Secrets of the right-wing conspiracy playbook
The debate over immigration and the border is a classic example of how the extreme right manipulates real issues
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The extremist right in America has always fed on real grievances that go either unaddressed or are mishandled by the mainstream system—by government, and in particular the federal government. In the 1980s and ’90s, they channeled discontent with badly malfunctioning federal farming and land-use policies in rural America into uprisings like the Posse Comitatus and Patriot/militia movements and their various offshoots, such as the Montana Freemen. This led to armed standoffs with federal agents and varying waves of domestic terrorism, all of it emanating from the American heartland.
What these extremists always tell their audiences is that there are simple reasons for their current miseries—inevitably, it is a combination of a secret cabal of elite conspirators running society like a puppet show at the top, crushing the middle-class working man from above, while a parasitic underclass saps his strength from below. This usually plays out, in the worldview of right-wing extremists, as being part of a secret conspiracy to enslave ordinary working people and destroy America.
What gives them special traction, however, is their knack for finding unaddressed grievances and exploiting them as examples of this conspiracy, thus manipulating working-class people who have legitimate problems. Their agenda comes wrapped in an appeal telling people that they not only feel their pain but have the answers to end it. And their strategy works, time and again.
In the twenty-first century, right-wing extremists became focused on a similarly dysfunctional immigration system as a means to recruit believers, in part because nativism is part of the genetic structure of the racist American right, dating back to the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, and in part because it was such a ripe opportunity target. After all, American immigration policy in the past forty years and more has time and again proven a colossal bureaucratic bungle that no one has been able to untangle, which presents an opening for right-wing extremists to jump in and offer their toxic solutions. Moreover, as is always the case in such vacuums, it is ordinary working-class people who wind up paying the price for the problems that ensue from such bungles, and extremists have long honed their appeals to reach those disgruntled citizens. This was nowhere more evident than in the desert landscape of Arizona in the first decade of the new millennium. It was there that these misbegotten policies came home to roost, embodied in a flood of border-crossing immigrants who defied both death and the law—sometimes not successfully—in a desperate attempt to reach work north of the border, and who in the process trampled on people’s ranches and yards and inflamed not only resentment but the increasingly paranoid fears of the people already living there.
The underlying problems inherent in the American immigration system probably date as far back as the Klan’s heyday, when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924. Also known as the Asian Exclusion Act, this was an explicitly xenophobic law whose primary purpose was to eliminate any further immigration from Japan and other Asian nations, largely because the Japanese were believed to be incapable of becoming “real Americans.” It also first enshrined in law the concept of the “illegal alien” and created a system of national quotas that would permit immigration officials to regulate the racial and ethnic composition of the people coming over American borders. Most of the explicitly racial and ethnic components of the law were gradually stripped out over the ensuing years, but the xenophobic bones of the system—predicated on creating a seemingly interminable maze of hurdles and hoops for immigrants to jump through en route to citizenship— have remained firmly in place.
The deadly crisis in the Arizona desert was created by a series of policy changes begun during the administration of George H. W. Bush and then exacerbated by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. The big gorilla among these was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was negotiated by Bush Sr., Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1993, and then ratified with the active support of Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. The treaty, which in creating a trilateral trade bloc opened up the ability of investment capital to cross borders freely, was sold to the American public as, among other things, an essential component in controlling immigration.
The Clinton administration followed NAFTA with a series of border operations apparently intended to ensure that, even if capital could now cross the borders freely, labor could not. The first of these was called Operation Hold the Line, begun in late 1993, and its focus was to clamp down on the steady flow of illegal immigrants who came to the United States through the border cities of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. By adding manpower and enhancing patrols in weakly secure areas where people traditionally walked across the border, the Border Patrol was able to effectively close off one of the major ports through which people usually crossed on their way north to work. This was followed shortly, in October 1994, by Operation Gatekeeper at the San Diego/Tijuana crossing corridor in California.
At first, the Border Patrol boasted of the marvelous success of these operations. Apprehensions dropped precipitously in the months after they were initiated, indicating, according to analysts, “better deterrence”: that is, it was believed the programs effectively discouraged people from trying to cross the border. “We can control the border, in fact,” boasted Mark Krikorian of the nativist Center for Immigration Studies, which eagerly supported the operations. “But there is more to be done.”
In reality, not only did these operations eventually prove the futility of an enforcement-heavy approach to securing the border, but they also became a human disaster—precisely because immigrants were no longer crossing at El Paso or San Diego. Instead, they were now fanning out into the countryside, attempting life-threatening border crossings in the middle of the desert. Like a river when a boulder falls into its path, the immigrants simply flowed out into the outlying areas.
Hardly anyone observed this phenomenon at first, because they were so enamored with the results of their El Paso experiment. Two more Clinton-administration campaigns followed: Operation Safeguard, in Nogales, Ari- zona, in 1996, and Operation Rio Grande on the southern Texas border in 1998. The administration also sponsored and passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Act of 1996, which massively expanded funding for the Border Patrol, called for construction of border fences in key areas, and toughened penalties for human smuggling. All for naught: by the end of the 1990s, studies demonstrated clearly that the flow of immigrants over the southern border had been anything but stanched. Estimates showed that by the end of 1999, some 5.5 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States, reflecting an annual increase of at least 275,000.
The numbers kept growing because the tide of immigrants had swollen to a tsunami—in large part because of NAFTA and its effects on the Mexican and American economies. When Mexico approved NAFTA in 1992, President Salinas abolished a provision in the Mexican constitution that protected the traditional small Mexican farmers from competition with corporate agribusiness, particularly American corporations. This proved disastrous for those farmers, whose chief staple was corn—a crop with deep historic roots in Mexico. For centuries even before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, Mayan farmers had cultivated corn in their milpas, the small acreages that farmers cleared out of the local landscapes so they could cultivate corn, beans, and squash. Over the ensuing centuries, small farms had remained one of the staples of the Mexican economy. Now, thanks to the arrival of American agribusiness under the banner of NAFTA, that way of life was being rubbed out.
Cheap American corn put over a million Mexican farmers out of business, and that was just the beginning. With the economy collapsing around them, scores of manufacturers who specialized in clothing, toys, footwear, and leather goods all went out of business. The only upside to NAFTA for Mexico—the arrival of new manufacturing jobs, including auto-building plants, as they departed the United States for cheaper shores, and of a fresh wave of maquiladora, the plants where various manufacturers would outsource their labor to Mexico—proved illusory. By 2000, many of those jobs had been taken to even cheaper labor sources in Asia, and the bleeding only grew worse from there.
In the meantime, the American economy—riding along first on a technology bubble and then on a housing bubble—was bustling, creating in the process in excess of five hundred thousand unskilled-labor jobs every year, the vast majority of which American workers either would not or could not perform. Yet the antiquated American immigration system only issued five thousand green cards annually to cover them.
The result was a massive demand for immigrant labor in the United States and an eager supply in Mexico seeking work. At the border, where a rational transaction should have been taking place, there was instead a xenophobic crackdown aimed at keeping Mexican labor in Mexico, with predictably limited success.
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