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[Editor's note: Firedoglake is honored to welcome Frank Sharry to our threads today. Sharry, one of the leading progressive voices on immigration, is here to talk about his plan for making comprehensive immigration reform a reality -- beginning with his new organization, America's Voice. -- DN]
You know that after 17 years running the National Immigration Forum — certainly the leading and longest-lasting progressive voice for immigration reform — and dedicating his career to that cause, Frank Sharry would not simply pack his bags for any old political venture.
Sharry, who stepped down as the NIF’s executive director earlier this year, did so because he had in mind a bridge-building venture that would try to provide a voice for the majority of Americans who want a sensible, humane solution to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration policies. That venture — just now getting off the ground (their website is still in its formative stages) — is called "America’s Voice." Their mission statement:
America’s Voice is the newly-founded communications and rapid-response arm of a reinvigorated campaign to advance immigration reform. Its goal is to build the public support and political power necessary to enact broad immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million immigrants working and living in the U.S. without proper legal status.
America’s Voice is part of a four-pronged strategy to be mounted by immigrant advocates beginning in 2008. Overall, the campaign will combine:
- an unprecedented voter mobilization campaign targeting immigrant voters;
- enhanced policy advocacy and research;
- grassroots mobilization;
- a campaign-style communications and rapid-response war room.
Its goal is to build the public support and political power necessary to enact broad immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million immigrants working and living in the U.S. without proper legal status.
I had a long phone conversation with Sharry earlier this week about how he hopes to transform these ideas into reality, and how they were forged in the crucible of the ugly right-wing framing of the immigration debate.
Tell me a little bit about how America’s Voice came about.
Well, following the defeat of the Senate immigration bill a number of immigrant advocates were engaged in trying to figure out what went wrong and what we needed to do, and clearly one of the areas where we failed was in framing and driving the debate in the media. So we decided that we really needed something like a communications war room that would provide some leadership and extra capacity to do just that. That’s the idea. Now we’ve got to actually stand it up and make it work.
In all those 17 years, can you recall nativist sentiment being at the zenith it is now?
No. I think the anti-immigrant movement has been successful at building their activist core and essentially taking over the Republican Party. Which is pretty remarkable.
So you have, in 2000, Pat Buchanan and the anti-immigrant crowd took over the Reform Party, and he got less than 1 percent of the vote. Just seven years later, all but a handful of Republicans are in favor of repressive policies that would have been unthinkable then. There’s always been a hard core of immigration hawks in the Republican Party to be sure, but the fact that so many Republican voters, as evidenced by the exit polling in the primaries, want to deport 12 million people, and the fact that most of their standard-bearers are in favor of mass deportation, and you see the spread of state and local initiatives — so no, in my 25-year career of working on this stuff, I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now. And how can we forget the radio and cable talkers who spew their venom every day and night?
When you say the Republican Party has been taken over by the anti-immigration faction, how does that affect someone like John McCain, who I understand is someone you’ve had some dealings with previously?
Well, I just have to say, when McCain and Kennedy teamed up in 2005, back in the days when we were optimistic that comprehensive immigration reform would be enacted in Bush’s second term, McCain really was a champion. He spent a lot of political capital on this issue. I’ve been in the back room with him many times when, you know, it was a question of whether he was going to stay strong or back off, and he always stayed strong. But that changed.
That changed, following the defeat of the Senate immigration bill and the fact that he was losing altitude in his presidential run, he shifted positions, and said border security first. I suspect that he’s being deliberately vague so that he doesn’t paint himself into a corner. He’s not saying, attrition through enforcement. He’s saying border security first.
But he’s definitely catering to the nativists in that.
To me, what it speaks to — I suspect that, in his heart, given what he’s done and what I’ve seen up close, is that he would like to enact comprehensive immigration reform if president. But the fact is that he doesn’t think he can get elected president by saying that. And it’s because he’s afraid of losing Republican base voters who are in the thrall of the anti-immigrant movement.
The problem with McCain is that he’s got an R next to his name. And he’s the head of a party that is I think in the throes of a historic political blunder and a kind of spasm of anti-immigrant sentiment that, in 20 years, the party elders will look back on, as many party elders already are commenting, ‘Oh my God. What did we do? What were we thinking?’ And the fact is that they’re not thinking.
They’re caught up in the revival of the Southern Strategy that has worked for them so well. And so they’re all salivating about the Jeremiah Wright stuff. Oh, great! We can use a racially charged to obscure the fact that our policies are so out of touch with ordinary Americans.
It seems to me the Wright thing touches on one of the underlying, core reasons for the traction that this anti-immigrant sentiment has gotten such traction, which is that the GOP really has become the party most invested in defending white privilege. And unfortunately, that is something that does seem to resonate across broad swaths of the electorate.
It was remarkable. As Cecilia Munoz [of the National Council of La Raza] often says, we thought we were in a policy debate. Up until the end of June. And in fact we were in a cultural war.
And no less an authority on racism than Trent Lott was overheard on the Senate Floor as Republicans were lining up to vote no on this bill, having indicated to the White House earlier they were leaning towards voting for it, and he went up and said, ‘This is about racism.’ He was overheard talking to some fellow Republicans. And you know, if Trent Lott says it’s about racism, I’m guessing he knows something about it.
You can’t much more cynical than that.
Look, the Republican Party, for 25 years, has feasted on issues like this. You know — crime, welfare, affirmative action, gay marriage. Illegal immigration fits squarely in that tradition of racially charged, culturally charged wedge issues. And they are, in the absence of evidence, they still seem convinced that this is a winning strategy. It’s remarkable.
It’s like Mike Lux said: It’s in their DNA. They have to.
But what we’ve seen actually in terms of electoral results is that even though it does well with the base, it does very poorly with the broader electorate.
That’s what’s remarkable. See, from my point of view, that’s why I’m confident that we are gonna mount a comeback and we will be successful. And the reason is that Republicans listen to talk radio and think that it’s mainstream America. And swing voters, even the so-called "Reagan Democrats" — and believe you me, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out where they’re at on this issue because they could prove decisive — they want a solution. They want government to solve problems.
Their anger is not directed so much at undocumented immigrants, who they understand have risked their lives to feed their families. Their ire is directed at leaders who are a bunch of hot air and don’t deliver solutions to pressing problems.
So the Republicans are committing a mistake of historic proportions, and the Democrats are divided over whether to hide behind their desks or to play offense. And so the Democrats could blow this if they continue to spout a Republican Lite line. They actually are going to have to unite in favor of a solution, stick their chins out, stick their necks out, and win the argument. And if they don’t, we won’t have reform, and I suspect it will hurt Democrats not only with Latino immigrant voters but with swing voters as well.
So tell me about what happened to last year’s immigration bill, kind of by way of explaining what your strategy’s going to be this time around.
Well, we had a theory of winning. [Laughs]
Should I insert "low mordant chuckle" at this part of the transcript?
Yeah [laughs]. Even now, the theory of winning makes some sense. We lost, so we own that. But the idea was that you had a conservative Republican president for whom one of the only issues that he actually had some progressive leanings was with immigration. And you had a Republican Party that was genuinely divided. Most favored enforcement without any relief for immigrants; but you know, look, in 2006, the Senate passed a version of comprehensive immigration reform with 23 Republican Senate votes. So the idea that you could get enough Republican votes to pass reform with a Republican president supporting it, that was part of the theory.
But the other part of it was it couldn’t pass without a majority of Democrats. That was always for us the ace in the hole. So with Ted Kennedy and the Democrats and the Hispanic Caucus, led by Luis Guitterez, leading the battle, we wouldn’t end up with legislation that was so bad that we couldn’t live with it.
But what happened is that the White House got involved. And they decided to engineer it so that they pushed McCain aside — who seemed willing, by the way, to be pushed aside. McCain and Kennedy were down to one remaining issue to unveil McCain-Kennedy 2.0, and it would have been a bill that would have excited progressives for the most part. But McCain backed off, in part because he was losing altitude in Iowa, in part because the White House said, ‘John, no offense, but we need this to be blessed by not only the president but by immigration hawks.’
So they introduced Jon Kyl [Republican senator from Arizona]. Jon Kyl negotiated a much harder bargain, they basically said, we’ll give you legalization, but we want cuts in family, we want a temporary-worker program, and a point system on future legal immigration. And when it was unveiled, the grand bargain was just bad enough to piss off just about every constituency.
Yeah, the classic making-sausage tale.
Yes, the sausage in the back room was basically very unappetizing. We all were pissed off about the temporary worker program. We were pissed off about, though there was some family-backlog reduction, there were cuts in family. The high-tech people were pissed off about the points system, because they weren’t getting to sponsor the kind of high-skilled workers that they wanted. And even the Chamber of Commerce and those types were pissed off that the temporary worker program didn’t set aside what they wanted, which was permanent workers. And the left went nuts on just about all of it.
I get this all the time, people ask: ‘Where was the progressive community on immigration reform?’ I say, well Christ, they were handed a pile of manure.
Yeah, I know a lot of folks, myself included, opposed it mostly because of the temporary-worker program. Mostly I just said that if this legislation dies, it won’t be a tragedy, because it’s not that good.
Yeah. And you know, we supported it, even though it was very difficult to do so, and it was painful. Believe me. We did so for a couple of reasons. One, the legalization provisions were pretty damned good. Two, we knew if it passed the Senate, it would have to get better in the House in order to attract the kind of support from Democrats that would be needed to get it across the finish line. And three, we knew that if it didn’t pass, that given how the pendulum swings on this issue, the vacuum would be filled by anti-immigrant measures. And it gives me no pleasure to say we were right on that third prediction. Down the stretch, we kept saying, ‘It’s destined to get better if it passes, and it’s destined to get worse on the ground for immigrants if it doesn’t.’ And unfortunately, that’s what’s happened.
One of my inside-the-Beltway type friends, Wade Henderson, kept saying, ‘Look, everything can be fixed. But we need legalization.’
But we lost. And now, why did we lose? Obviously, the divisions on the left were a problem. But that’s not why we lost. There was a right-wing revolt.
What happened was that the Republican Party and the anti-immigrant movement joined forces, became one and the same. And Republican senators who had promised the White House they were gonna vote for the bill. The whole deal with the right-leaning, grand-bargain bill was that the Senate Republicans would produce 25 to 30 votes. The White House theory of winning was, ‘Give us a right-leaning bill in the Senate, we’ll get people like Jon Kyl and Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell and others who in the past have been opposed to this stuff, we’ll get them to vote for it.’ And that would send a signal to House Republicans that it’s safe to vote for. That was their theory of winning.
But they thought Bush would have more sway than he did. They thought Senate Republicans would be good to their word, and they weren’t. Everyone knew that the anti-immigrant crowd would go wild, but no one thought it would be as big and as strong and as vocal with the talk radio and the talk TV joining forces, looking to give Bush a black eye as well as to stand up to those brown people who, you know, how dare they want to become citizens of the United States.
It’s actually become a handy way for congressional Republicans to distance themselves from Bush politically now, because he’s proven so unpopular.
That’s right. So we had been pursuing a bipartisan approach to comprehensive immigration reform on the theory that it couldn’t pass unless it was progressive enough for a sound majority of Democrats. But it also had to be centrist enough to attract enough Republicans to get it done. And that legalization was not the only issue — with families, workers rights, all the other important issues related to immigration. But at the end of the day, even a right-leaning version was not enough to hold Republicans.
In the self-criticism afterwards that many of us have engaged in, it’s not like, ‘Oh, let’s just put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, and go at it.’ No — it’s that comprehensive immigration reform, as we’ve known it, is now dead. And we need a new strategy and a new approach, and a lot more power.
So for us, trying to learn the right lessons, the main ones have been: One, we counted on business and Republican support in a way that they didn’t deliver. Two, the divisions among progressive forces needed to be closed — we needed to close ranks within the progressive constituencies and forces in order to have real enthusiasm for immigration reform and make it the defining issue that many of us see that it is. Three, we need to get on the right side of the economic anxieties of American workers and the concerns of local communities, and we seem to be on the wrong side.
And four, and probably most importantly, is that this is fundamentally a political war that needs to be won with raw political power. And that when the combination of immigrant voters, particularly Latino immigrant voters, is felt and recognized and registered, combined with the desire of swing voters for a solution, that that will enable Democrats to not fear illegal immigration as a wedge issue but use it themselves eventually as a wedge issue against a shrinking Republican Party.
It’s gonna take time, it’s gonna require us to be very special at voter mobilization, not only this cycle, but probably the next cycle and maybe another one. It’s gonna require Democrats to have the confidence to get on offense. And it’s gonna require, in the end, enough Republicans realizing that this issue is backfiring for them to sue for peace.
And of course, a progressive approach to immigration reform requires changes in the policy approach.
The hardest thing to overcome, I think, is the nativist sentiment that’s floating about out there, particularly in the media. I wonder how you hope to deal with that.
It’s a huge problem. On the one hand, I do think it will matter hugely if progressive forces — if labor, and immigrant advocates, and Latinos, and African Americans, — if we close ranks, and Democrats get on offense, that’s going to matter hugely. I guess what I’m getting at, to answer your question more briefly, is that the way to deal with the right-wing echo chamber is to marginalize them through a combination of political power and winning the argument over who has the better solution.
We increasingly are and will take them on. There’s an anti-hate approach that’s part of the strategy. But from my point of view, the real key is to have the netroots take this on as an issue. I think we pretty much have the upper hand in the mainstream print press. And I think eventually we want to make cartoon figures out of TV talkers like who are cartoon characters.
There’s no easy fix. We have to put some things in place. We should be saying, right after the election, ‘Oh my God. When Latino immigrant voters turned out in record numbers, and swung Florida and three or four Southwestern states for the Democrats, Republicans now would have an electoral map in which they only seem to be able to win in the South and parts of the Rocky Mountain West. And the Southern Strategy, as expressed through using illegal immigration as a wedge, so didn’t work that the Republican Party is going to go through a painful rebranding, reorganizing, rethinking process, in which they actually have to become more competitive.
That could be the narrative coming out of the election. And I think quite frankly that it’s likely to be. And I think if Obama is the likely nominee, they are gonna throw everything they can at him in what I hope will be the last gasp of the Southern Strategy. But it’ll be a big test for America. Big test.
We’re already seeing it. The thing that has struck me about the whole Jeremiah Wright matter is the way the media have turned a blind eye to the really racially charged way this is being played, the obvious dog-whistle aspects.
And the media thinks that America is still stuck at the America of, like, 1973.
Look, this is why I’m so excited about this election cycle. I talk to Democrats every day who are just so nervous. Because we’re so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Especially on these kind of cultural issues that we seem to have blind spots on.
But to me, I think the country is emerging from the Republican hegemony by wedge issue. I mean, just look at Broder’s column on Sunday, about being down in Mississippi — there’s a race down there, a special election for the seat vacated by the guy who replaced Trent Lott, and now it’s down to a two-person race. But the Democrat almost won. And this is a district that went for Bush for 77 percent. And the Republican was running on illegal immigration and the Democrat was running on Iraq, gas prices, and, you know, getting things done. It’s in the heart of Republican Mississippi, and the Southern Strategy ain’t working. That’s pretty remarkable.
Another reason for my optimism on this is that — look, we do have some vulnerability with swing voters. But as the debate gets clarified, that will change — and now that we’re not talking about a complex piece of legislation, the debate is getting clarified. Do you want to drive 12 million people out of the country? Or do you want to get them on the right side of the law and on a path to citizenship?
It’s expulsion vs. citizenship is the issue. And as that becomes clearer, and it becomes clearer that the Republican Party’s position is to drive 12 million people out of the country — I suspect we will win the argument with swing voters, that Democrats have a better approach.
But that assumes that Democrats will be strong enough to actually be for something. And the good news is that either nominee will be. Either nominee — Barack gets this issue. I’ve been in some meetings with him and he so gets this issue. Really gets it. And she [Hillary Clinton] does too. They actually talk about — they call it comprehensive immigration reform, but what they’re really talking about is get tough on employers, and legalize people, and it works together.
And that’s the kind of counterintuitive insight that most Americans don’t get: ‘So, we solve the problem by legalizing immigrants?’ Yes, is the answer. Because if you don’t — the crackdown on employers won’t work unless you do legalize immigrants. So all the discussion — temporary workers and family, all that stuff, very important issues, have to be part of a discussion.
But the heart of the political and policy debate is: 12 million people — citizens, or deportees? And the polling is very, very clear. Even if they think mass deportation is a good idea, they think it’s impractical. And strong majorities want folks here to get on the right side of the law and become citizens.
People don’t understand it. We have a big job ahead of us. There’s a lot of mixed feelings and a lot of grievances, like they don’t want them using social services, blah blah. But people, at the end of the day, just want immigrants to get legal. And that’s where my confidence comes from.
The issues aren’t clear enough, we haven’t done a good enough job of making the issue clear — that it’s between mass deportation and earned citizenship. And I think the moral, the practical and the political dimensions are going to work in our direction.
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Welcome to Firedoglake, Frank. I hope our readers don’t mind all the words we’ve already expended above — because what you had to say was really critical, I think.
Thanks, Dave. We had a nice long chat, and you’ve done a good job of capturing the key points. Look forward to fielding any comments and questions folks have.
I’ll kick things off with a question I meant to ask in our conversation:
How do you deal with the claim that people like yourself are advocating “open borders”? The success of that clearly false meme is one of the cornerstones of the nativist folks’ success, I think.
Frank,
You mention that McCain’s position with the nativists is one of ambivalence, if not antagonism. It would seem to me that the Republican Party is dangerously poised to have a third-party candidate emerge that will espouse anti-immigrant positions IF McCain doesn’t start pandering to that wing. Do you think he’ll start doing that? How will it affect the Republican Party’s support in other areas?
The anti-immigrant crowd has spent a lot of energy trying to define immigrant advocates, and we have not fought back enough. That will change. We are the ones who have a solution that will deliver a controlled immigration system, and their deportation-only approach will deliver more chaos, exploitation, and tension.
I think McCain is trapped. He can’t waver from the enforcement first position he now espouses or he will invite a Lou Dobbs type into the race, as you rightly suggest, or will lose base voters pissed off about immigration. This will make it much harder for him to compete with the Dem candidate in Latino and other immigrant communities. My prediction: he’ll stay right on the issue and lose big with Latino immigrants because of it.
Good afternoon and welcome to FDL sir.
How do we get around the inherent racism that has some folks thinking that building a wall, physical or virtual, along the southern border is fine yet never mention doing the same along the northern border?
I don’t think we get around it, I think we have to expose it and marginalize it. The racists make high sounding arguments about the rule of law. Over time, we have to make “no amnesty” and “build the wall” have the same taint as “states rights” came to have in the 60’s.
Welcome Frank!
It’s an honor to be here. Dave is someone whose work I’ve admired for some time, but from afar. I’m hoping that in our new roles we can work more closely together to fight back against the extremists who have hijacked this debate — but only temporarily.
I especially love raising that point, in no small part because I spent some time with the Minutemen patrolling the Canadian border here in Washington state. They admitted it was basically a publicity stunt intended to blunt the criticism of racism.
But they all keep talking about border security in relation to the “war on terror.” Problem with that line of argument is that the only known al Qaeda cells outside the U.S. on this continent are in Canada. Indeed, the only instance of an al Qaeda terrorist crossing our borders from within the continent was the case of Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium Plot terrorist who intended to blow up LAX. He was caught here in Washington state, crossing the border from Victoria.
Incidentally, we just altered Frank’s ID backstage so that his name reads Frank Sharry instead of fsharry. In case there’s any confusion.
Your point is right on the mark. When anti-immigrant extremists, say “it’s not about race, it’s about the rule of law” you can bet your bottom dollare it’s about race. Look, it’s already happening, but in the coming months and years the anti-immigrant movement will get more and more extreme. They think they have the upper hand and they will continue to press on cultural and language issues, and up the extremism of their rhetoric and proposals. This will reveal their true agenda, which is to drive 12 million mostly Latino workers and their millions of legal resident and citizen family members out of the country. It’s non-violent (to this point) ethnic cleansing.
Frank, Someone a few threads down asked me about this recent law proposed in Arizona that appears intended to eliminate MECHA from University campuses,
AZ Legislature Considers Bill To Outlaw “Race-Based” Groups
While the law appears to mainly show the ignorance of the authors about groups like MECHA (which is not “racial”) it seems to me that it actually would open a window of opportunity to immigrant-rights groups to enunciate that they encourage those “on the path to citizenship” to learn their rights and responsibilities as Americans…and that Naturalized citizens often know more about US History and the Constitution than do native born citizens.
Further it’s a great forum for MECHA and other groups potentially impacted by this (including academic Departments, arts and music groups, student “ethnic groups”, and even athletic teams with a disproportionate level of one or other ethnic group) to join in common cause.
Welcome Mr Sharry
Funny thing is, I first got interested in immigration back in the 1990s, when I was putting together material for Strawberry Days — mostly historical research. At the same time, I was writing about militias and the far right, for whom immigration was indeed an issue, but mostly a secondary one, on a completely separate track. I was kind of surprised when, in this century, the two tracks came together.
So when, in the early part of the decade, it became clear that the far right was going to be organizing around xenophobic immigrant-bashing, I had to get up to speed on what was occurring within a more current context. And the NIF’s work, yours especially, was just invaluable in that regard — especially its thoughtfulness. Decidedly a mutual-admiration society.
Arizona is an example of how the anti-immigrant crowd is spinning out of control. Laws against ethnic-identified student groups? Driving workers out of the state at a time of low unemployment? A sheriff conducting sweeps in Latino neighborhoods with armed volunteer “posses”? At some point, the business community will grow a spine, the average Arizonan will be tired and even repulsed, and immigrant advocates will regain the upper hand. The work ahead will be difficult and even dangerous, but it is up to all of us to expose the whackos for who they are and define ourselves as being for the best of American ideals and pragmatism.
My local paper ran a story today about the effect of the administration’s crackdown on immigration on our local jail:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are already spending more time at the downtown jail and the county jail complex in Del Valle, with striking results: From Jan. 1 through March 31, agents placed 763 immigration holds on county inmates, an almost 400 percent increase over the same period last year.
FWIW, I posted about that legislation here a coupla weeks ago.
The Path To Citizenship is complicated, expensive and unfriendly. Applications, Fees, Medical/Physical Examinations, Embassy Appointments with take-it-or-leave it scheduling in inconvenient locations, Interviews with curt (often rude) agents/workers (they’re doing you a big favor to talk to you) Biometrics appointments (people treated like cattle), Another interview, wait for green card, another interview, wait for conditional permanent residency card, two years later apply for unconditional resident card, then citizenship.
Any immigrant that can deal with this system, would be far better off to go to Canada. When an immigrant enters Canada legally with a work permit, that immigrant is immediately elligible for a Canadian Health Care card. What do you get in the US? A kick in the ass.
I’ve been through this with my wife. I’ll posit my question in another box.
Once comprehensive immigration reform failed last year, the Bush Administration said fuck it, we are going to do everything the anti-immigrant crowd has wanted us to do. We’ll do more raids, more fugitive teams roaming immigrant neighborhoods, more social security records checks, and more cooperation with local police to detain and deport those arrested on traffic violations. And they did it to punish the business community for not supporting the legislation. But the folks really feeling it are immigrants, not employers. Of the arrests and convictions related to immigration violations, some 98% are against immigrants working and living in the U.S. illegally and only 2% are against employers engaged in illegal hiring.
Thanks for being here today Frank,
I know very little about the topic of imigration.
Do you see an oporunity to use technology in this discussion?
One example, of many, that I am particuallry fond of, at the moment, is the open source operating system ubuntu. There is an installer for windows and a lively discussion board that includes people from all over our planet. I value the technological contribution of this open source community. Many people are engaged in work and talk about the technology that gives us the freedom to talk and share with people around the globe.
I hope I am not straying off-topic.
It would seem that this Act could effect everyone from those advocating Universal Health Care or even Taxation (as it denigrates “capitalism”) to the Newman Center (because it clearly “denigrates” religious pluralism by insisting Catholicism is the superior and orthodox [right] form of Christianity). Lot’s of groups could be hit by this bill…including some of those that might be advocating it.
Dave, others, question for you. Immigrant advocates have mostly focused — in the past — on MSM. As we seek to move immigration reform into the heart of the progressive world, how best can activists, netroots, and bloggers work together better?
Have Democrats found themselves on the negative side of immigration issues vis a vis Union Support? Union workers have had a beef with low wage non-union workers. IMHO, their agression is often misplaced.
It seems to me, that a combo approach, similar to that used by all the other advocacy groups such as IAVA, Courage Campaign, etc where email alerts go out asking for contact with our Senators and Representatives along with LTEs.
Pressure the electeds AND pressure through the TradMed.
Actually, the unions overall have been very good on the issue of legalization of the 12 million undocumented in the U.S. The splits come with regard to a “future flow” of workers. For example, most unions oppose temporary worker or guest worker programs, arguing that these programs fail to protect American and immigrant workers and are essentially a give away to employers seeking cheap labor. Some unions, and groups like the National Immigration Forum, where I used to work, argued that you could construct a worker-friendly future flow program with sufficient worker protections, visa portability (full mobility), and a self-initiated path to permanent residence. I think going forward, progressives will focus more on legalization, cracking down on employers, and permanent visas with strong labor protections for any future flow visas. And this will help close ranks with labor and unite progressive constituencies around the need to crack down on unscrupulous employers and legalize workers already here.
A few questions for Mr. Sharry:
1. Approximately how much did your former group (the NIF) obtain from companies that profit from illegal immigration? I know they got at least $40,000 from Western Union, a company that illegal aliens use to send money to their home countries. Can you give us a ballpark figure on any other money received from other companies that profit from illegal immigration?
2. Would you agree that illegal immigration is an indicator of government corruption, and that anyone who supports illegal immigration through things like discouraging enforcement of our laws is supporting government corruption?
3. The ACLU is working directly with the Mexican government, and other non-profits have direct or indirect links as well. And, Calderon recently stated that they’re going to be using U.S. non-profits to push their agenda inside the U.S. Will you denounce such meddling in our internal politics?
Of course, that affects the taxation levels of people in the most inefficient way. More prisons and need for man-power heavy law enforcement. Prisons and law-enforcement is now far outstripping the expenditures of almost every other facet of government spending.
A focus on employer sanctions would be far cheaper and actually generate some revenue. But unless we have a more rational immigration policy it won’t work.
Just attended a seminar about the nursing-shortage crisis in the US. This is a result of the baby-boomers reaching the retirement age demographic. American nursing schools supply just 20% of the national demand. 10% of the remainder are coming from the Philippines, and they are filling the demand by constructing dozens of new nursing colleges there, often converting medical and engineering schools to the purpose. DOCTORS are getting credentialed as nurses, because the pay in the US is 5 times that of an MD in the Philippines. These folks take their US Board Exams in Guam under top standards. Still this hardly scratches the surface of the demand.
Many of the people MOST antagonistic to immigrants are the very ones that are being treated or nursed to health by foreign born (and non-citizen) doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.
I think the most important thing is to not just open the lines of communication but to keep them thrumming. A lot of being effective in this area, I think, has to do with recognizing what kinds of information the folks in the netroots are looking for.
In general, this has to do with attacking and deconstructing rhetoric and political figures on the right, including media figures. That is, if you send bloggers a press release discussing immigration statistics, they may or may not find it useful. If, OTOH, you can pass along info that makes Rush Limbaugh out to be the liar he is, or helps them paint a portrait of John McCain as a principles-challenged hypocrite, then that will be likely to get picked up.
Speaking of the latter, I think a lot of progressives should pick up on immigration as an important way of deconstructing McCain’s whole “straight talk” schtick. Beat him and the GOP over the head with it.
But unfortunately, they don’t all listen to me.
Hi, Frank. Thanks for joining us today.
I’d like to add a little of my perspective about why the flawed bill fialed.
My belief at the time, and my reason for not supporting the bill, was that it would never pass because I and others who watched the right wing operate never for a minute believed the GOP would split. That was an insider’s peyote fantasy. So, why put all that energy into a bill that could not stand on principle, never galvanize passion on the left, for a strategy that was, in my view and that of others, a failed, doomed strategy?
It defied my understanding to hear people talking about flipping John Cornyn’s vote. That was never, ever going to happen, and to the extent he ever gave anyone the idea it could happen, he was playing people. They do it every time.
I don’t believe the immigrants’ right movement has taken a clear eyed view of the right wing, though I think it’s now learning. Neither do I think the movement has taken sufficient account for the need to organize among outsiders and join with others on the left to fight the extremely asymmetrical media environment in which we operate.
On the plus side, your choice to join us today is, I think, a step in the right direction, not because we’re the be all and end all (we’re emphatically not), but because a successful long term strategy must build new 21st Century coalitions and work with new media to change the national debate entirely. The time is long past to shed immunize ourselves from the impoverished, GOP lite advice of Stan Greenberg.
Thanks again for joining us.
I think we at Blue America piloted a nice model with ICIRR going after Rahm Emanuel with ads and events, putting boots and netroots together. We need more of that across the board, involving both paid media (online and off), robocalls, events, and pressure on erstwhile democrats who make their living selling the rest of us out.
I work in the public schools, and I think that undocumented parents are far more reluctant to enroll students than they used to be. Many more kids staying at home alone unschooled.
I’ve recently heard (and I hope I’m wrong) that the UFW is actually bending on the issue of temporary and guest-worker programs for farm workers. I was a bit shocked, given the long history of the Unions support for full immigration rights, rather than some sort of bracero program. He was quite upset about this, so it appears that its a major dispute between the leadership and supporters.
Coalition-building across organizations is just critical too. I’m a big admirer of the Courage Campaign, since I got to spend the better part of a week crammed on a train with Rick Jacobs and a hundred immigrants coming from LA and Texas last year for the Dreams Train that CC helped put together.
Unfortunately, much of what we hoped to achieve didn’t happen because the partnerships kind of crumbled at the end, in D.C. I’m hoping we don’t repeat those mistakes.
Well, it pains me to admit it, but your critique of the strategy we used is on the mark. I never thought we could get Cornyn (after meeting with him once, I could tell he was full of it), but when Trent Lott, the two Georgia Senators, and John Kyl signed onto the bill at first, I have to admit I thought the insider strategy might just work. Alas, I was wrong, the R’s caved as soon as their right wing got worked up, and we do have to take on the right and the Republican-lite deportation Democrats. But we have to figure out how to be both pro-worker and pro-controls. If we cede the rule of law argument to the other side, I think it would be a mistake. But we do have to make the right pay for their embrace of nativism. Thanks for your thoughtful analysis.
The work you did with ICIRR re Rahm and then with Pera is the blue print of the more aggressive work we need to do going forward. Thanks for showing the rest of us the way.
Thanks for your answer. It sounds like a valid and good approach.
On Cuba: Obama is on the right track with Cuba/US relations. Hillary is pandering to Miami Cubans who wish to continue the Asylum Seeker game. As asylum seekers, Cubans who land in the US by any means have Carte Blanche. They are elligible for food stamps, housing allowance, Medicaid, and other benefits. No other groups of Immigrants are entitled to these benefits.
Mexicans, Haitians or anyone else who is here under similar conditions (without documents) is illegal. This is the status quo. It is unfair and unjust.
Many immigrants have babies in the US (births paid by medicaid). These (American birth certificates) babies are their hope for quasi-legal residency. Perhaps a fairer system would curtail this behavior.
The Latino immigrant community is under siege. State and local initiatives, agreements between local cops and the feds, more aggressive federal enforcement is making many undocumented immigrants and their legal family members very scared. A recent poll suggested a quarter are thinking of leaving the country because of economic conditions and anti-immigrant measures. This is why it’s important for those of us who are not immigrants to stand up with and for them. This will be a defining issue of our generation. Let’s make sure we win this war.
Amen!
The UFW has negotiated a deal with growers, something called AgJOBS, that would be much better than the status quo. The deal would enable the current temporary worker in ag to continue with some employer-desired changes in exchange for the legalization of more than 1 million farmworkers. Farm workers with legal status will have much greater bargaining rights, so I am sympathetic to their efforts.
A few questions for Mr. Sharry:
1. Approximately how much did your former group (the NIF) obtain from companies that profit from illegal immigration? I know they got at least $40,000 from Western Union…”
Seems to me that Western Union would make just as much money from LEGAL IMMIGRATION. WU makes money from remittances from “immigrants”. Unless you want to close off all immigration then WU doesn’t profit. Are you opposed to ANY and ALL immigration…even legal???
2. Non-sequitor.
3. Do you believe that any business or Federal Agency that has contacts with the Mexican Government is allowing them to “meddle in our internal affairs”? What about the DEA? Or Ford? Or Coca Cola? The ACLU is concerned about rights violations under the American Constitution. Read the 14th Amendment.
omg
i TRY to go outside and have a day,
and LOOKY what i missed.
ty
FDL
for giving me a way major excuse to be on the puter instead of OUT THERE.
sheeeeeesh
s
Given the insane gauntlet of regulations that foreign-born spouses of American citizens have to go through in order to enter the US and obtain citizenship it would almost be easier for them to become Cuban, and enter from there!
Hey! There’s an idea!
Thanks for the name of the program, Frank. It seems to be a deal to raise the drawbridge behind those already here, though. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction combined with the comprehensive reform espoused by Obama and Clinton.
Well, Frank, it being Sunday, I know you’ve got to make use of your time wisely, and we’ve kind of run out the clock here. Thanks again for coming by, and again for the superb interview.
I’ll continue to hang out in the thread for anyone who wants to talk immigration, though.
Great discussion, thank you all.
Dave, thank you for doing the interview, making it sound coherent (!), and inviting me to hang out with you all this afternoon. Look forward to many more discussions about how to win progressive immigration reform in the next few years.
Is the America’s Voice organization located in DC? Thanks
Yes. Their offices are in downtown D.C.
What is the best approach? The raise the drawbridge trade-off may be the best one for now, b/c it provides benefits to existing undocumented workers. What is a more long term answer that makes sense? (Wingnut Wall building or any wingnut crap aside, of course.)
Many American citizens don’t realize that we actually need immigrant workers.
Many forget that our grandparents and theirs were all immigrants.
I can’t and won’t answer this for Frank, but I’ve always argued that any immigration policy, to be effective in the long term, is going to have to deal with the other half of the typical “push-pull” dynamic inherent in immigration — that is, the “push” half. As long as our southern neighbors (and in the even longer term, the rest of the Third World) are forced to endure horrendous living conditions, horrendous politics, and a horrendous wage disparity with their neighbors to the north, the problem simply won’t go away. If you want to stabilize immigration, you have to help stabilize the rest of the world, and particularly Latin America.
Many of us have African blood in us too, even though we have white skin. Racial mixing has been going on for a long time. What if some of these Minutemen traced their ancestry and found out they were part Mexican!?
More likely part Troglodyte.
Now, now. I’m sure many Minutemen are perfectly lovely people, as long as you’re white and have a couple of generations of genealogical depth in the U.S.
You said a mouthful there. Republican Idealogy – cheapest goods, cheapest labor, lowest common denominator has moved nearly everything to China. This helps make Mexicans and Central Americans move to the USA!
The key question seem to be “Is is possible to stop the flow of undocumented workers into the country. If not- then everyone’s just flapping their jaws about a policy.
I the flow CAN be stopped- then we can intelligently discuss who to let in.
One of the Minutemen I met up in Bellingham was in fact a WWII German Army veteran who was an immigrant himself. He was all worked up because they weren’t coming in by the rules.
What’s your take on the Wall?
Who is coming in from Canada? Are there Mexicans? Or are there primarily Asians?
I’m actually with you on this, now that I discovered that it involves legalized status for farm workers already here. My friend stated that it was more of a bracero program.
But I also agree that any realistic system of preventing exploitation likely requires dealing with the wage/health care/educational disparities in the source countries. Unions need to be able to reach across the borders and assist in helping workers in similar “guilds” to organize and obtain their rights and proper incomes/benefits concordant with local housing/food costs. They should not have to live in poverty, with their kids unable to afford school, and suffer from illness due to poor environmental protections. People don’t WANT TO dislocate away from family and connections, they do so because their conditions are degrading, or dangerous.
Canada is pretty tough on illegals. Tougher than we are.
Stupid waste of money in my opinion…I don’t think we can stop this flow in any practical manner- they’re gonna come and stay about as long as they want and we might as well get used to it…The efforts to “catch em” are like peein in the ocean to raise the tide–We should just get used to it.
Ya know, if people in Mexico had decent jobs, food for their families, and a sustainable standard of living, perhaps fewer of them would come here.
Mostly drug runners. There are some South Asians who cross from Canada to the U.S. there also, but the numbers are not large.
It’s ironic that this is exactly why American companies go there, isn’t it?
Dear Frank Sharry,
It’s a pleasure to see you interacting with the netroots. I hope that you and America’s Voice continues to work with the broader pro-migrant sanctuarysphere as well.
One thing I always feel like is lacking from our pro-migrant leaders is their leadership in the global pro-migrant movement, not just the U.S. pro-migrant movement. What are your general positions on the global aspect of this debate? It’s probably too much to comment on here, but issues like free trade, deportation, U.S. foreign policy, and international development.
I mean the food crisis, for example is a frightening obstacle at the same time that it is an amazing opportunity. It’s going to push a lot more migrants into the U.S. but U.S. citizens can feel it too. And there is an opportunity to forge solidarity there, and get people to start thinking about the reasons so many migrants are in the U.S. in the first place. Legalization is an important goal, but isn’t the ultimate goal a world where people migrate out of want, and not out of need?
Going on much too long, of course, but it’s good to see your thoughts in depth here.
Another welcome pro-migrant post, Dave,
My question to you is, how are we going to get people in the broader progressive blogosphere to start taking ownership of this issue? Firedoglake has been generally good in this fight, but it’s always a constant fight. I just feel like progressives don’t have a stake in this issue so their commitment isn’t as strong to the pro-migrant struggle. How do we get progressives to realize this is their struggle, too?