Commentary:
By Oscar Chacon

When it comes to immigration policy reform, what does the newly found “Latino Power” mean? The answer to this question depends on how well organized Latino and Latino immigrant communities can be when it comes to affecting the national political and policy debate about immigrants, Latinos and U.S. immigration policy.

As it is well known, beginning on election night last November 6th, one of the most talked about changes in the political landscape of the nation is the rising power of Latino voters in the U.S. The story goes as far as suggesting that one of the key failures made by the Republican Party during the just concluded election was to alienate the Latino community by taking a hard line approach on immigration policy. Such an approach included suggestions by the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to the effect that the infamous Arizona anti-immigrant law should become the model for the rest of the nation, and that self-deportation by immigrants residing and working in the U.S. without immigration status could be achieved by making life for them in the U.S. as hard as possible.

The newly-found focus on the rising “Latino Power” has given impetus to the possibility of both political parties coming together to enact immigration policy reform in the near future. The promise by President Obama to pursue immigration policy reform in his second term, accompanied by statements made by Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress to the same effect have created a perception that both parties might be ready to move forward with immigration policy reform soon. However, what it is not clear with this narrative is what specifically they are planning to do.

The basic idea behind the newly acknowledged “Latino Power” is that both political parties must do right by it if they want to improve their chances for electoral success in the future. From a demographic point of view, there is no question about the fact that one of the most rapidly growing segment of new voters in the U.S. over the next few decades will come from the segment of our population of Latin American origin. In this respect, it is highly desirable for both political parties to be on good terms with the Latino community if they want to be in a position to secure the support of this growing segment of the electorate.

The news media and policy analysts are correct in pointing that U.S. immigration policy reform is badly needed. Our current immigration policy is obsolete, inhumane, dysfunctional and terribly wasteful. The origins of our current policy go back to the mid 1960s, with several superficial fixes enacted at various times since then, including the piece of legislation wrongfully referred to as the 1986 Amnesty. However, beginning in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the national debate about U.S. immigration policy took a turn for the worst.

Such a turn has been intimately tied to the national narrative about Latino communities and Mexican and other Latin American immigrants that has dominated over the past 20 years. Beginning in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, political forces motivated by a racist and xenophobic agenda began to paint new immigrants as an economic, social, political and cultural threat to the integrity of the nation. Given the fact that people from Mexico and other Latin American countries make up the largest segment of the foreign born population residing in the U.S., the demonization of “immigrants” has been a synonymous with the demonizing of Latino communities, including those born and raised in the U.S.

The first highly organized attack against Latino and Latino Immigrant communities arrived in the form of Proposition 187 in California, the one state in the nation where the Latino community has been so highly concentrated. As is well known, this Proposition managed to get the support of a majority of voters. The then Republican governor, Pete Wilson, managed to get re-elected by attacking Mexican and other Latin American immigrant communities and, by extension, all Latinos in California. Even although most of the mean-spirited provisions contained within Proposition 187 were struck down by the courts for their outright unconstitutionality, the actual prejudice against Latino communities kept steadily growing throughout the nation.

The extreme political forces that brought about Proposition 187 in California were able to harness the growing prejudice against Latino communities, particularly Mexican and other Latin American immigrant communities; and managed to come back with a vengeance at the Federal level with the passage in September of 1996 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act or IIRIRA for its acronym. The passage of such a law with a significant number of Democratic legislators voting for it, demonstrated the fact that anti-immigrant sentiments have not been an exclusive characteristic of Republican legislators. Besides, it was President Bill Clinton who signed IIRIRA into law.

The negative narrative about immigrants and, by extension, Latino communities in the U.S. has been the backdrop for all legislative initiatives on U.S. immigration policy reform for most of the past ten years, as well as the many anti-immigrant law and regulations passed by many local and state governments. The notion that immigrants, mostly from Mexico and other Latin American countries, must be punished for their infractions of an outdated law that has been a dominant characteristic of our public and legislative deliberations on immigrants and immigration policy makes no sense. That law should have been subjected to constant change over the past four decades in order to keep it in sync with the ever more interdependent relationship between the U.S. and its southern neighbors, The punishment mentality has been absolutely dominant in the way the Republican Party relates to these issues, but it has also found a great deal of acceptance within Democratic Party circles.

The insistence by the Obama Administration to rigorously apply existing U.S. immigration law, which has gained them the infamous distinction of having been the Administration that has deported the most people ever, is one piece of evidence of the lack of bold new ideas within the Democratic Party leadership circles when it comes to U.S. immigration policy. Another piece of evidence of the same characteristic is the highly punitive nature of Democratic Party-led immigration reform bills filed over the past few years.

All this brings to the forefront the need to realize that in order to speak of a truly new day when it comes to how political parties should related to the growing Latino community power, it is imperative to leave behind the deeply polluted narrative about immigrants and Latinos in America. Conversely, the once again ignited debate about U.S. immigration policy reform must move away once and for all from the highly punitive mindset that has dominated since at least the early 1990’s.

What is mostly broken with current U.S. immigration policy is precisely its highly punitive nature, which has already caused millions of families to experience forceful separations just over the past few years. Another example of what makes it terribly broken is the fact that every night over 30 thousand foreign nationals, mostly Mexicans and from other Latin American nations, are found in detention centers, on their way to be deported. The fact that millions of permanent resident visa applications take forever to be fully resolved is another example of what actually is now broken with U.S. immigration policy. This list could go on and on.

If we truly have entered a new day when it comes to the respect and the dignity Latino communities deserve, both political parties must be pushed to leave behind their punishment-above-all-else approach to immigration policy reform and focus on really fixing, all at once or little by little, what is actually terribly broken with our current law. Otherwise, we may well end up with an immigration reform law that does not fundamentally change anything of what makes today’s immigration law so deeply hurtful to millions of Latino families in the U.S.

Oscar Chacon serves currently as executive director for the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC), a national network of immigrant-led organizations from around the country. Oscar is an immigrant from El Salvador with over 30 years of experience on immigrant rights and immigration policy advocacy issues in the U.S. and abroad. He can be reached atochacon@nalacc.org.