Immigration conflation

by Stephen Menendian, Research Associate for the Kirwan Institute

A few years ago I chided my European friends, who are used to lecturing me in holier-than-thou tones about American policies, for the anti-immigrant turn in their countries, particularly the surprising popularity of anti-immigrant demagogues like Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider, and Pim Fortyn, and the subsequent rejection of the EU Constitution in those same countries. I was forced to eat crow when large scale demonstrations broke out in the US last spring, spurred by similar misgivings and apprehensions.

Immigration, as an issue, is really many issues. It's an economic issue, a cultural question, a security dilemma, and a legal question, among others – all of which are conflated into an incoherent whole. This conflation produces a debate that is astonishingly confused. Every night Lou Dobbs can be heard complaining about the need to “secure our borders.” Is he talking about national security? Primarily, he's talking about economics. The Lou Dobbs mantra is the decline of the middle class. He connects immigration with a declining middle class every evening on TV and in print, but he doesn't clearly explain what the connection is. Perhaps the rhetorical conflation is easier to swallow than a careful economic analysis.

Then there is the cultural side of the immigration debate, prominently displayed in the writings of Samuel Huntington, among others. The fear is that immigrants today - as distinguished from the past - will not assimilate. The assimilationist ideal is largely a post-hoc fabrication. America never represented a single cultural tradition. The original thirteen colonies were rival religious and cultural factions that arrived on these shores for very different reasons. The Puritans scorned the Quakers who despised the Calvinists, and so on. Contrary to the assumption that Americans largely reflect a single viewpoint or cultural tradition, the federalist structure of our system assumes a pluralism of viewpoint bound together through a common Constitution. Democracy is a system designed to negotiate that pluralism.

And the security side of the immigration debate? In our post-9/11 world, the idea is that porous borders make it possible for terrorists to enter the US. This is very different from the claim that illegal immigration will drive down standards of living or lead to a clash of cultures.

Then there is the legal side of the debate. From the very first Immigration Act in 1790, restricting immigration to “free white persons,” immigration has had a racial component. Today, it is critical to emphasize that immigration is not about Hispanics or Latinos. The immigration question is a much broader (and narrower) legal question about requirements for citizenship.

An honest and careful debate on immigration will strive to clarify the separate components of the immigration debate and help to build policies that address each in their own sphere without conflating them for rhetorical flourish.

Is Senator Obama Black Enough?

by Andrew Grant-Thomas, Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute

Actually, I think the question isn't so much "inherently flawed" as it is instructive/revealing about the operation of race and racial thinking in this country in ways that even people who consider themselves progressive may find uncomfortable. Certainly, the question itself highlights the "social construction of race," which we enact implicitly all the time, but almost never affirm explicitly.

It's instructive to note that the question of whether Senator Obama is "black enough" has become increasingly salient for a lot of people in proportion to his political ascendancy. People may have started asking whether he is black enough in 2004 after his convention speech, with references to his non-slave ancestry, biracial parentage, Harvard law degree, non-civil rights background, etc. But the question of Senator Obama's blackness becomes more significant only now that a plausibly black candidate poses a serious challenge to prevailing expectations. In fact, I'd say that from the moment he burst onto the national scene, the prospect of his sooner-than-later becoming a viable presidential candidate was part of what fueled those early questions about his blackness.

It is also interesting that the media typically frame the issue of Senator Obama's blackness as if this is a question only African Americans are debating. (Actually, I question the degree to which this is being debated at all. We can't ever lose sight of the media's role—as agents, rather than mere conduits—in establishing the parameters of "race talk" in this country.) But to the extent that an active debate about Senator Obama's blackness really is taking place, I strongly suspect that much of it is taking place among white Americans. Many white voters who otherwise might like and support him may well conclude that they cannot support a "black" candidate for president. The president, after all, is not only the country's chief executive, he more than anyone else is its public face and embodiment, ­not to mention the "leader of the free world." We tend to infer too much about the state of race from the successes of a relatively few people of color, but this particular "first" would be a biggie.

For a lot of people of all stripes, whether or not Senator Obama is black enough/too black remains to be determined. Part of the answer will depend on the Senator himself­, his political and policy positions, whom he's seen as reaching out to, etc.­, and part on the dynamics of the campaign, including poll numbers. But an important part will also owe to interracial signaling. Some white voters will conclude that he's too black as African Americans and other non-white voters move to embrace him, quite apart from what he himself says or does. And some black voters will grow suspicious because whites seem to like him. So, Senator Obama himself will have only limited power to shape how people answer the "blackness" question. What better indication of the fluidity and contingency of race in today's America?