Sonny's Corner

Sonny Foster "Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.

In our inaugural July 2007 issue, Prairie Fire published two articles on U.S. immigration policy, “Liberals beware: There is a high cost to ‘cheap labor’” by Gov. Richard D. Lamm and “Federal immigration reform and the future of the U.S. workforce” by Admiral Jim Partington. Certainly, the debate has never entirely cooled, and the division over the future direction of our national immigration policy seems to have deepened. The following essay reflects the intensity of that debate.

By Paul A. Olson

We are in for some sizable immigration battles in Nebraska and ultimately in the Great Plains. The demand for cheap labor appears insatiable; unemployment is lower than in other U. S. sections and the temptation to use undocumented workers high. The competition over jobs between whites and persons of color has become intense in the present economic climate. Consequently, organizations capable of enabling fear of, and contempt for, immigrant populations have grown powerful.

The most powerful of these is the polite Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose attorney, Kris Kobach, working for FAIR’s satellite, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), crafted the Arizona “illegals” bill and the Fremont, Neb. ordinance directed against undocumenteds. Kobach also powered the effort to repeal Nebraska’s “Dream Act,” which offered in-state tuition to graduates of Nebraska high schools.

FAIR is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though overt national firebrand racist movements have largely failed, the new polite xenophobia seeps through its apparently learned presentations and a network of numerous affiliated organizations. FAIR has an immaculate command of the national and local media and election processes that stir entitlement rage in groups threatened in the present economy.

This is new in the Plains. Most of the persons who have European-based ancestors have foreparents who came before one could be illegal. 1924 saw the first laws that set limits on how many people from specific countries would be admitted here. Since we are all recent immigrants, save for Native Americans, the Great Plains has always been more or less open (though WASPS have feared non-WASPS, Northern Europeans have feared Eastern Europeans, and the establishment has feared all cultures not gratuitously broken by melting-pot ideologies).

Even conservatives were not haters. Since the 1920s (and the decline of the “populist” tradition in the Democratic Party and of George Norris’s influence), the Plains have been primarily centers of conservative thought. But they—at least the Northern Plains—have not welcomed hate groups. Our prejudice is complacent, based on a phlegmatic fear of different or new people. We did have the 1919 lynching in Omaha. The Klan, as an anti-Catholic organization, had some play in the 1920s, and Posse Comitatus in the 1980s. But for the most part, Northern Plains people are meat-and-potatoes conservatives, not hate-based firebrands.

How the new movements work

Fremont exemplifies the new movement’s actions. The Fremont FAIR ordinance will have a racial profiling effect like that of the Arizona effort now daily in the news. Nebraska’s Supreme Court held Fremont’s ordinance, submitted by petition—to forbid undocumented workers from receiving harbor, housing or employment—was perfectly legally submitted. Fremont’s vote will come June 21. The bill, like other town bills passed with FAIR’s help, will probably have high litigation costs, and the courts have not upheld similar bills. Where like bills have been litigated, the litigation costs associated with the ordinances have cost millions: e. g., Farmer’s Branch, Texas, population 26,455, has spent $3.2 million, to defend its bill already and expects more. Such costs fall on the towns, not on FAIR. The product has been not one single ordinance that has been upheld as legal—because immigration has traditionally been the national government’s bailiwick.

However, FAIR keeps plugging away. Ostensibly made up of intellectuals who wish to preserve us from overpopulation and civic hardship and whose private recommendations include a eugenicist twist, its national statements about population control are generally fairly neutral racially—though FAIR’s roots lie in the eugenics movement opposed by a 1920s Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan, and favored in the ’30s by the European racists who provoked World War II. FAIR’s leaders in the ’80s and ’90s—especially its founder, John Tanton, and its early funder, the “Pioneer Fund,” which has provided $1.2 million in grants to FAIR—both consciously sought to revive the race-based eugenics movement. However, officially race is not issue.

Kobach has held that his legal work is directed against illegals of all races. However, if one looks at the website of the Nebraska Advisory Group Against Illegal Immigration (NAIGAII), FAIR’s Nebraska subsidiary, one finds little or nothing to do with illegal immigration and everything to do with fear of the other—keeping Hispanic immigrants, documented or undocumented, from achieving respect. The website opposes a vote by Puerto Ricans on statehood (Puerto Ricans are, of course, already U.S. citizens). It attacks an award ceremony for Hispanic kids at Omaha’s South High School, but it does not excoriate Nebraska’s Swedish and Czech pride observances. Horror of horrors, undocumented people might receive proper medical care—from the Medical Center. Speaking in Omaha at a “Tea Party Against Amnesty” on April 15, the head of NAIGAII argued that her group is active “at the local, state and federal level [sic],” that the organization has huge Nebraska support, and that it was “able to get prenatal care [for undocumented mothers] stopped.” One is puzzled as to what would make one wish to deny prenatal care to children who, when born, are American citizens. Wanting increased medical costs for them after they are born? Wishing to create malformed or undernourished children?

Entitlement in legislative debate over education and jobs

FAIR also uses legislative strategies to develop the sense of educational or work entitlement in white populations threatened in the present economy. FAIR opposed the national 2003 “Dream Act” that allowed paths to citizenship and higher education for children of undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents. The legislation provided these paths following high school graduation and returned to the states the right to determine whether qualified undocumented students should be eligible for in-state tuition. This Dream Act, due partly to FAIR’s opposition, has been defeated repeatedly in the House and Senate since 2003, FAIR apparently wanting no opening of such paths to citizenship.

Still, state Dream Acts followed, such as Nebraska’s in 2006, and FAIR also opposed these. This past legislative session, Kobach and other FAIR and IRLI workers furnished a Fremont state senator the data and legal advice for LB 1001’s effort to repeal Nebraska’s Dream Act, and FAIR and IRLI offered most of the substantive testimony supporting it in the Legislature’s Education Committee. The current statute does no more than grant in-state tuition rates to undocumented students living in Nebraska who have graduated from Nebraska high schools. Kobach and his entourage argued that denying the Dream Act to undocumented residents would save state taxes.

The rational question is, “How could repealing the Dream Act save taxes?” Only a handful of undocumented students attend Nebraska public colleges and universities. How could having undereducated members of our state save money? The bill, of course, could not save Nebraska dollars. Passed, it would have cast suspicion on all Hispanic students and leave a trail of undereducated Hispanics. FAIR-IRLI in fact testified that Mexican-American undocumented students should be sent “home” to Mexico, where they could start seeking American citizenship or go to school in Mexico. When one senator asked where “home” in Mexico is for students who have lived in Nebraska from childhood, Kobach and company were unresponsive.

Work is also at issue. On Dec. 12, 2008, FAIR’s national field director, Susan Tully, appeared before the Nebraska Legislature’s study group on immigration and encouraged the Legislature to adopt the “E-Verify” program to keep undocumented people from occupying “American” jobs, saying that it is 99.4 percent accurate (she later contradicted herself by saying that E-Verify is not accurate in that “illegal’s” can use identity theft to get through it easily).

Tully also encouraged local communities to give law enforcement officials the “287G” training that gives legal authority to state and local enforcement to investigate, detain and arrest aliens on civil and criminal grounds.

Yet, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered 287G reviewed—and the Government Account Office (GAO) condemned it—because it allows local officials to use minor immigrant offenses to deport people of color, particularly victimizing women. GAO also said it leads to local racial profiling. But Tully, undeterred, said that undocumented workers threaten terrorism, “drug trafficking, drug cartels, …crime, …kidnapping, …murder, …sex trafficking and … human smuggling.” All this criminal behavior, she stated, comes from Mexico, a narco-traffickers haven, and she never explained how to distinguish documented residents from undocumented ones. One must assume that all brown-skinned people are suspect.

Immigration is a real national policy issue. Any new immigration plan has to include clear routes to legalized citizenship for undocumented workers; new, accurate forms of E-Verify and documentation; guest workers programs and closer border cooperation with Mexico. But that effort will probably not be enough without a revision of NAFTA that, unfairly, has forced millions of hungry farmers off the land. Unlike the European Union, NAFTA contains no provision for North America’s poorer sections, and illegal immigrants are the price of the poverty it has brought.

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