How We Know “Immigration” is a Dog Whistle

It’s not about jobs, crime, or public health; it’s about identity

I really don’t like it when people immediately assume their ideological opponents are motivated by bigotry. It’s counter-productive. If you want to persuade people, you should assume the best about them, for two reasons.

First, people won’t hear you if you lead with accusations of racism or sexism. They’ll be in full-on defensive mode.

Second, and more importantly, you won’t seek out the best arguments to support your position. It’s easy to argue against bigotry. Hardly anyone today wants to go on record defending that. It’s a lot harder to meet the best arguments your opponents can muster, even if you think those arguments are largely pretextual.

But sometimes the evidence is so clear, so overwhelming, that we cannot but conclude our opponents are operating in bad faith. Under those conditions, we still have to find the best arguments to meet the best that they could come up with, but we can’t stop there.

We also have a duty to point out the dog whistles and the pretexts whenever we see them. Because whether or not our opponents are motivated by bigotry, their audience could unconsciously soak up assumptions that aren’t just false, but false in a way that reinforces invidious bias.

The debate over immigration in America is a great example. The main arguments for tighter immigration policies focus on things like crime, public health, low wages, and unemployment. These are all reasonable things to worry about.

The problem is that there really isn’t much evidence linking immigration with troubling trends in any of these areas, and the evidence that does exist suggests that simply building a wall, increasing deportations, or denying more asylum claims would do very little to reverse them.

When there’s such a glaring mismatch between the rhetoric surrounding an issue on the one hand, and the policies proposed to deal with it on the other, that’s a good indication that the issue may be a proxy for something else. That’s especially true if social norms frown on complaining about it.

In the case of immigration, I think we can no longer ignore the elephant in the room. If we’re really being honest, we’d acknowledge that crime, public health, and jobs all take a back seat to to concerns about the effects of demographic change on culture and identity.

In this essay, I’m going to look at two important stories, one from five years ago and one from this week, that illustrate this thesis. As we’ll see, if I claim that conservatives’ worries about immigration are primarily rooted in identity politics, that’s not because I am trying to paint them as bigots. It’s because 1) they’ve actually come right out and said this is what bothers them, and 2) they consistently oppose the kinds of policies that might address their more “acceptable” concerns.

MAGA in a microcosm

In the year 2000, Latinos made up about 4 percent of the population of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The rest was almost entirely white. It had once been a thriving coalmining town, but that industry had been in decline since the mid-20th century. Between 1950 and 2000, the population shrunk by half.

Around the turn of the millennium a large influx of Latino immigrants began to transform the town. For many of Hazleton’s residents, the change was uncomfortable. In 2006 the city council passed an ordinance making English the town’s official language. The Republican mayor, Lou Barletta, said the ordinance was necessary “to preserve the city’s fading way of life.”

The city also passed ordinances that imposed heavy fines on anyone who employed or rented an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. Lou Dobbs even recorded an episode of his show from Hazleton, where he chastised the national media for appearing

hell-bent on obfuscating the issue, frequently equating legal immigration with illegal immigration…. Communities such as Hazleton are now taking action on their own, precisely because the federal government has failed to secure our borders or to enforce our immigration laws.

But Hazleton’s Latino population continued to grow. By 2018, the town was as big as ever, and its white residents were now the minority. After a National Geographic article brought the nation’s attention back to the town, Tucker Carlson weighed in:

People who grew up in Hazleton return to find out they can’t communicate with the people who now live there. And that’s bewildering for people. That’s happening all over the country. No nation, no society, has ever changed this much, this fast.

Now before you start calling anyone bigoted, consider (and be honest) how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood? It doesn’t matter how nice the immigrants are. They probably are nice. Most immigrants are nice! That’s not the point. The point is, this is more change than human beings are designed to digest. This pace of change makes societies volatile, really volatile. Just as ours has become volatile.

And notice where this change isn’t happening: any place our leaders live. They caused all this with their reckless immigration policies, and yet their own neighborhoods are basically unchanged. They look like it’s 1960; no demographic change at all in their zip codes. Our leaders are for diversity, just not where they live.

To hear Lou Dobbs or Tucker Carlson or the city council of Hazleton tell it, the town’s transformation was due to illegal immigrants run amok thanks to the fecklessness and hypocrisy of Washington elites.

There was just one problem: it wasn’t true. Very few of Hazleton’s new residents were undocumented immigrants, or even immigrants for that matter. Most were second- or even third-generation American citizens. They hadn’t immigrated, but migrated from predominantly Dominican enclaves in New York, Trenton, and Philadelphia.

They came to take jobs in the warehouses and distribution centers of the growing e-commerce market. But they started new businesses in turn, and over time they transformed a shrinking, moribund local economy into a community that was growing and thriving once again.

These facts are important. It’s one thing to blame leaders who allow your culture and identity to be eroded by foreign influences. It’s quite another to mistake your fellow countrymen for foreigners. It’s one thing to lament the decline of a community. It’s another to rue its revival just because the agents of that renewal look and speak differently.

Suffer the little children

At the age of 14, Efren Baldemar was working the night shift at a snack food factory in Geneva, Illinois. He labored from 10pm to 6:30am to support his family back in Guatemala. When work was over he went straight to school, where he struggled to stay awake.

Efren is just one of many migrant children profiled in a recent article in the New York Times. American labor laws are supposed to forbid child labor, but as the article points out, the private auditing firms hired to inspect factories “provide little more than a veneer of compliance for global corporations, which overstate how rigorously they review sprawling supply chains.”

Obviously private auditors, hired by the very companies they inspect, are going to have a conflict of interest. When one inspector flagged 21 violations at a plant that processed potatoes for Costco, where the previous auditor had found none, “the plant’s management complained that he was demanding and argumentative, and his supervisor barred him from returning.”

The Department of Labor — or contractors working for the government — should be conducting the lion’s share of such audits. And they do perform some. One DOL inspection of a Monogram Meat Snacks plant in Minnesota “found such severe child labor violations that it temporarily banned the shipment of any more jerky.”

But just as the IRS can’t catch tax cheats without adequate funding, the DOL can’t crack down on child labor and other violations — including the employment of undocumented immigrants — when its staffing levels are “now so low that it would take more than 100 years for inspectors to visit every workplace in the department’s jurisdiction once.”

Ask yourself how that happens. Who benefits from gutting the agencies that keep powerful corporations from hiring an illegal (and thus underpaid and under-supported) workforce? Who benefits from hollowing out the agencies responsible for making sure billionaires can’t hide their wealth from taxes?

Who benefits when the heir to one of the countries largest agricultural conglomerates — a company that routinely hired children and subjected them to life-threatening injuries — is named Secretary of Agriculture?

When conservatives complain about undocumented immigrants, it’s not usually the high school-aged kids getting their arms torn off at chicken processing plants that they have in mind. But maybe they should.

If conservatives were truly interested in eliminating the undocumented immigrant workforce, they wouldn’t vote for carnival barkers who turn around and empower the very labor practices that thrive on a steady stream of undocumented workers.

If they wanted positive change, they’d find many liberals eager to help. Some of us have been arguing for years that labor protections need to be significantly strengthened. That means

• Fully funding the DOL and OSHA’s mission to enforce child labor laws and other workplace safety laws.
• Cracking down on the misclassification of employees as independent contractors.
• Implementing e-Verify nationwide.

These and other measures would likely do more to dissuade immigrants from crossing into America illegally than any wall ever could. Combine that with significantly greater humanitarian aid to struggling Latin American countries, and most of the people now flocking to our shores would have a much stronger incentive to stay put.

Instead, our public stinginess fuels private greed, and results in human tragedy at home and abroad.

Conclusion

We’re going to hear a lot about immigration and the crisis at our border over the next year. And most of the people crying loudest about it will blame Biden and the Democrats.

But their complaints sweep too broadly, encompassing changes wrought not just by immigration but by internal demographic change as well. And their proposed solutions converge too narrowly, ignoring how poverty pushes people in our direction, and corporate greed pulls them the rest of the way here.

Like the “pro-life” activists who could reduce abortion by funding contraception, sex education, and universal health care, but choose to focus instead on counter-productive culture wars aimed at vindicating “Christian” morality, I’m starting to think the brouhaha about immigration was never really about jobs or crime or disease or anything else Republicans wring their hands over.

It was always about finding voters who knew, on some level, that they had gotten the shaft from the last forty years of economic history. And instead of acknowledging how their war on unions, their tax cuts for the wealthy, their promotion of legalized corruption, and their habit of letting the fox guard the henhouse had directly caused that frustration and despair, they chose instead to pin the blame on people who were even more frustrated and desperate.

Like I said, I don’t like impugning others’ motives. But I like bullies and grifters even less. And I don’t have a problem calling out harmful motives — whether people are aware of them or not — when the stakes are too high to hold my tongue.