4

From Jim Crow to Juan Crow

In the United States, we have, over the course of generations, developed our own system of values. These are the ideas that dominate our culture and shape how each of us views the world beginning at a very young age. There are a number of such values that we can identify as being commonly held across generations and across regions of the country. However, there may be none that are more central to the American identity than (1) liberty; (2) equality; and (3) family. Those three, in particular, are at the very core of what we profess to stand for as Americans. These values are so near and dear to our hearts that when we perceive something that infringes upon them, our sense of injustice and outrage can be triggered very quickly.

Expert filmmakers have learned this lesson well. They know that they can almost instantaneously shift our loyalties and manipulate our emotions by even just briefly tapping into these values. Thus, in the Star Wars movies, all it takes are short depictions of the Empire’s authoritarian tactics to immediately identify them as the villains and the Rebels as the freedom fighters. In Braveheart, a few brief scenes that depicted Scots as second-class citizens of the British Empire were enough to turn much of the audience into rabid defenders of Scottish independence. The horrors of being forcibly separated from one’s family members are so evocative for us that Liam Neeson was somehow able to make three Taken movies, and the four The Hunger Games movies grossed nearly $3 billion.¹

These values also have more practical applications, of course. For example, as a country we have a rich tradition of humanitarianism toward individuals suffering from oppressive conditions elsewhere around the world. We have an asylum process for individuals who demonstrate that they were “persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.”² In other words, when lack of liberty or unequal treatment threatens the well-being of people around the world, we have often been willing to provide safe haven for them. Plus, for over fifty years, our immigration policies have prioritized “family unification,” meaning that we have given preference to the family members of US residents. Through these and a variety of other means, we have put our core values into practice, allowing countless individuals to enjoy higher-quality lives in the process.

This is the cultural tradition in which I was raised. It was a source of pride that, when it came to immigration issues, my country was willing to stand up for individual liberties, the fundamental equality of all people, and the importance of familial bonds. I was, of course, educated enough to know that our track record on these matters was nowhere close to perfect, but I still believed that the US’s approach to immigration was truly guided by the famous quote on our Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I believed that, even with all our flaws, we still generally treated people here and around the world better than other countries, and that there was something to this idea of “American exceptionalism.”

Then I began spending time within immigrant communities around the United States. In particular, I began working very closely with predominantly Latinx but also Caribbean and South Asian immigrant communities in New York, California, Colorado, Virginia, Illinois, Florida, and numerous other parts of the country. I witnessed how, across the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, we have implemented public policies that have caused millions of people to live in constant, abject fear that they or their loved ones will be detained or deported. I observed how we have expanded the Criminalization Trap described in chapter 3 to terrorize immigrant communities with the threat of not only criminal justice consequences but immigration consequences as well. I watched as we created bands of law enforcement officials charged with hunting down brown-skinned people who don’t have legal immigration status. I have seen how, as a nation, we have been deliberately cruel to some of the most dispossessed people in the world as a matter of policy.

Those descriptions may seem overblown to you. That is what I would have thought if I had read those words years ago. Before I saw these dynamics for myself, I was resistant to accepting the truth about how we treat migrants in this country. I didn’t want to believe that this was such a significant part of who we are as a country right now. Thus, even as I began working with immigrant communities, I rationalized the injustice I was seeing as the actions of a few misguided public officials. However, as I became more acquainted with how routinely and comprehensively we mistreat undocumented immigrants, I realized that what I was seeing weren’t aberrations; they were the norm. I learned that those core American values of liberty, equality, and family are far from absolute. Though they may be deeply rooted within us, we Americans can, under the wrong influences, abandon them entirely. We can be made to support, or at least accept, severe limitations on people’s liberties, thoroughly unequal treatment of particular groups of people, and the wanton destruction of families. In other words, we have shown ourselves to be more than capable of permitting our public policies to systematically devalue the lives of millions of people of color who migrate to the United States from around the world.

The reality is that most Americans have virtually no knowledge of the policies and dynamics that I am describing. Most of us have never witnessed the devastation caused by our immigration policies on a daily basis. Most of us have no direct experience with the impact that this type of agonizing fear and anxiety can have on a person. We have never been on the sharp end of discrimination that is widely deemed to be acceptable simply because of where we were born. If you don’t live or spend a great deal of time within immigrant communities, it is quite easy to live your life unburdened by the realities of what is being done by our policy makers. To be sure, one can easily find extensive coverage of a variety of immigration issues within mainstream media. However, what is almost never highlighted within that coverage is what is most important: that for many years the United States has been implementing a set of public policies that target the undocumented members of our society with a barrage of unequal and unjust treatment that virtually ensures that their lives will be filled with fear, trauma, and suffering. In other words, despite our stated commitment to aiding individuals who face persecution abroad, we are actively persecuting millions of people in our own country solely because of their race, ethnicity, country of origin, and immigration status.

Of course, there is plenty of room for disagreement on the particulars of immigration policy. The decisions about who gets to come here and stay here are often both difficult and complex. But at the core of this thorny set of issues there is actually a very simple question that we are called to answer: How are we going to treat the people who are already here but who don’t have legal status? There are approximately eleven million such undocumented immigrants (or about one out of every thirty people in the United States).³ They have migrated here over the past several decades for a wide variety of reasons. Many faced horrendous conditions in their home countries—some of which were created or exacerbated by US policies—that essentially “pushed” them here. Most were also “pulled” here by job opportunities and the possibility of a higher quality of life. What they all share in common is that they would have all preferred to enter the country legally and be “documented.” Given the choice, no one would opt to be undocumented, not with all the consequences and risk that has come to entail (including, for many, having to cross one of the most brutal deserts in the world, a trek that has claimed thousands of lives).⁴ However, for the vast majority of undocumented immigrants, there was no real choice. Hardly any of those eleven million people had any viable path to come here legally. Those opportunities have simply not been provided by US law.⁵

So that leaves the rest of us with a choice to make. One would hope that in making that choice, we would live up to our core values and opt for the humane treatment of those who have migrated here and now make their homes here. Sometimes—such as with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—we have. However, far too often we have instead opted for brutal and heartless treatment of migrants. As a country, we often act as if their lack of US citizenship grants us a license to abuse them for our own benefit. Thus, rather than putting our core values into practice, we have extended the worst of our American traditions: that of setting ourselves apart from, and above, those we define as being different from “us.” In other words, our modern-day treatment of undocumented immigrants follows in the same line of some of the most shameful chapters from US history, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the forced displacement of Native Americans, and Jim Crow segregation, among others.

How have so many of us been led to view migrants as the “other,” to actually value their lives less than those of other people? And who benefits from that? By this point in the book, I am sure you can guess that our collective ignorance and failure to address such a long-standing example of systemic racism aren’t accidental. Our treatment of immigrants may be a flagrant betrayal of core American values, but it is also a prime example of the strategic racism employed by the ultra-wealthy. As will be discussed later in this chapter, a small group of Corporate America and Wall Street executives have been instrumental in creating and preserving the immigration policies that have forced millions of people to live “in the shadows” as far less than equal members of our society. While the stated rationales for our many harsh, anti-immigrant policies have been that such policies are necessary to protect public safety, uphold the rule of law, and avoid the overextension of limited public resources, these are, for the most part, merely smokescreens. The primary purpose behind our cruelty toward migrants is to advance the wealth accumulation of billionaires and multimillionaires.

Thus, while there are many immigration issues that contribute to racial injustice, in this chapter the focus will be quite narrow. It centers on whether we, as a country, are going to continue allowing undocumented residents of the United States to be ruthlessly exploited and treated as a virtually permanent underclass, or not. To put it another way, we have to decide how we are going to treat millions of people who made the same decisions that we likely would have made had we been in their shoes (that is, if we hadn’t had the luxury of never having to consider transnational migration as a means of survival).

To address that issue, and demonstrate how the ultra-wealthy profit off immigrants’ pain, it may help to start by understanding how our immigration policies work in practice. And there may be no better place to exemplify how hostile and degrading such policies can be toward immigrants than Arizona.

The Eye of the Storm

The population of Arizona has experienced two dramatic demographic shifts in recent decades. First, it has become home to the largest number of aging baby boomers anywhere in the United States outside of Florida.⁶ Drawn by the warm weather, dry air, relatively low cost of living, and “senior friendly” communities, Arizona has become a prime destination for retirees and “snowbirds.”

Second, the undocumented population in Arizona increased dramatically as the state became by far the most heavily traveled passageway through which undocumented immigrants pass over the border from Mexico. That shift was attributable, in significant part, to federal immigration policy. Because of stricter enforcement policies along the border in California, New Mexico, and Texas beginning in the 1990s, migrant crossings were essentially funneled into Arizona.⁷ The thought was that the harsh desert along the Arizona-Mexico border would serve as a natural deterrent to border crossings. In reality, and because of how desperate many migrants are, it just made the journey to the United States far more dangerous while concentrating many of the effects of migration within one particular region.⁸ Obviously, many of the migrants entering the United States through Arizona continue on to other states around the country. However, many others choose to stay in the state. As a result, it is estimated that the number of undocumented immigrants in Arizona increased from ninety thousand in 1990 to half a million in 2007.⁹

Thus, the state was simultaneously inundated with both older, predominantly white Americans, and mostly young Mexicans and Central Americans.¹⁰ In one sense, you can see how these two groups were on a collision course. The seniors who relocated to Arizona were sold a vision of perpetual tans, immaculate golf courses, low taxes, and simple living. What wasn’t included in the shiny brochures were the realities associated with large numbers of migrant individuals and families who are struggling to survive and gain their own toehold on a better life. Thus, many of Arizona’s light-skinned transplants saw the state’s darker-skinned transplants as intruders within their retirement paradise.

While such conflict was perhaps unsurprising, there has also been a codependence that has developed between these two populations. Meeting the needs of an expanding community of retirees requires workers who can build new senior living facilities, provide home-based health care services, and handle all the lawn mowing, housecleaning, and other domestic chores that many seniors can no longer do themselves. Those jobs have often been filled by immigrants. Thus, Arizona’s senior community is often just as reliant on the undocumented workers helping to meet their geriatric needs as those workers are on them for their jobs.

Nevertheless, beginning in the 1990s, the response to the influx of undocumented immigrants in Arizona (and elsewhere) was to institute what essentially amounted to a “tough-on-immigrants” strategy. Just as our so-called tough-on-crime approach in the criminal justice system used hyperaggressive enforcement tactics and severe criminal consequences for offenders, our immigration policies began to single out undocumented immigrants for severe mistreatment while also ratcheting up the penalties for unauthorized border crossings. Many of these tough-on-immigrants policies came from the federal government, such as the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the creation of a massive “deportation machine” directed at undocumented individuals already within the country.¹¹ While these federal initiatives were devastating to countless migrant families, many states and localities still took it upon themselves to layer on additional anti-immigrant policies. Arizona, in particular, took up this mantle with extreme vigor. Here is just a sample of Arizona’s crackdown on the undocumented:

•1996: Until the 1990s, undocumented immigrants were able to get driver’s licenses anywhere in the United States. California was the first state to revoke that access in 1993, and then Arizona followed suit in 1996. (Forty-five other states joined them in subsequent years.)¹²

•2000: Proposition 203, which banned bilingual education in Arizona public schools in favor of so-called “immersion” strategies, was passed with 63 percent of the vote.¹³

•2004: Proposition 200, which passed with 56 percent of the vote, prohibited undocumented immigrants from receiving any public benefits.¹⁴

•2006: Proposition 103, which passed with 74 percent of the vote, made English the official language of the state and prohibited most government business from being done in other languages. Proposition 300, passed with 72 percent of the vote, made undocumented persons ineligible for child care assistance, adult education, in-state college tuition, and financial aid. Proposition 100, passed with 78 percent of the vote, singled out undocumented immigrants as being ineligible for bail for certain criminal offenses. Proposition 102, passed with 74 percent of the vote, singled out undocumented immigrants as being ineligible to receive punitive damages in the event they win a civil lawsuit.¹⁵

•2010: The state legislature passed SB 1070, arguably the most comprehensive anti-immigrant law ever passed in the United States up to that point. Its stated purpose was to pursue “attrition through enforcement,” meaning that the legislators wanted to make living conditions so bad for undocumented immigrants that they would leave the state voluntarily.¹⁶ It included a number of provisions designed to achieve that effect, including making it a state crime to reside or work in the United States without legal permission, requiring law enforcement officers to verify the legal status of all individuals who were arrested or detained, and making it a crime to transport or “harbor” an undocumented immigrant. (Thus, driving one’s grandmother to the doctor or having her live with you would be a crime if she were undocumented.) The law also required law enforcement officers to determine a person’s immigration status during stops, detentions, and arrests if there was a “reasonable suspicion” that the person was undocumented (thus legalizing blatant racial profiling).¹⁷ Less than six weeks after SB 1070 was signed into law, the state also banned the teaching of ethnic studies classes.¹⁸

On top of these state-level anti-immigrant measures, many localities instituted additional policies targeting undocumented immigrants. In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and over 60 percent of the total state population, Sheriff Joe Arpaio carved out a national reputation for himself owing to the extreme anti-immigrant policies he instituted during his twenty-four-year tenure.¹⁹ For example, the self-styled “America’s toughest sheriff” detained individuals charged with immigration offenses in an outdoor jail called Tent City where the temperatures reached as high as 145 degrees during the day. Arpaio referred to this jail as his own “concentration camp.” He seemed to delight in demeaning those he incarcerated, such as by forcing men to wear pink underwear and denying women menstrual hygiene products and forcing them to sleep on their own blood-stained sheets. He also reinstated chain gangs and ran a twenty-four-hour webcast from within his jails that showed people being arrested, strip searched, and held in cells. He even had webcams mounted in bathrooms and streamed live footage of women using the toilet.²⁰

Arpaio’s efforts to target the Latinx community with immigration enforcement actions escalated in 2007 when his department became the first in the country to partner with ICE to implement on a large scale what is known as a 287(g) agreement. This agreement allows state and local law enforcement officials to become deputized as, and perform the duties of, federal immigration officers. Arpaio used this newfound authority to conduct perhaps the most tyrannical sweeps and raids in modern US history. For many years, the Sheriff’s Department would target Latinx communities, establish a perimeter, and send in over one hundred officers, who over the course of several days would stop everyone who was suspected of being undocumented (which in reality often meant everyone who was brown-skinned). Arpaio recruited nearly one thousand civilians to become part of an armed “posse” that would assist with these immigrant roundups.²¹

Each one of these state- and local-level policies had a profoundly harmful impact on people around the state. The English-only law and the ethnic studies ban created shame around people’s language and cultural identity. The ban on public benefits meant that many people could no longer access professional health care services, and as a result a number of individuals were subsequently deported directly from hospitals because they had a health care emergency and they weren’t able to cover the charges out of pocket. The ban on educational services sent an unmistakable signal that an entire community of people wasn’t going to be allowed to improve upon its social and economic status. The ban on bail meant that a certain class of people was truly treated as guilty until proven innocent. The bans on punitive damages and driver’s licenses reinforced the notion that undocumented immigrants weren’t to be afforded the same protections and privileges as Americans. The raids and sweeps made people so fearful that they would lock themselves in their houses for three or four days at a time, not even leaving to take their children to school. SB 1070 made every minute of every day a minefield of potential encounters with police that could lead to being permanently separated from one’s family.

When viewed in isolation, each one of these policies has been rather vicious. Taken as a whole, they represent an all-out assault on every aspect of life for Arizona’s undocumented population. Each one of them creates or expands the divide between “them” and “us.” Each one of them ramps up the degree of difficulty of living in Arizona as an undocumented person. Each one of them increases the likelihood that undocumented individuals, and families with one or more undocumented members, will become trapped in a vicious cycle of intergenerational poverty and criminalization. Overall, the end result for most of the people targeted by these policies is either (a) their lives are made to be so miserable that they leave the state voluntarily; or (b) they stay in Arizona, continue to work largely menial jobs, but are forced so far into the shadows that the rest of society barely has to account for them.

In other words, Arizona essentially decided to abuse people so thoroughly and repeatedly that they would either reach a point where they couldn’t take it anymore or they would have to accept being continually demeaned and exploited. Go ahead and try to reconcile that approach with your understanding of American values. The deliberate creation of an aggressively inhospitable environment is what you do to address an infestation by mice or roaches in your house, or what a petulant teenager does to register unhappiness over having a new step-parent. It is far beneath any country that purports to exercise moral leadership across the globe—or at least it should be.

To understand how dehumanizing this collection of laws has been on Arizona’s undocumented residents, it is of course best to listen directly to those who have been affected by them. Thus, I visited Arizona in February 2018 to meet with undocumented residents and hear their stories about how the policies described here have intersected with their lives. For example, I met Josefina, a mother of four with a broad smile and a magnetic personal warmth that makes even strangers feel like they have known her for their whole lives.²² She and her family had, by that point, lived in Phoenix for sixteen years. She told me that for her, and many families like hers, the reality of being targeted by Arizona’s anti-immigrant policies could be felt every minute of every day.

“We leave the house as infrequently as possible,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen, so we really only are out to go from home to work, and then from work to home. When we have to go to the grocery store, no one ever goes alone. The entire family goes together. That is the level we have come to—that one person cannot go to the store alone because of the fear of being stopped. We all go together; we all leave together. It’s because of the fear that one of us could go and not come back.”

Josefina’s husband was deported in 2017, and as with most deportations, the impact went far beyond the person being moved to the other side of the border. Josefina’s oldest daughter, Elena, who had acquired legal status under the DACA program, had to leave college to get a job in order to help support the rest of the family following her father’s deportation. Josefina was heartbroken over the impact this had on Elena. She explained, “It’s very sad because my daughter said to me, ‘Mommy, this would have been the year I would have graduated if not for what happened to Daddy. Because of that, my dreams have been broken.’ It’s very sad to hear that from one of your kids.” As a result of this episode, Josefina said that Elena was so devastated and so perpetually fearful that she would no longer speak to anyone she didn’t know.

The impact was perhaps even more severe for Josefina’s ten-year-old son, Manuel. She told me that she worried about him incessantly, and said that his spirit was broken by losing his father. “He’s often very afraid,” she said. “He tells me, ‘Mommy, don’t go to work.’ He says the same thing to his sister. And he doesn’t want to go to school either because he’s afraid of what might happen.” After her husband was deported, Josefina said that Manuel would implore her, “ ‘No one can go anywhere, Mommy—we all have to stay here inside in the house. I don’t want to ever be separated from the family.’ ”

Anyone who has ever been a parent of a young child and had the experience of being out in a public place and suddenly realizing that you had lost track of your child, even for only a few seconds, knows how terrifying that can be. Maybe you are out shopping or at a park watching them play and you turn your head, just for a moment. Then, when you turn back, you don’t see them anymore, and you panic. Your heart starts racing, adrenaline starts coursing through your veins, and whatever capacity you once had for rational thought has now vanished. Those can be the worst moments of a person’s life. Yet people like Josefina are forced to confront similar fears every single day. She explained, “I have to live with this uncertainty that one day I’m going to go to work and be detained and then won’t be able to return home to see my kids. I am so afraid, my body trembles to even think about them arriving to take me away and not being able to see my kids again. It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I wouldn’t be able to endure that, to be without them. So every day when I leave the house I pray, ‘God, please take care of us, protect us, help ensure that nothing happens at my job and that I can arrive home safely, and that nothing happens to anyone.’ I shudder just thinking about these things; so many things go running through my mind.”

Because of how aggressively we police, detain, and deport immigrants, particularly in places like Arizona, the possibilities that Josefina’s worst nightmare will occur are far from remote. Thus, she constantly has to walk on eggshells. “Every time I’m in the car and see a police officer,” she said, “I pray to God that they don’t stop me. You never know how they’re going to react. Maybe they’ll just give you a ticket, or maybe …” She wasn’t able to finish the sentence as she wept at the thought of what could occur.

Families all over Arizona have stories like this. I met a man named Miguel who moved to the United States fourteen years earlier with his wife and their two kids. Miguel is the type of strong, dignified man who looks you squarely in the eyes the entire time he is speaking with you and, when you meet him, makes you realize that too many years of working behind a computer have left you with a weak handshake. Three years earlier, just as he got home from work one evening, several police cars emerged, and officers swarmed around him on his front lawn as his family watched in horror. He was detained for an immigration violation and taken to Mexico that night. It was nearly two years before Miguel was able to rejoin his family while the court system considered his petition for legal status.

That separation took a huge toll on the whole family. “Our family life has been completely devastated,” he said. “The fear, the uncertainty, having to find a way to subsist that we weren’t accustomed to; you can’t take that away. That is going to be permanent. It’s always going to be part of the story of our lives. They’re going to be sad stories, but that’s what they are. You lose part of yourselves. For me, I was separated from my family for two years. I can’t get those back. I missed a lot of important things in my kids’ lives. Their growth, their education, a lot of planning, and all of that ends, right? So we’re starting over again now, but always with that ‘yesterday’ that was missed in mind.”

I asked Miguel what it was like being apart from his family for that length of time. He said, “It’s like your life ends. You’re still alive, and you’re still walking down the street, but you’re only walking because you need to walk. You’re only breathing because your body does it for you. You don’t really exist anymore; you’re no longer in your own body. You’re somewhere else, thinking only of your family. It’s a very sad daily life. Every moment you’re thinking of them. Of your wife, and how will she be able to provide for the family? And what will happen to your kids if they wind up detaining your wife? And what are the two of you going to do if you’re both deported?”

As difficult as it was for Miguel, he too was most concerned about the effects it had on his children. “You could say that I was the victim of what happened,” he said, “but in reality it was my kids who were the victims. They were harmed more than I was. That’s what hurts me the most.” He explained to me that the entire family suffered from depression. He said that his son Joel wouldn’t leave his room for a long time. “He would only go into the kitchen,” he said, “and he ate a lot, and put on a lot of weight. Same for my daughter. She shut herself in her room and wouldn’t leave. She used to be very involved in school. She was the student council president and a cheerleader. She stopped all of that. And that has left a mark on me.”

As Miguel describes the impact of his removal from the United States on his children, tears streamed down his face. He was deeply concerned about them being put at greater risk because of his absence. “Here I was, in Mexico and then in a detention center,” he said, “and meanwhile my kids are abandoned here, away from their father, and as a result they can make mistakes that can result in them entering a prison or a detention center.” He was also troubled by the impact of these immigration policies on other children and youth in his community. “A lot of kids are being separated from their families,” he said. “They’re alone, and so they have to leave school to get a job. And now they’re on the path to detention, to being hurt, even to being killed.”

Even though Miguel’s family was back together when I met them, they were still living in a constant state of apprehension that the immigration system would again upend their lives. According to Joel, they would use the “Find My iPhone” app to monitor each other’s location throughout the day and make sure that no one had been picked up by ICE. He told me that they also called to check on each other regularly throughout the day. When I asked how often, he answered “a lot!” though with far less annoyance than a typical twenty-one-year-old who constantly has to explain his whereabouts to his parents.

For Joel, what was most difficult was seeing the impact that the anti-immigrant climate in Arizona had on his parents. “My parents are always afraid to leave the house,” he said. “If my parents see a car they don’t recognize, they freak out. They turn off the lights and start looking through the window. When they’re out and they arrive back at the house, they still stop for a minute just to look around. They get really nervous, even though my dad has legal status. They still freak out when they see a police officer.”

When you talk to undocumented Arizona residents, one after another has stories like those of Josefina and Miguel, stories that should horrify every American. Most of the people I met were reluctant to leave their houses unless absolutely necessary, and most would take precautions such as only going out in groups. Many have known parents who were picked up by ICE while simply taking their kids to school, so they are hesitant to even do that anymore.²³ According to Carlos Garcia, a Phoenix City Council member and former executive director of Puente Human Rights Movement, a grassroots migrant justice organization, “most families have an ‘on your way home you’re calling us’ rule and a ‘when you get home you’re calling us’ rule. It’s a constant check-in. A constant fear that you’re going to get home that night and not everyone is going to be at the dinner table. That’s literally everyday life for the majority of our people.”

I met people who are filled with regret because our immigration policies led to their missing important milestones in their children’s lives or prevented them from being with loved ones as they were dying in their native countries. I met families in which someone got sick with a disease that would normally be easily treatable or curable, but because the family didn’t have access to health insurance and had to rely on home remedies, their loved ones suffered severe, permanent harm, or even died. Person after person had stories of almost unimaginable cruelty by immigration officials and law enforcement officers, such as the woman who went into labor as she was picked up by Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies for an immigration violation and then was forced to give birth while still in handcuffs. Virtually every family I met lived in such a precarious state that they had a written plan in place that identified, in the event one or more parents were detained by ICE, who would pick their kids up from school and care for them.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Arizona’s immigration policies is how they have shattered people’s hopes and dreams for their lives and their children’s lives. Many parents I spoke with told me how disillusioned their children had become as they got older and realized how many education and employment opportunities had either been taken away or were never available to them in the first place. They expressed how agonizing it was to watch their children lose hope that a better life was possible. According to Garcia, “Most of the folks will tell you that they came here for a better future for their kids. But all of those roads have been blocked because of the conditions that have been created for them. So you’re seeing this loss of spirit. Because they’re not with their people, they’re not happy, they’re not practicing their traditions, and their culture is being taken from them because they had to move here. But now their hopes and dreams of their kids becoming something else and then maybe going back or being able to recuperate some sort of happiness or find a better way of life are also not happening. Because the youth are living in the barrios and being pushed into the criminal justice system. So now a lot of their kids are on probation, in jail, in prison, getting killed, all the same things that black and brown folks with papers go through. So now they’re getting the worst of both worlds. The whole reason they risked their lives to go through the desert and put up with all this injustice isn’t turning out the way they intended. They put themselves through this horrible trajectory, and now the outcomes are even worse than they would have been if they hadn’t left.”

For those who have never experienced anything similar to these dynamics, it can be difficult to put into context the cumulative impact that Arizona’s immigration laws have had. It is just not that common for a single group of people to be targeted by so many destructive policies at one time. One analogy for these anti-immigrant laws would be to the effects of chronic pain. If you have ever suffered from chronic pain, you know how all-consuming it can be. You know how it dominates your thoughts almost every second of every day, how it disrupts every aspect of your life, from your eating and sleeping to your overall mood, stress, and energy levels. You also know about how it frequently leads to other physical, mental, and behavioral health issues, producing a downward spiral that can be extremely difficult to break. Now imagine those dynamics affecting hundreds of thousands of people living in close proximity to each other, and you would have a rough approximation of the effects of Arizona’s anti-immigrant policies. These laws have produced entire communities of severely traumatized individuals, many of whom suffer from excruciating and debilitating levels of toxic stress, depression, and anxiety.²⁴

The only other analogies to Arizona’s anti-immigrant policies that come to mind are from the historical no-fly zones, those chapters in world history that aren’t supposed to be discussed because their mere mention is deemed to be inflammatory and beyond the pale. Nevertheless, as person after person told me how they were forced to hide in their houses for fear of being discovered by ICE and forcibly removed from their family, it was impossible not to be reminded of The Diary of Anne Frank. Indeed, there is very little that a government can do to its residents that is worse than terrorizing them to such an extent that they become afraid to leave their own houses. Throughout history, there have only been a relatively small group of members of that ignominious club. It just so happens that the Third Reich was one of them, and modern-day Arizona is another. If that happens to fall outside the lines of civil discourse, then so be it, because it represents a truth that we must confront as a country.

A Thousand Points of Darkness

While Arizona may be the worst example of American xenophobia, it is by no means an outlier. All across the country, immigrant families have been encountering similar, or even worse, mistreatment from state, local, and federal government officials for many years.²⁵ For example, after Arizona’s SB 1070 was passed in 2010, two dozen copycat bills were introduced in state legislatures across the country, and five of them passed, in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah.²⁶ Overall, a total of 164 anti-immigrant laws were passed by state legislatures in just 2010 and 2011. The election of President Trump in 2016 spurred yet another wave of state immigration laws.²⁷

At the local level, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed an ordinance in 2006 that was similar to SB 1070 and sought to limit the ability of undocumented immigrants to work and find housing in the city. Over one hundred other localities around the country subsequently passed some version of the same law.²⁸ (Note that many of these laws, or portions of these laws, have, like sections of SB 1070, been struck down by federal courts in recent years. Nevertheless, their impact prior to being struck down was still devastating, and those effects linger on in those communities and beyond.)

At the federal level, our nationwide deportation force, ICE, regularly conducts raids across the country, sometimes detaining people by the hundreds.²⁹ ICE also pursues more individualized enforcement actions, tracking down undocumented immigrants in their homes or at work. In 2017, ICE expanded its target areas to include schools, hospitals, churches, and courthouses, so that there is nowhere for people to feel safe.³⁰ Nationwide, we have been deporting between 165,000 and 435,000 people per year since the beginning of the George W. Bush administration.³¹

Additionally, ICE now partners with 133 law enforcement agencies across twenty-four states through the same types of 287(g) agreements that Sheriff Arpaio used to terrorize the Latinx community in Maricopa County.³² Moreover, through a program called “Secure Communities,” whenever individuals are taken into custody anywhere in the United States, the FBI cross-checks their fingerprints with immigration databases to determine if they are eligible to be turned over to ICE.³³ In other words, we have essentially deputized all law enforcement officers across the country to assist in advancing ICE’s agenda.

Thus, the same type of fear and anxiety experienced by the undocumented residents of Arizona has been exported to the rest of the country. Contrary to popular understanding, those effects haven’t been limited to brown-skinned Mexican and Central American immigrants, either. Black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America have disproportionately been targeted for ICE enforcement, and Asians, Muslims of all races and ethnicities, and other immigrants of color have all been deeply affected by our tough-on-immigrants policies.³⁴

The Criminalization Trap: Immigrant Edition

As discussed in chapter 3, the United States has, in recent years, favored the highly aggressive enforcement of extremely broad criminal laws, making it remarkably easy to identify “crimes” and ensuring that virtually every person can be considered a criminal at some point. Additionally, we have greatly prioritized the use of law enforcement responses to these “crimes” over many other possible responses, while also attaching profoundly harmful, punitive consequences to them. The focus of the preceding chapter was on the impact that this Criminalization Trap has had on US citizens. However, these dynamics haven’t been limited to those born within the United States, nor have the consequences meted out been restricted to those administered by the US correctional system.

Our national addiction to criminalization has carried over to the immigration system and our treatment of immigrant communities as well. In recent years, the criminal justice system and the immigration system have become so thoroughly intertwined that it is often impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. However, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, for most of US history, immigration issues were largely treated as matters of economic and labor policy, or as humanitarian concerns. It has only been over the past few decades, and particularly over the past fifteen years, that immigration has been handled through the same destructive and ineffective “law and order” approach that characterizes our criminal justice system. The result has been that we have stopped viewing and treating undocumented immigrants for what they are: fellow human beings who are doing their best to play the often lousy hand they have been dealt. Instead, we have lumped them in that ever-growing box marked “criminals” that contains all the other members of our society we have become so quick to discard.

For example, in 1994, the average number of people we incarcerated at any one time in immigrant detention centers was around 5,000. By 2019, that had skyrocketed to an average of 50,165 people behind bars for immigration matters every day. Overall, ICE incarcerated 510,854 immigrants in their detention centers that year.³⁵ In other words, we are now putting over half a million immigrants behind bars every year on top of those we put in jails and prisons as part of the largest incarcerated population in the world.

This process has been fueled by a massive investment in immigration enforcement that virtually mirrors our ballooning expenditures on the criminal justice system. To illustrate, our projected 2021 budget for federal immigration enforcement was $28.6 billion.³⁶ If we adjust for inflation, that is ten times more than what we spent in 1994 and thirty-two times more than what we spent in 1975 (see figure 6).³⁷

This explosion of resources devoted to immigration enforcement has been used to criminalize immigrants in much the same way that we have criminalized US citizens, and particularly people of color. That criminalization has been achieved through a variety of mechanisms, including increased use of all the following tactics: (1) treating the act of crossing the border without documentation as a criminal act; (2) imposing incarceration as a consequence for immigration violations; (3) targeting immigrant communities with heavy police presence and hyperaggressive law enforcement tactics; and (4) using even the flimsiest suspicions of criminality to trigger severe immigration consequences.³⁸ Moreover, because of federal programs like 287(g) and “Secure Communities,” the law enforcement officers who are charged with criminalizing US citizens are also often at the front lines of the criminalization of immigrants.³⁹ In short, the criminal justice and immigration systems have become seamlessly integrated in ways that put all noncitizens at high risk of devastating consequences such as incarceration and deportation.

Figure 6. US Immigration Enforcement spending, in billions of 2017 dollars.

Sources: Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice.

Just as the mass criminalization and incarceration system brings severe and needless harm to the lives of countless individuals, families, and communities, so too does this approach to immigration enforcement. For example, while the public rhetoric around immigration enforcement often centers on “violent” or “dangerous” immigrants, the reality is that most of the individuals being deported have no criminal convictions.⁴⁰ Even where there is an underlying criminal violation, it is often the result of the same overly punitive law enforcement approach that afflicts US citizens. In other words, the “criminal” acts don’t necessarily indicate that the person is a genuine threat to public safety.

Consider the impact of the war on drugs on immigrant families. For undocumented immigrants as well as legal permanent residents, we have created policies in which any drug law violation can trigger automatic detention and deportation, often without the possibility of return. Thus, more than 250,000 people have been deported from the United States for drug law violations every year since 2007. Many of those offenses were for some of our lowest-level drug charges. For example, in 2013, the fourth most common cause of deportation for any criminal offense was simple marijuana possession. That charge led to the deportation of more than thirteen thousand people in 2012 and 2013.⁴¹

The criminalization of immigrants also hasn’t been limited to adults. In the previous two chapters, we have discussed the school-to-prison pipeline, which refers to the widespread use of education and law enforcement policies that push young people out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice system. Tying immigration consequences to criminal justice matters escalates this crisis even further, creating a school-to-deportation pipeline that threatens undocumented youth and mixed-status families across the country. Now a routine disciplinary infraction can, for some students, result in not only an out-of-school suspension, expulsion, or arrest—it can also lead to them being ripped from their family and their community for detention and deportation. Thus, the school-to-deportation pipeline is, in some ways, the ugly culmination of all the deep, systemic injustices discussed thus far within this book. It combines the worst elements of our education, criminal justice, and immigration systems and centers them on children and youth of color to absolutely devastating effect.

Peeling Back the Onion

There are many who feel compassion for the plight of immigrants but who aren’t inclined to object very strongly to their criminalization. “They broke the law by crossing the border illegally,” they often say, “and the law is the law!” However persuasive you may find such arguments—and putting aside for the moment that just because something is illegal doesn’t mean that any set of consequences attached to that illegality is just—it is still worth considering why those particular laws are broken so frequently.

If history has taught us anything, it is that wherever there are people suffering from a relatively low standard of living or unsafe conditions, and there is a perception that opportunities are substantially better elsewhere, migration is inevitable. That, in a nutshell, is why the ancestors of most US citizens wound up moving here from other countries; it is why many of those ancestors moved westward across the United States during the 1800s; and it is why children who grow up in suburban or rural areas still tend to congregate in major cities after their education is completed. Some of the factors that influence such migration are out of our control. However, quite often the United States exerts considerable influence over many of the factors that drive migration into our country, including a long history of economic and political destabilization of Latin America.

One significant component of that history is the aggressive pursuit of economic policies that primarily advance the interests of US corporations abroad, often at the expense of low-income and working-class families in other countries (as well as those in the United States).⁴² For example, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994, American corn exports to Mexico increased by over 400 percent, flooding the market and severely harming Mexico’s two million corn farmers. Overall, 1.5 million agricultural jobs in Mexico were lost. Additionally, US pork exports to Mexico rose twenty-five-fold, eliminating 120,000 Mexican jobs. During this period, the number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty surged by more than fourteen million. Not surprisingly, the number of undocumented Mexicans entering the United States increased by 185 percent between 1992 and 2011.⁴³

The United States also has an extensive track record of supporting right-wing Latin American political leaders who align themselves with the interests of our large, multinational corporations, while opposing left-wing politicians who prioritize addressing social and economic inequality in their countries.⁴⁴ Additionally, it is well documented that the United States has supported brutal regimes in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador—including in some cases backing atrocities perpetrated by those governments against their own people.⁴⁵ It is not coincidental that a large percentage of the migrants now crossing, or attempting to cross, our borders originate from those countries.⁴⁶

In other words, when it comes to international relations and immigration, the United States often tries to have its cake and eat it too. We use our clout to advance US-specific interests, often to the detriment of extremely vulnerable communities in nearby countries, and then act surprised when residents from those countries show up on our doorstep.

It is also true that, until very recently, US policy makers haven’t demonstrated much genuine interest in discouraging undocumented migration into the United States. As will be discussed later in the chapter, this is intimately related to the fact that most US corporations are more than happy to benefit from an expanded and more easily exploitable labor market. Thus, not only do these corporations often welcome undocumented workers; they recruit them. US businesses frequently advertise for workers in Mexico and have even set up bus lines to transport them to the United States.⁴⁷ Examples of particularly aggressive efforts to bring undocumented workers to the United States include the effort to prepare Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics and to help rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, undocumented workers were integral to advancing US interests, though after the jobs were done those workers often found themselves encountering extremely hostile treatment from their new country of residence.⁴⁸

In short, one cannot credibly lament the so-called “flood” of undocumented immigrants trying to enter our borders without also recognizing that our own policies helped to turn on the tap. Indeed, the mass migration across the US-Mexico border is the predictable result of taking too many actions that destabilize and take advantage of our regional neighbors, and too few to promote vibrant democracies and social justice in the region. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to allow entry to every oppressed person who seeks entry to the United States. It does mean, however, that our efforts to criminalize and otherwise demean such individuals are extraordinarily callous.

How Human Beings Become “Illegals”

While it became fashionable during the Trump administration to blame the president for the widespread anti-immigrant sentiment within the United States, that view underestimated the depths of the problem. These efforts have long had bipartisan support and have been substantially advanced over the past twenty-five years by both Democrats (including Presidents Clinton and Obama) and Republicans (including Presidents George W. Bush and Trump). Anti-immigrant efforts have also garnered substantial support from the public. So how was it that so many of us became accustomed to drawing such a sharp distinction between “Americans” and “illegals”?

Much of that answer can be attributed to how our policy makers discuss these issues and how the media covers them. A variety of tactics has been used over the years:

•Demonizing immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, for a wide variety of social ills, regardless of whether the facts support the assertions being made⁴⁹

•Engaging in “dog whistle politics” by using race-neutral language in strategic ways to trigger racist views against immigrants⁵⁰

•Highlighting individual acts of wrongdoing by undocumented immigrants and suggesting that they are representative of all such migrants⁵¹

•Defining an entire group of people by a particular violation of the law—that is, “illegals” or “illegal immigrants”

•Turning national origin into a defining distinction between people (in the United States we seem to care far more than much of the rest of the world about where someone happens to have been born)

•Providing a large media platform for those who create or support anti-immigrant policies, while largely neglecting the perspective of those who are most affected by those policies⁵²

•Failing to provide critical analysis of anti-immigrant policies and positions⁵³

As a result, some segments of the population are driven to irrational fear or hatred of undocumented immigrants, and virtually everyone’s perspective on the issue becomes confused, overly narrow, and infected with at least a little moral ugliness. Even compassionate and thoughtful consumers of the news become inclined to support deeply harmful anti-immigrant policies when they absorb enough images and sound bites of trusted public officials and news programs discussing the harms allegedly being committed by migrants. Many of our policy makers have become quite proficient at keeping the public’s attention focused on the supposed scourge of “illegal immigration” while ignoring the fact that our policies are having a far more harmful impact on millions of undocumented immigrants than those individuals are having on the rest of us. The end result is that enough doubt is sown about whether or not our policies are unwarranted or unjust that relatively few US citizens become motivated to forcefully object to them.

Here is a dirty little secret of both the legal profession and the public relations field: Every policy, no matter how despicable, can be successfully sold to the public if it is made to appear as if there is room for debate on the topic. Not only that, but for skilled practitioners, there are always multiple strategies available to create that uncertainty. There are numerous, sophisticated-sounding justifications that can be crafted for even the most appallingly racist policies.⁵⁴ These strategies are especially potent if one’s critique of the alternatives can successfully stoke the public’s fear. We have a mountain of evidence demonstrating that there is no shortage of audiences who are receptive to those arguments. Indeed, it is remarkably easy to divert attention from the most important issues—such as the thorough dehumanization of large groups of people—toward far less important matters, or even issues that are entirely unrelated. All you have to do is make it seem as if there are at least two sides to the story.

However, there are some things that are so clearly wrong and so obviously morally reprehensible that there can be no justification for them. Consider the actions of former sheriff Arpaio. His crusade against Maricopa County’s Latinx population was so horrific that it actually met some legal definitions of domestic terrorism.⁵⁵ It should have been easy for us, as a society, to denounce and bring a swift end to such disgusting abuses of authority. There is simply no “other side of the story” that can come close to validating the routine degradation of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet Arpaio was repeatedly provided with a largely uncritical national platform to defend his policies and spread misinformation.⁵⁶ For example, over the course of the one-year period following the launch of his immigration sweeps—which wouldn’t have looked out of place within the most notorious fascist regimes of the twentieth century—he appeared on CNN seventeen times to share his perspective.⁵⁷ Over the years he has appeared on Fox News and Fox Business at least sixty-five times.⁵⁸ Thus, while it would be difficult to find more than a handful of people in the United States who have caused more harm to more people than Arpaio, he won six elections in a row, garnered substantial public support, and was even pardoned by President Trump for a 2017 criminal conviction resulting from his refusal to comply with a judge’s order to end racially motivated traffic stops. He continues to have enough supporters that in 2018 he ran for Arizona’s US Senate seat and in 2020 ran for his old job as the sheriff of Maricopa County.

How effectively has the wool been pulled over the public’s eyes on immigration issues? A large percentage of the US population continues to blame undocumented immigrants for “taking American jobs” or “using resources that should be going toward Americans.” But who is really to blame: the undocumented men and women who are typically making poverty wages doing jobs that are often excessively dangerous and demanding, or the executives in charge who were more than happy to increase their profits by hiring often desperate and vulnerable migrants for those jobs? And who is more responsible for the increasingly inadequate educational and health care opportunities that are provided for low-income, working-class, and middle-class families, the undocumented immigrants who are forced to fight for the same crumbs as other marginalized populations in the United States, or those who consistently try to minimize such services for others and decrease their own tax bills in the process?

And here is a related question: Who do you think benefits the most from the fact that so many of us do direct our anger over these realities toward immigrants?

The Spoils of Xenophobia

Back in 2009, a Republican state senator in Arizona named Russell Pearce had a problem. For five years in a row he had attempted to pass legislation that would have escalated the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, but each time he had been unable to garner enough votes. He realized that he needed something to push his bill over the hump, so he took it to ALEC. There, among the high-powered corporate titans who had been so influential in the rise of “tough on crime” criminal justice policies and school privatization, Pearce found the support he needed. In fact, Pearce got more than just support. ALEC proceeded to adopt his “No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act” as one of its model bills in December 2009. One of Pearce’s key champions within ALEC was the for-profit prison company Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) (now known as CoreCivic). CCA had identified immigrant detention as a profit center important for its future growth, speculating that “a significant portion” of its future revenues would come from detaining immigrants. This new model bill represented such a potential financial boon for CCA and others in the industry that after Pearce returned home to Arizona and introduced it in the Arizona legislature under a new name, thirty of the thirty-six legislators he had recruited to be cosponsors of the bill promptly received campaign contributions from for-profit prison companies.⁵⁹

Shortly thereafter, in April 2010, Pearce finally got his victory. Owing in significant part to the endorsement of ALEC and the active and tacit support of its members, Arizona passed one of the most aggressively racist laws in modern US history, SB 1070 (which was described earlier).

To understand what motivated such efforts, it can be helpful to put yourself in the shoes of those represented by organizations like ALEC. Think of it this way: If you were an extraordinarily wealthy business executive or investor and you wanted to continue to maximize your own wealth, what would be the best possible set of immigration policies to serve your interests? You would want enough low-wage workers to handle all the various menial jobs that needed to be done, but not so many that there would be a surplus of people requiring various life-sustaining services that would have to be paid for with public dollars. You would also want all of those workers’ lives to be unstable enough that they would be motivated to work hard and wouldn’t be inclined to push back against any injustice they faced, engage in any activism, or otherwise rock the boat in any way. In other words, you would want to create the most favorable conditions possible for exploiting immigrants. Thus, you would be agreeable to, and even supportive of, federal, state, and local policies—such as SB 1070—that criminalize migrants and target them for mistreatment, so long as those policies didn’t go so far as to drive away too many of the low-wage workers you desire. At the same time, you would want the federal government—which is charged with creating the overall structure of our immigration system—to keep undocumented families in limbo. You wouldn’t want there to be a broadly accessible path to citizenship, which would eliminate much of your leverage over undocumented workers, but you also wouldn’t want the type of mass deportation that hard-core nativists would prefer. Finally, you would want as many opportunities as possible to profit off the oppression and criminalization of immigrants that would ensue.

This is precisely the system that has been created over the past quarter century. Over that time, our immigration system has become remarkably aligned with the interests of the ultra-wealthy. Thus, while there has been widespread consensus for many years that a path to citizenship is urgently needed for undocumented immigrants, Congress has consistently failed to deliver. And that failure has the fingerprints of Corporate America and Wall Street all over it.

For example, outside of SB 1070 and the dozens of copycat laws that were introduced across the country (and were also based on ALEC’s model bill), ALEC has adopted a number of other immigration-related model bills intended to shape both public policy and the public dialogue around the issue. Two examples:

•“Resolution against Amnesty”: This bill explicitly urges Congress “to strongly oppose any legislation supporting amnesty or the granting of lawful status to any person that has entered or remained in the United States illegally.”

•“Resolution to Enforce Our Immigration Laws and Secure Our Border”: This ALEC bill would require states to eliminate “sanctuary policies” in order to combat the “illegal alien invasion” that, the bill alleges, has produced an increase in “violent crime, gangs, threat to public health, billions in cost to the taxpayer, [and] jobs taken from Americans.”⁶⁰

Additionally, some of the most ardent and influential opponents of immigration reform have been heavily funded by Corporate America and Wall Street donors. Among them is the Heritage Foundation, which, as profiled in previous chapters, has received millions of dollars from ultra-wealthy donors such as the Koch network and the Bradley Foundation. The Heritage Foundation has also received tens of millions of dollars from the Scaife family, which is the primary bankroller of numerous anti-immigrant organizations (using wealth that, as mentioned in chapter 3, comes primarily from the Mellon oil, aluminum, and banking fortune).⁶¹ The Heritage Foundation has been actively opposing legislative efforts to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented individuals and has even put out a toolkit to assist like-minded members of the public.⁶² Additionally, in 2013, while Congress was considering a comprehensive immigration reform proposal that included a path to citizenship, Heritage released a widely publicized report (written by someone who had previously argued in his doctoral dissertation that Latinx immigrants have lower IQs than the “white native population”) strongly condemning such a step as a fiscally irresponsible approach.⁶³

Of course, outside of the obvious influence of organizations like ALEC and the Heritage Foundation, a direct line cannot always be drawn between the ultra-wealthy and the profoundly harmful and racist immigration policies that have been enacted over the years. Political causes and effects are rarely so transparent. Nevertheless, some trends evident within the political process can be illustrative.

For example, ever since the early 1970s, when Corporate America and Wall Street executives began promoting their interests far more aggressively within the political process, primarily through enormous political contributions, their priorities have been increasingly reflected in political platforms, and particularly those of the Republican Party.⁶⁴ Up until that era, Republican presidential platforms had typically been supportive of liberal immigration policies and silent on issues related to the treatment of undocumented immigrants. Consider Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 presidential platform: “The Republican Party supports an immigration policy which is in keeping with the traditions of America in providing a haven for oppressed peoples, and which is based on equality of treatment, freedom from implications of discrimination between racial, nationality and religious groups, and flexible enough to conform to changing needs and conditions.”⁶⁵ Considering the tenor of modern-day Republican rhetoric on immigration, reading this today is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

However, by 1972, Republicans had changed course, as illustrated by Richard Nixon’s presidential platform that vowed to “increase our efforts to halt the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” Note, however, that in a nod to the interests of Corporate America, the platform still advocated for “selective admission of the specially talented.”⁶⁶ Positions combining strict enforcement practices with business-friendly exceptions have been a consistent hallmark of Republican priorities ever since (though, notably, “illegal entry” has never come close to being halted).

Notice also that whenever any federal legislative efforts that would disrupt this status quo do progress, such as several recent efforts to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, they have been consistently thwarted by those members of Congress who are remarkably well-funded by Corporate America and Wall Street executives. These individuals serve as the backstop against any efforts that would threaten the interests of the ultra-wealthy. For example, in recent years one of the most outspoken critics of so-called “amnesty” for undocumented residents has been Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). While his reasons for adopting this position are ultimately inscrutable, it takes very little investigation to notice that Senator Cruz’s views on immigration matters seem to have evolved in direct relation to the tens of millions of dollars in contributions that he has collected from billionaire donors.⁶⁷

Yet perhaps the most important piece of evidence against the ultra-wealthy is their collective silence on addressing this issue. They have never joined together as a group—as they have around dozens of other issues—to support a legalization process for undocumented immigrants. As a result, despite immigration being consistently highlighted as a key legislative priority by multiple presidents, much of Congress, and the general public, there has been no significant legislative action around immigration issues for decades.

Think about it: As a group, the ultra-wealthy have collectively invested unfathomable amounts of resources in the political process in order to influence policy making around a huge range of issues, and they have been remarkably successful at it. On every single area of public policy that has a direct impact on their economic interests, they exert enormous and often overwhelming influence.⁶⁸ Quite simply, if they had wanted the immigration system to be fixed, it would have been fixed. (Who would have stood in their way? Which organized political constituency would have had enough clout to stand up to Corporate America and all the other supporters of a path to citizenship? The small band of angry xenophobes? Not a chance.)

There is absolutely no reason to think that immigration is the one area of US policy in which these Corporate America and Wall Street executives haven’t gotten their way. But instead of using their immense political muscle to create a more humane set of immigration policies, they have chosen instead to largely sit back and enjoy the enormous benefits our racist immigration system has provided them for many years.

So what are the benefits to this form of strategic racism? They are virtually identical to those that the ultra-wealthy enjoy as a result of the criminal justice policies described in chapter 3. Almost everything covered in that section (how mass criminalization has expanded opportunities for privatization, limited democratic action by promoting social control, reinforced the system of racial hierarchy, and so on) is also applicable to our anti-immigrant policies. Indeed, the wealth-generating effects of the criminal justice system are substantially broadened by our treatment of undocumented residents. By expanding the scope of our mass criminalization system to include the undocumented, we have also expanded the benefits that can be accrued from that system by the ultra-wealthy. In other words, the more people who are subject to criminalization and oppression, the more Corporate America and Wall Street executives profit.

While the full descriptions of how these types of policies benefit the ultra-wealthy won’t be repeated here, there are some additional elements and subtle differences within the immigration context that are important to understand. Thus, here are some examples of additional ways in which the ultra-wealthy benefit from the persecution of migrants:

1. Generates Profits from the Privatization and Expansion of Immigration Enforcement

Just as in the criminal justice system, the mass criminalization and incarceration of immigrants creates a highly lucrative racism industrial complex. For-profit prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group are certainly a large part of that equation. These two corporations operate over 60 percent of all immigrant detention facilities, making them even more prominent in the immigration sector than they are in the criminal justice sector.⁶⁹ As CoreCivic predicted in relation to SB 1070, the expansion of immigrant detention has been highly profitable for private prison companies in recent years, and the extreme anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration were great for business.⁷⁰

For-profit companies have also invested heavily in alternatives to detention for immigrants, such as GPS monitoring through electronic ankle bracelets and “intensive supervision programs.” Many of these programs are operated by Behavioral Interventions Incorporated and other subsidiaries of the GEO Group.⁷¹

Just as Wall Street has benefited extensively from the use of for-profit prisons and privatized “community corrections” within the criminal justice system, firms such as Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and BlackRock, among others, have profited greatly from these dynamics in the immigration enforcement context as well.⁷² Additionally, when former President Trump promised to build a US–Mexico border wall, many of these companies positioned themselves to enjoy an additional windfall as it was constructed.⁷³

Numerous Silicon Valley tech companies have also been enthusiastic partners with the federal government on these issues. For example, Microsoft, Palantir, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, and Motorola all had active contracts with ICE as of 2018. Microsoft had a $19.4 million contract to help ICE develop its surveillance operations with data-processing and artificial-intelligence technology. Palantir, whose chairman is billionaire Peter Thiel (the cofounder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook), had a $39 million contract to use its proprietary intelligence database to track immigrants’ records and relationships. Hewlett Packard Enterprise had a $75 million contract with US Customs and Border Protection to manage their network operations center.⁷⁴

In short, anti-immigrant policies have been a fertile cash cow for Corporate America and Wall Street.

2. Ensures a Large Supply of Cheap Labor

As has been discussed previously, Corporate America is on a never-ending search for strategies to reduce costs. For most companies, labor costs represent by far the largest component of their total expenses. Thus, large corporations are constantly on the lookout for ways to pay people less money to do the work that they need. Sometimes that results in relocating operations or outsourcing to other parts of the United States, or other parts of the world, where they can pay lower wages. Sometimes that results in using technology to eliminate jobs or hold employees accountable for completing their work at ever-increasing speeds. That almost always results in support of so-called “right to work” laws and opposition to labor unions. And for well over one hundred years, that has meant relying on workers who migrate across the US-Mexico border.⁷⁵

US businesses have always sought out cheap bodies to fill the least desirable jobs and pad their bottom lines. Thus, from their perspective, a healthy supply of undocumented immigrants is invaluable. In fact, during many points in our history, there has been too little migration to serve their purposes, and they have supplemented the undocumented workforce with massive “guest worker” programs such as the Bracero Program, which resulted in two million Mexicans being recruited to work in the United States.⁷⁶ So if you ever go looking for a reason why the United States has, for decades, had such a deeply anti-Mexican public dialogue but has never actually closed down the US-Mexico border, you need look no further than the immense benefits that US corporations enjoy from having a consistent supply of easily exploitable foreign workers.

3. Generates Profits from Ultra-Cheap Labor in Immigrant Detention Centers

One of the arguments frequently made by the advocates for private prisons is that they are often cheaper to operate than their public counterparts. What rarely goes mentioned is that one of the reasons they are cheaper, and their profit margins are so great, is that—just like within the US prison system—they often force the immigrants detained inside to do the work required to operate the facility. In other words, rather than paying employees to prepare the food, clean the facility, do the laundry, and so on, many immigrant detention centers demand that the detainees themselves do those jobs, often for as little as one dollar a day, and sometimes for no pay at all.⁷⁷ At some facilities, detainees who refuse to work are threatened with solitary confinement and the withholding of basic necessities like food and soap.⁷⁸

In other words, we are now incarcerating hundreds of thousands of people every year for the “crime” of wanting to improve their quality of life—a crime that US businesses frequently aid and abet—and then, while they are in captivity, we force them to work for little to no money so that for-profit prisons and their investors can increase their profit margins. (Of all the ways in which our mass criminalization and incarceration systems have created modern-day parallels to slave plantations, none may be more disconcertingly close to the mark than this.)

4. Provides a Cheaper Alternative to Meeting People’s Basic Human Needs

To humanize people who are unfamiliar to you, to fully recognize their humanity and how they are fundamentally equal to yourself and all other people, isn’t easy. It requires that we not only value their lives appropriately but that we also recognize what they need to lead good, full lives. That means we have to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and acknowledge that just as we need high-quality education, health care, housing, and the other basic building blocks of a happy, healthy life, so too do all other people. That also means that we must recognize that the failure to ensure that all people have their basic needs met is unjust. Then, just as you would expect others to object to injustice committed against you, in order to demonstrate full respect for the humanity of others you must be willing to stand up against injustice committed against them. Thus, true humanization requires that we take some responsibility for each other’s well-being.

The dehumanization of someone, however, is far simpler. When the public can be convinced that a person, or group of people, is less worthy of having the same opportunities to thrive that the rest of us enjoy, then it becomes quite easy to abdicate any responsibility for that person’s, or that group’s, well-being. That is why so many of the right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations funded by the Koch network and other ultra-wealthy individuals—such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Foundation—invest so much time and energy in disparaging low-income and working-class people and place such an enormous emphasis on “personal responsibility.” If other people’s struggles are seen as their own fault, then the collective capacity to recognize the roots of injustice and then address them diminishes considerably. Such ideas have been critically important to establishing an intellectual foundation for systemic racism, including the long-standing undereducation and overcriminalization of black and brown communities discussed earlier.

So it is with regard to our treatment of undocumented immigrants as well. They have been so thoroughly dehumanized in much of the public’s eyes that it has become difficult to discern if there are even any limits to the injustices we are willing to heap upon them. Plus, the multitude of anti-immigrant laws passed in Arizona and elsewhere throughout the country made it crystal clear that there is no widespread sense of responsibility for the well-being of undocumented individuals. On the contrary, these laws send the unmistakable message that “we” don’t want to invest in, or be accountable for, “them.” They draw a line in the sand signaling that “our” resources are for “us” and us alone, and not the millions of undocumented immigrants who will suffer as a result of these laws.

Not only is it disturbingly easy to dehumanize millions of people, from the perspective of many of the most influential shapers of public policy it is also cheaper than the alternative. If the public doesn’t care that an undocumented immigrant is receiving a poor-quality education or being paid a substandard wage, then imposing such inequities becomes, from a certain (morally vacuous) perspective, a valuable cost-cutting approach. (This also explains why the conditions in immigrant detention centers are so abysmal—perhaps even worse than they are in our jails and prisons.)⁷⁹

Thus, the main beneficiaries of this approach are once again the ultra-wealthy, as they have the most to gain from reducing public spending and the most to lose if we did recognize our common humanity with undocumented residents and assumed collective responsibility for ensuring their basic human needs are met.

5. Limits Democratic Action through Social Control

While the US criminal justice system has effectively quashed many positive social change efforts and created a more docile and compliant population, that pales in comparison to how our array of federal, state, and local immigration policies has affected our immigrant population. It has long been the case in the United States that undocumented immigrants were expected to simply do the jobs they are given and otherwise neither be seen nor heard. What ICE’s hyperaggressive enforcement actions and laws like SB 1070 have done is dramatically increase the threat to any migrants who aren’t so submissive. The end result is that our immigration policies have ensured that millions of people will be too fearful and traumatized to ever stick their necks out to demand the type of justice that would challenge the existing power structure.

6. Impedes Racial and Class Solidarity

Just as issues of crime have effectively pitted communities against each other, so too has immigration been used to breed resentment against undocumented immigrants among US-born low-income and working-class people, in particular. This becomes quite easy to do when there is severe underinvestment in low-income communities and a lack of commitment to meeting the needs of all people, as there is across the United States. A critical element of that systemic neglect is that employment opportunities and public services are often treated as zero-sum competitions, meaning that any progress made by immigrants can seem to, and in many cases actually does, result in losses for other residents. Even when there are no such direct causal effects, if people are struggling to survive, the perception that “their gain is our loss” can easily take hold. Within such an environment, where people are put into direct competition around the means of survival, anti-immigrant rhetoric and action will almost invariably find a welcoming audience.

This tactic of pitting the newcomers against the “native population” has perhaps the longest history of any wedge issue in the United States, dating back to the early colonial period.⁸⁰ It has been especially popular during any economic downturn. The idea is simple: if low-income, working-class, and middle-class people are fighting each other, then they are less likely to come together and direct their anger at those who are most responsible for their common plight.

7. Preserves the System of Racial Hierarchy

Just as the US criminal justice system has substantially reinforced the subordination of African Americans and other US-born people of color, our various anti-immigrant policies have virtually ensured that immigrant communities will be unable to advance socially, economically, and politically. It is simply impossible for the residents of a community to avoid becoming an underclass when the oppression they face is so overwhelming that they become afraid to even leave their homes. And, obviously, the more difficult it is for those who occupy the lower strata of our racial hierarchy to advance, the more benefits there are for those who occupy the upper strata.

8. Helps Their Preferred Political Candidates Win Elections

The tough-on-immigrants approach has been perhaps even more valuable to the ultra-wealthy than tough-on-crime criminal justice policies were in attracting a voter base that could win elections for corporate-friendly candidates. The most obvious example is the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. One of the key pillars of his campaign involved stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and promising to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Yet by far the most noteworthy legislative initiative of his first year in office had nothing to do with immigration but rather involved passing massive tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-wealthy.⁸¹

The politics around immigration have now become so extreme that, on the Republican side, policy makers are seemingly competing with each other to see who can be the most strenuously anti-immigrant, and there is almost no support for any humane immigration policies.⁸² On the Democratic side, the dynamics have been remarkably similar to what happened with criminal justice policy. Starting with the Clinton administration and then continuing on during the Obama administration, the Democratic Party has largely followed in the anti-immigrant footsteps of its political rivals out of fear that being labeled “soft on immigration” will have the same effect as being labeled “soft on crime.”⁸³ Thus, the two primary political parties have effectively been working in concert over the past twenty-five years to create the thoroughly vicious environment that undocumented immigrants experience today.

Bidding Farewell to All Members of the Crow Family

It wasn’t that long ago that it was lawful in the United States to treat people differently on the basis of their race. Jim Crow segregation was permissible, it was said, because African Americans were fundamentally different from white Americans. Thankfully, we don’t do that anymore. We have decided that creating legal distinctions solely on the basis of someone’s race is barbaric and beneath us. We like to think that we have evolved beyond such glaring bigotry as a society. However, the reality is that we have simply moved from discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicity to discriminating on the basis of national origin and immigration status combined with race and ethnicity. Plus, while we no longer try to justify Jim Crow by making the case that white people and black people are intrinsically different, there is no shortage of those who will defend “Juan Crow” discrimination by claiming that “illegals” are fundamentally different from Americans. One of them happens to have been the forty-fifth president of the United States.⁸⁴

The fact is that there is very little difference between our current federal, state, and local Juan Crow policies and the Jim Crow system of the early twentieth century, beyond the fact that one legalizes discrimination on the basis of where one was born and the other legalized discrimination based on where one’s ancestors were born. Yet whereas Jim Crow represents, for most of us, an embarrassing chapter of our history, the Juan Crow story is still being written, and there appears to be very little embarrassment about what it contains. On the contrary, Donald Trump was elected in significant part on a promise to pick up a pen and write a chapter himself.

Quite simply, we have to be better than this. We, like all people, want to believe that we live in a great country. However, there can be no greatness alongside such disgracefulness. They are incompatible. We cannot claim to be superior to any other country when we treat the people of those countries as if they were inferior to us.

Fortunately, our wrongs can easily be corrected. We can put ourselves on a different path, one that is more compatible with the values for which we claim to stand. Liberty. Equality. Family. These need not be merely the foundation for meaningless political rhetoric or Hollywood movies. We can rediscover these values in ways that have real meaning and that can elevate us all to higher ground. But that requires that we listen closely to those communities that have been most affected by our anti-immigrant policies, as they are in the best position to educate us on how we have gone astray from our core values and how we can reconnect to them.⁸⁵ Here are four recommendations that have emerged from those communities:

Solution 1: Eliminating Juan Crow Discrimination

This should be easy. The fact that there is even a debate about the righteousness of our systemic discrimination against undocumented residents speaks to how morally bankrupt our politics have become. There are really only a few options with regard to how we treat the millions of undocumented people who have decided to make the United States their home: (a) we maintain the status quo and continue to force them to live in the shadows as inferior members of our society; (b) we forcibly deport them, creating unimaginable human suffering; or (c) we legalize their status and start treating them like full-fledged members of the United States who can openly contribute to their communities, enjoy all our country has to offer, and live their lives in peace. That should be just about the easiest multiple choice question any of us has ever had to answer, and yet it has proved to be too difficult for our policy makers thus far. Far too many of them, both Republican and Democrat, have treated the lives of undocumented people as little more than political bargaining chips to be used to extract concessions from the other side of the aisle or score cheap political points.

This reckless disregard for people’s basic humanity has to stop. The Juan Crow system, and all the various federal, state, and local laws that uphold it and allow discrimination against undocumented persons, needs to be systematically dismantled. Second, US immigration policy must also open up more paths of legal immigration for people of color around the world, particularly for family members of US residents who have encountered disproportionate barriers to being with their loved ones.⁸⁶ Third, those who have been separated from their families in recent years through needless deportations should be allowed to return. Fourth, as we construct the path to legalization for undocumented residents, unlike many of the comprehensive immigration reform proposals that have been discussed, but not passed, in Congress over the years, there shouldn’t be exclusions for those who have been needlessly caught up in our Criminalization Trap. Fifth, unlike many previous efforts, the path to legalization also shouldn’t be made contingent on the implementation of heightened border security measures or any other issue that is immaterial to the urgent needs of current US residents.

Finally, contrary to what has been included in previous reform proposals, there shouldn’t be any onerous fines, fees, or administrative procedures involved in the legalization process, as they would only serve to limit access to legal status and thus perpetuate the problem. While there are those who demand that we impose these sorts of penalties as the pound of flesh for the “wrongs” committed by undocumented residents, at this point, the wrongs committed by the US government in this area vastly exceed those committed by those who seek to legalize their status. Thus, instead of focusing on the penance to be paid for these supposed wrongs, we should, at long last, simply do what’s right.

Solution 2: Do No Harm

Just as the US criminal justice system should adopt a “do no harm” approach (as discussed in chapter 3), so too should the immigration enforcement system. The same principles should apply regardless of someone’s country of origin. Simply put, the US government shouldn’t be in the business of inflicting avoidable harm on people and making millions of people feel unsafe through cruel policies. Yet we have routinely acted in ways that have been devastating to individuals, families, and entire communities without any reasonable justification.

Here are some examples of what a “do no harm” approach to immigration enforcement would entail:⁸⁷

•ICE would be abolished. US tax dollars shouldn’t be going toward immigration shock troops whose primary purpose is to target, imprison, and exile people.

•Migration wouldn’t be treated as a criminal act. There are innumerable ways to address the challenges of migration without criminalizing migrants for crossing the border and thus adding immigration enforcement to the long list of issues that have been inappropriately tasked to the criminal justice system.

•Criminal justice violations would not be used to justify the deportation of those who have made their home in the United States. Consistent with the more narrowly tailored role of law enforcement agencies outlined in the last chapter, the functions of the criminal justice system shouldn’t become confused with those of the immigration system. Thus, even if there is a serious criminal act committed by an undocumented resident of the United States, it can be addressed just as any similar infraction committed by a US citizen would be addressed. There is no need to potentially cause exponentially greater harm—such as by breaking up a family—through the imposition of immigration consequences like deportation.

•We would eliminate all immigrant detention centers. Just as US citizens shouldn’t be kept in cages unless there are no other acceptable alternatives to protect others from an imminent threat of serious harm, the same holds true for migrants. Even in the rare circumstances in which that condition was met, once again there is no reason why we would need a separate incarceration infrastructure beyond the prisons and jails within the criminal justice system.

•We would not under any circumstances be incarcerating children and youth who migrate here.

•The US-Mexico border would be demilitarized. The vast majority of individuals attempting to cross into the United States are doing so because they are suffering in their home country and are desperate for a better quality of life. They are also often severely physically compromised from the journey across the desert. It doesn’t speak well of our country that they are then greeted by a heavily fortified border patrolled by a massive force of armed and often hyperaggressive officers who have been trained to treat the border area as a war zone. Thus, rather than welcoming migrants with fences, guns, and surveillance cameras, our response should be to provide them with the humanitarian aid they need to be safe before ever delving into the various issues of residency and legal status.

•US employers wouldn’t be allowed to exploit undocumented workers and other immigrants. While we have been hypervigilant and punitive with regard to the alleged transgressions of immigrants, far too often we have ignored employers who have taken advantage of vulnerable undocumented workers and guest workers to pay them substandard wages, subject them to deplorable and abusive working conditions, and often fail to even pay them what they are owed.

An immigration enforcement system that committed to do no harm would lead to far less criminalization and incarceration, far less violence, far fewer deaths, and far more humane treatment toward millions of thoroughly marginalized undocumented immigrants. It would also free up considerable resources that are currently being misused to implement tough-on-immigrants policies but could instead be repurposed for more admirable and effective initiatives.

Solution 3: Reinvestment

Rather than investing taxpayer dollars in the criminalization and deportation of migrants, we could be allocating those funds to addressing many of our most urgent education, economic, health, and housing needs. For example, if we were to roll back our immigration enforcement spending to what it was in the mid-1970s, that would save nearly $28 billion per year that could be used to address far more urgent priorities. Just imagine how much good could be done with those resources that are currently causing so much pain and suffering. As just one possibility, we could be using those resources to invest $1 billion annually in comprehensive community development strategies within twenty-eight of the immigrant communities across the United States that have been most harmed by anti-immigrant policies over the years. Alongside the life-altering direct effects of such an initiative, the positive ripple effects would be staggering, producing benefits for all US residents. Some of the resources could also be leveraged to not only address the needs of those who have migrated, but the causes of their migration as well.

Solution 4: Responsible Global Citizenship

There are many US residents who favor closing the borders. They want to make America an impenetrable fortress. Others, including many economists, argue for relatively open borders so that people can move as freely across nations as capital is allowed to move. They point out that this is already how much of the world operates.⁸⁸ Wherever one might fall on that spectrum, hopefully we can all agree on two things: (1) people should always be able to move when their health, safety, or even their very survival depends on it; and (2) we can no longer tolerate, and even exacerbate, severe global inequality and then be surprised when migrants show up at our borders.

Far too often we act like a schoolyard bully trying to take as much for ourselves as we can while disregarding the well-being of everyone around us. But if our foreign policy continues to support repressive governments across Latin America and the Caribbean while also destabilizing governments that propose to tackle long-standing social, economic, and political inequities, then we can expect mass migration to continue. If our trade agreements and other economic policies continue to allow US corporations to exploit people around the world, then mass migration will continue. If the United States doesn’t make a far more concerted effort to raise the standard of living within neighboring countries, then mass migration will continue.

The United States has been on a long crusade to achieve global economic, political, and military dominance, and however one might feel about that approach, it must be recognized that the long lines of immigrants at our borders are, in many ways, a consequence of it.

Simply put, we have to start playing nicer in the sandbox. While we cannot, by ourselves, eliminate global inequality, we can make substantial inroads in reducing such inequities by becoming more invested in the well-being of our Latin American and Caribbean neighbors.⁸⁹ The more we can help those nations thrive, the less reason their residents will have to uproot their lives and take the uncertain and often dangerous journey to the United States. Thus, in the future, however and whenever we decide to allow people from around the world into the United States, we can make it far more likely that migrants come here because they want to, and less likely that they do it because they have to.

One of the most common questions asked of all people who were alive during a major human rights violation perpetrated by their government is some version of “How could you have let it happen?” It was asked of Germans alive in the 1940s, it was asked of white Americans alive during the era of legalized slavery, and one day it will be asked of us because of our treatment of undocumented immigrants. There is no avoiding that at this point. All that is left to determine is what comes next. Will we allow this institutionalized cruelty and discrimination to continue? Will we replace one form of oppression with another, the way slavery was replaced with Jim Crow? Or will the history books report that we finally reached the point where we stopped making deeply harmful distinctions based on characteristics like immigration status and instead we began to discover just how much shared prosperity could be achieved once we recognized that all of our lives have equal value?