THE DEMS' DILEMMAS ON IMMIGRATION IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION, COURAGE, AND BOLDNESS

The article below by L.A. Times journalists is an accurate and extensive depiction of the twists and turns that Kamala Harris has undergone in her political career on the immigration issue ever since she entered politics in California - championing immigrant rights then, but then as a Senator and VP for president Biden, pivoting to Biden's increasingly harsh restrictionist policies.

This trajectory has to be put in the full context of how the duopoly has badly dealt with immigration over the past half century. Everybody agrees the "system is broken," but nobody acknowledges how this is directly attributable to how both parties in the duopoly in Washington frame and manipulate the issue. Similar toxic and ineffective political dynamics have affected negatively other vital public policy issues - guns & police brutality, climate change, wars, poverty & inequality, etc.

Let's take a look on the supposedly "intractable" issue immigration. We'll skip analyzing the global phenomenon of what causes forced population displacements in this era of corporate globalization and geopolitical chaos for now, and just focus on how the American reining duopoly has dealt - or failed to deal - with this issue over the past 3 decades.

"Triangulation" has for a long time been the default political and policy strategy on the issue of immigration for the Democrats in office - from the long 8 years of the Clinton administration, through Obama's 8 years, and now through Biden's 4.

The abysmal results are there for all to see. Again and again, the immigrants - both the 11 million long-residing undocumented immigrants and their mix-status families, and the continuing and varying flows of migrants and asylum-seekers from various failed states in Latin America have been met, in the course of the past 4 decades, with increasingly restrictionist and punitive polices.

They - the immigrants who actually contribute so much to the well-being and prosperity of sending and receiving countries - have been denied the justice, respect, and protection they deserve. At the federal level, they have been thrown under the proverbial bus, over and over again, by their supposed "allies." "Amnesty" has become a dirty word. They have been blamed for every ill in the country, unjustly, from violent crime to drug trafficking. And they have been depicted as low-grade, undesirable human beings, black and brown invaders "sent" here by Jewish and cosmopolitan evildoers for the purpose of "replacing the white race."

That these 19th and 20th racist, poisonous century tropes have been fully activated 60 years after the Civil Rights Laws and Immigrant Reform of 1964/65 and now command the politics of one of the two major parties in the duopoly, while the other cave to or runs away from confronting them, is a vivid demonstration of the full crisis of both liberalism and traditional conservatism. The ascent of neofascist ideology is unmistakable.

More progress has been seen in some states like California, New York, though other states have adopted extremely negative policies, like Florida and Texas. It has all depended to what degree the immigrants themselves - and their allies in the ethnic, mostly Latino communities in which they seek refuge - have defiantly mobilized politically, beat back the immigrant haters, and elected their own leaders.

But at the federal level that has not worked - the pro-immigrant elected leaders have been incapable of making headway through the political cowardice of their own top leaderships in Congress and the White House, or through the effective deployment of the filibuster in the case of the obstructionist Republicans. Others have proven to be too meek or opportunists to champion anything. The duopoly and its funders tame most of them.

There has been no immigration reform since the extremely draconian, restrictionist, and punitive laws were passed in the mid-1990s with the full support of the Clinton administration and the Congressional Dems (including most Latino Dems). They came under intense pressure from the then GOP-controlled House of Representatives and the relentless, rampant xenophobic campaigns by the mainstream media (CNN, Fox News, the print media, the radio networks). The Dem response was to retreat from confronting and defeating this new wave of orchestrated xenophobia in the U.S., and chose instead to triangulate by accepting the main narrative of the restrictionists while proposing milder limited policies. The result was disastrous.

The Republican Party, in sharp contrast to the Dems, have embraced since the early 1990s the most strident, intransigent, resolute, and punitive & racist anti-immigrant stand since 1924, when they last succeeded shutting down further immigration from Europe, Asia, and Africa for the next half century (the "Western Hemisphere" - meaning Mexico - was exempted under pressure from the powerful Southwest agricultural lobby).

The Repubs rediscovered that the so-called "third rail" of American politics, as the immigration issue was perceived in the 1990s, was, in fact, their best, easiest ticket to win and retain elected office. All misgivings of losing the Latino vote were jettisoned. There was a much larger block of white votes to curry fanning unbridled nativism. Jingoism and immigrant scapegoating grew in stridency and virulence in the new 21 century, and has evolved into becoming the ugly hate feast of open white nationalism, draconian bills, and celebrated cruelty so pervasive today in the GOP.

Both parties have continued - in spades - their respective approaches to immigration during the Trump and Biden administrations, leading to where we are today: not just utter chaos and dysfunctionality at the border and the extreme suffering of immigrants in the country's interior and the border, but in the countries of transit. All of this has caused extreme social and political polarization in the body politic of the U.S.

We are witnessing now a renewed Trumpist attempt to return to office, with its central plank consisting of doubling-down on its draconian anti-immigrant promises: massive round-ups, a gulag of detention concentration camps, and millions of expulsions; stripping citizenship to all U.S. born children of an undocumented parent, with the Supreme Court's blessings; shutting down and sealing the border from all further immigration; abolishing all asylum rights; imposing rightwing ideological requirements on all legal immigrants (students, legal permanent residents, tourists, etc.).

Trump and his team - including the notorious "Project 2025" blueprint from the reactionary, well-funded Heritage Foundation - are not hiding any of these harsh, inhumane, and unconstitutional  proposals. On the contrary, they are publicly showcasing them as the central component of their platform at every opportunity and the first thing Trump will act on "as a dictator" on Day One. It's now the official GOP platform. His reception at the recent Republican convention was a xenophobic apotheosis.

In the face of this unrestrained, overt play for extremism on the immigration issue, the reflex response of the Biden administration and most congressional Dems has been to, once again, triangulate their response and capitulate. First Biden and the Dems quickly shelved their own immigration reform proposal; then Biden extended Trumps border policies at the border and the gulag of detention centers; and finally, Biden has now exceeded Trump in denying asylum to most seekers at the border, using a number of bogus legal mechanisms that give the appearance of channeling applicants to an "orderly process" that in fact are anything but, and has reduced the flow to a trickle. (In this endeavor Mexico has helped, just as it did in Trump's period).

At the first and only presidential debate between Trump and Biden, Trump never ceased to brazenly demagogue the issue of immigration and demonize the immigrants, with NO push back from Biden.

This was ascribed to Biden's general failure to engage due to his diminished cognitive capacities, but this is only a partial explanation.

Biden's entire campaign approach to the immigration issue  - and the Dems continue to peddle it, including now the Harris campaign - has been to expose, correctly, that when Biden and the Dems capitulated to the Republicans on most of their draconian anti-asylum demands at the border, without any trade-off for immigrant relief whatsoever, the Republicans reneged on orders from Trump, who wanted the issue alive for the election season.

That's it! The Dem's brilliant tactic is to focus on saying: "We gave in to the Republican demands on the border, without asking for anything in return, and they reneged. This shows they are not interested in solving the issue, just exploiting it."

One grimaces at such disgusting, morally bankrupt, triangulation tactics. This approach is empty of any vision, bold proposal, or political courage in the defense of immigrants - cowardice wrapped into supposedly "clever politics" to just show that the other side is, surprise, surprise, utterly opportunistic and callous on the issue; which, of course, they are, but then, why did you cave in to them and why are you boasting that you did??

Now that Biden has taken a (involuntary) bow, one can fairly count that he will do nothing to upset the apple cart on the issue of immigration for the remainder of his term, other than keep pointing at the lame fact that the Republicans are not serious on the border. He never displayed any courage to do anything IN SUPPORT of immigrants, but merely sent Harris on a restrictionist-motivated tour of Central America's Northern Triangle countries and Mexico (never Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela, where now most asylum seekers come from), which led to nothing.

In Mexico, Harris more "successful" assignment was to pressure the pliable AMLO administration to do much more to intercept, detain, and deport immigrants in transit to the north. AMLO, always ready to cooperate for the sake of maintaining good bilateral relations, complied. To this day and despite Trump's current anti-Mexican vitriol, he still publicly reveres his "amigo Trump" and still says only kind things about his "amigo Biden". Meanwhile, the Mexican and other Latin American diasporas are cruelly persecuted by both parties of the America duopoly.

Now Kamala Harris has become the designated Dem presidential candidate, instantly endorsed by the Latino Dem political class and the docile Dem-affiliated immigrant advocacy NGOs.

What will she do, what will she say when (and if) she debates Trump? What will be the platform of the upcoming Dem convention? The usual Dem-affiliated immigrant advocates, as the article below shows, wistfully want her to return to her old role as champion of immigrant rights.

Keep dreaming! You endorsed her before she commits?

Where's the combative social movement to force her to do just that? Where is the mobilized, collective incentive - as say, the Arab American communities have been unequivocably signaling to the Biden campaign in reference to the Gaza genocide - to bring tangible relief to immigrants and asylum-seekers or else don't count on our votes in November?

The sad and, frankly, infuriating truth is that the entire Latino Dem political class and the Dem-affiliated immigrant rights groups for the most part are, so to speak, already "in the bag." Infuriating, I say, for it is THEIR political cowardice and unhealthy codependency to the Democratic party that have enabled, in turn, the political cowardice of the Dems for too long. And both types of cowardice have greatly embolden the Trumpist right to continue its vicious assaults on immigrants, to return to power.

The Republicans led Obama by the nose for eight long years, with empty promises of "bipartisanship" if he only kept deporting immigrants. They led Biden again by the nose for the last year or so, with the same promises vis-a-vis border enforcement, only to be had, again.

Biden/Harris are now trying to turn such a abject surrender into a successful electoral exposé of the Reps, but only expose themselves for their political opportunism and cowardice.

Still, the ball is again on the Dems' court, now that Asylum-Denier Joe has been not-so-gently shoved away from the contest.

The Harris campaign can represent a "fresh new beginning," not just for the neglected and much abused issue of immigration, but for many other salient and urgent issues - the Gaza genocide and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict; mitigating climate change, reining in police and gun violence, ushering in real improvements on housing, wages, education and health.

But will they, the current Dem establishment and Harris team, dare to engage in any or all of these fronts with bold new proposals to contrast themselves vividly from the GOP, and stop the Trumpist juggernaut in time? Or will they keep to their habitual path of triangulating their way to the abyss just ahead?

The answer is blowing in the wind.

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Article: “Harris’ stance on migration becomes complex”