The 2008 election of Barack Obama appeared to herald a new dawn for 12 million undocumented immigrants, many of them laboring in the US’s most exhausting and underpaid workplaces.
The president’s own aunt, 58-year-old Zeituni Onyango, was forced to live “without papers” in Boston when a judge rejected her original petition for asylum in 2004. So it seemed Obama would be sympathetic to the plight of immigrants at least.
However, mounting evidence indicates life is becoming increasingly miserable for the undocumented population in the US.
A study by the Pew Hispanic Center has showed a clear drop in the number of undocumented living in the US.
A September 1 Washington Post article on the study said: “A deep recession and tougher border enforcement have led to a sharp decline in the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally in the past five years, contributing to the first significant reversal in the growth of their numbers in two decades, according to a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center …
“In the first half of the decade, an average of 850,000 people a year entered the United States without authorization, according to the report, released Wednesday. As the economy plunged into recession between 2007 and 2009, that number fell to 300,000 …
“The new figures come amid a heated national debate over efforts by Arizona and other jurisdictions to identify people who are here illegally and push to have them deported.”
Undocumented immigrants are trapped in a vice of recession and repression. Desperate for a return to power, the Republicans are fuelling anti-immigrant hatred across a volatile nation, with 25 million people unemployed or underemployed.
However, this doesn’t explain why the plight of the undocumented has dramatically worsened in a time when the Democratic Party dominates Congress and runs the White House.
Obama and the Democratic Party have abandoned immigrants.
In December 2005, the House of Representatives passed by a margin of 239 to 182 the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Immigration Control Act, known as HR 4437.
Author and immigrant rights activist David Bacon, in his 2008 book Illegal People, described the law as “one of the most repressive immigration proposals of the last hundred years”.
The bill was a declaration of war. Its implementation would have led to in the forced eviction of the US’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.
Resistance erupted with millions taking to the streets in the mega-marches in 2006. May Day demonstrations of millions who took the day off work reflected the pivotal contribution of immigrant labour.
With US corporations dependent on immigrant labor and sensitive to the threat to profits if they lost access to it, the “moderate” wings of the Republican and Democratic Parties made sure the bill was rejected in the Senate.
Yet the war on immigrants didn’t end. The Bush administration carried out workplace immigration raids across the country. The images were shocking: immigrant workers shackled and chained together, grossly criminalised.
The great surge of enthusiasm for Obama’s presidential campaign came from tens of millions of ordinary working Americans, but also from sections of the US establishment. Both were desperate for change, but with deeply different visions and expectations.
The powerful clamored for a return to the status quo — global hegemony, but without the barbarism of US power constantly on display under Bush.
Obama also galvanised immigrants and the immigrant advocacy movement to pour massive amounts of time, dollars and energy into his election bid.
Once in office, Obama continued the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The funding for Israeli violence goes on.
At home, the “terror raids” against the undocumented have mostly disappeared — but the squeeze on the undocumented population has grown tighter.
Author Justin Akers Chacon, writing in the September-October issue of the International Socialist Review, described how Obama and the Democratic Party have abandoned the undocumented: “Despite its being a major campaign promise, the Obama administration jettisoned plans for a legalization program in late April of 2010, concluding that lawmakers lacked the ‘appetite’ to get behind it.
“‘I don’t want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn’t solve the problem”, he was quoted as saying.
“Ironically, by not advancing legalization at the federal level, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have allowed the Republican Party to seize the initiative at the state and local level, and run aggressive crusade-like campaigns against immigrants purely for the sake of politics …
“Rhetoric aside, the punitive measures against immigrant workers by the Obama administration have been severe.”
The Obama White House’s multi-pronged approach to immigration enforcement includes expanding the federal 287(g) programs, which allow state and local law enforcement to enforce immigration law; extension and expansion of the E-Verify database system targeting undocumented workers; and implementation of the “Secure Communities Initiative” that lets participating cities and towns access federal immigration and criminal databases to check the status of people detained in local jails.
Under the Obama administration’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security has increased its target for deportations in 2010 to 400,000, up by about 20% from the Bush years.
In August, Obama signed into law a US$600 million “border security bill”, with funding for 1500 more Border Patrol agents, customs inspectors and other law enforcement officers at the border, as well as more pilotless aerial “drones”.
About 300,000 immigrants continue to languish in the sprawling for-profit detention centre network across the country.
An August 29 New York Times article that documented the growing encroachment of Border Patrol on buses and trains inside the US said: “Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon.
“The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.”
Chacon summarised in the ISR: “The ratcheting up of enforcement under the Obama administration has not only continued the policies of the Bush administration, but it has set a new standard in enforcement priority.”
The Obama administration is making life increasingly unbearable for the undocumented. Walls, physical and virtual, are getting higher on the border and in the interior.
In essence, change has come, but for the worse. The primary interest from the White House is the strengthening of the US state at home and abroad.
This is the cord that binds Obama to Bush.
[Abridged from http://www.socialistWorker.org ]