. participated in Latino festivals and parties in Chicago, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, singing ’The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish and bringing with him the Mariachi band ’Viva Bush’ from Texas.
Bush named one of his first companies ’Arbusto’’his surname in Spanish, and set it up in the same building where his father had founded ’Zapata.’ A half-Latino cousin, George P. Bush, gave more credibility to Bush’s seeming sympathy for Latinos. Some renowned Latino and immigrant activists say Bush is sincerely pro-immigrant. The Bush family cultivated a Hispanic base in the South. Two of Bush’s brothers, respectively the governors of Texas and Florida, speak Spanish and have put Latinos in senior posts in their Cabinets. Republican analyst Kevin Phillips concludes that the blacks weren’t strategically vital for the Bush family, but the Latinos were: ’Here was realpolitik at work.’
What effects will
immigration reform have?
A study recently concluded that the Republicans would win back the Latino vote with immigration reform. Ohio Republican Representative John Boehner, Speaker of the House, hired consultants to help him immerse himself in the immigration issue and pull its reform out of the quagmire. He may have done it just to take the lead away from Obama after having blocked voting on the reform in the House he presides over, but perhaps he was hoping for what happened: a Congress with a Republicans majority in both Houses, from which vantage point they can present the reform as a Republican achievement.
At the same time they multiplied initiatives such as those that preceded Obama’s presidential campaign in 2012: TV spots warming Latinos not to let themselves be carried away by the promises from Obama, the President with the most deportations in US history. One spot contained quotes from Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos, saying that Obama broke his promises. He insisted that with friends like this you don’t need enemies: No more lies, Mr. Obama. The sketch was signed in bold letters by Nevada Hispanics but the fine print said it was paid for by American Principles in Action, a self-styled conservative movement that said its ad aims ’to challenge the simplistic Democrats-good-Republicans-bad narrative that has taken hold with too many Latinos.’
In the current campaign, among others, The Economist called Obama ’Deporter-in-Chief,’ blaming him for the expulsion of a record number of immigrants, which will make the US economy less dynamic. The Republicans may lack a consistent stance on immigration but there’s no doubt they have effectively worked on two fronts: for the Latinos they got Obama to accelerate deportations so they can present him as the villain of the piece and for their conservative Republican base they’ve come out in favor of border control and safe communities.
The Obama plan: a reprieve
for half the undocumented
Faced with the prospect of going down in history with the odious title of Deporter-in-Chief, Obama used his room for maneuver. With his feet but not his hands tied by a legislature he now controls even less than previously, he turned to the tools available to the Executive: the application of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and their extensions: suspension of deportation and work permits for the parents of children who are US citizens or who have legal residence and were taken to the US as children.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, this reprieve means the suspension of deportation for over 5.2 million undocumented people. The Pew Research Center calculates that 850,000 (51%) of the 1.7 million undocumented Central Americans could apply: among the possible beneficiaries are 63% or 425,250 Salvadorans, 37% or 194,250 Guatemalans and 49% or 171,500 Hondurans.
John Boehner immediately accused Obama of adopting unilateral measures that sabotage the chances of a bipartisan agreement on immigration reform. The House Speaker, by law second in line of succession should anything happen to the President, accused Obama of acting like an emperor and damaging his presidency. He threatened a counter-attack from the House without specifying its nature. Republicans talk about ’executive amnesty’ and disapprove of Obama’s ’unconstitutional measures,’ but don’t go so far as the monolithic position’or at least one not so diverse’for which Boehner was perhaps stalling.
For the moment we have state heterogeneity working with positions the public sees as polarized: an executive offering a breathing space to half the undocumented and a legislature procrastinating on the issue and more obsessed with border control.
The right to vote will
determine Latinos’ future
Arendt wrote that ’strictly speaking, suffrage and the right to be elected to office are the only political rights and, in a modern democracy, constitute the very quintessence of citizenship. Unlike all other rights, civil or human, they can’t be granted to resident foreigners.’
The undocumented have demonstrated, with their persistent permanence and access to numerous state and private resources, that these are not the only political rights in the US. But some are rights that matter for future establishment and they are occasionally granted to foreigners, whether or not they have papers, as happens in Maryland.
In the current context, the right to vote is decisive for the future of Latino immigrants. Without discounting its scale, it should be noted that Obama’s measures leave out 5.8 million undocumented. Excluded from the ’amnesty’ are parents of adolescents benefitted by DACA, which leaves the door open to future family separations. Moreover, suspending deportations is just one step on the long road to citizenship and although it’s a very important one for Latinos today, in a less tense context the one who gives them residence and places them on a firmer path to citizenship is the one who will get the credit.
Historically the citizen factory has been the same as the voting factory: in 1860 Tammany Hall’a New York City political organization founded in 1786 and affiliated to New York’s Democratic Party after 1829’opened a naturalization office in an assembly hall and within a month sent almost 60,000 petitions to the New York Supreme Court, which approved them in the words of the xenophobic New York Tribune, ’with no more solemnity than the converting of swine into pork in a Cincinnati packing house.’
The Republican-Democrat struggle:
Will the knot be untied?
The Gordian knot of undocumentation can come undone in the battlefield between parties. The massive Latino presence and its growing political clout is the starting gun in the race to win the Latino vote. Until now anti-immigrant Southern politicians have tried to please their conservative WASP social base with a xenophobic discourse and have been able to play with apportionment in which the undocumented this has been a temporary solution. That’s why the Republicans play on two sides: sometimes pleasing their conservative WASP base with xenophobic statements but also showing signs of approaching a key source of votes.
Democrats are working on Latinos becoming as near as possible to what Afro-descendants are for them right now: a loyal electoral base. Activists and academics have made interesting proposals for untying this knot: with only what’s counted in the ballot boxes mattering. In other words, measuring the calculation to assign representatives, taxes and subsidies’i.e. each state’s weight’by the number of votes not by a simple head count, which includes so many undocumented heads. This encourages political participation, eliminates the gap between demographic weight and electoral weight and prevents politicians from parasitizing undocumented persons who count in the censuses but not the vote.
They well know that The bottom line is that migrants, once they’re inside, count in the apportionment and are a source of power. The Republican mainstream tries to keep them deprived of rights, similar to what happened to the Southern blacks in the 19th century, but this not only doesn’t prevent but to a certain extent actually cultivates them being treated as members of the community: in terms of calculating representatives and taxes and also the federal subsidies received by local public institutions.
The system maintains an ambivalence that is inconsistent with its principles and unsustainable in the long run. The undocumented are, in a certain light, quasi-citizens. They are and yet still aren’t citizens. How to make them in fact what they potentially already are? This would be via bipartisan agreement. Both parties want to win over the Latinos. So far the Democrats have shown a more consistent stance. The Republican dependency, the Tea Party, and the conservative social base are burdens that prevent their issuing loud and clear signals.
Obama is winning
At the moment Obama is winning the game through a tour de force that his fellow pro-immigration party members were expecting for some time. The price to be charged by a Congress in Republican hands’reprisals have already been announced’is a measure of the value of the Latino vote to the Democrats. But there’s a long way to go until the undocumented are registered. The one who registers them will be the good guy and will reap their votes. Then the undocumented migrants’ staying power and the support given them by activists and certain media will be rewarded.
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