Writ­ten for The Media Consortium

After sign­ing a con­tro­ver­sial $600 mil­lion bor­der secu­rity bill last week, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is draw­ing fire from immi­gra­tion reform advo­cates and anti-immigrant con­ser­v­a­tives alike. While the for­mer argue that the new secu­rity mea­sures are a step back­wards for com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform, the lat­ter say the bill does too lit­tle to secure our borders.

Arizona’s SB 1070 was a chal­lenge to the fed­eral government’s abil­ity to resolve the immi­gra­tion issue, and the Obama admin­is­tra­tion took a strong stood against it. The bor­der secu­rity bill is almost cer­tainly a demon­stra­tion of the administration’s might. But for what, and at whose expense?

The fur­ther right the pres­i­dent moves on immi­gra­tion, the more absurd the opposition’s tac­tics become. Anti-immigration activists are now direct­ing their ire towards the unborn chil­dren of immi­grants. Mean­while, immi­gra­tion activists in Ari­zona are butting heads with an increas­ingly vocal gang of Tea Party mem­bers and have yet to see any pos­i­tive change as a result of the fed­eral lawsuit.

Obama gets an F

At The Amer­i­can Prospect, Adam Ser­wer argues that Obama’s immi­gra­tion poli­cies have failed the reform move­ment, and that they have also failed to bring anti-immigrant con­ser­v­a­tives into the fold:

…While Pres­i­dent Obama talks like an immi­gra­tion mod­er­ate, in prac­tice his actions are those of an unapolo­getic immi­gra­tion hawk who has tight­ened bor­der secu­rity with­out ful­fill­ing his promise of immi­gra­tion reform. […] On mat­ters of bor­der secu­rity, the admin­is­tra­tion is doing just about every­thing a Repub­li­can might do in his place, which means that Repub­li­cans have had to go to even greater extremes just to pro­vide an excuse for not going along.

The extrem­ist cru­sade against the 14th amend­ment, which grants auto­matic cit­i­zen­ship to any­one born in the U.S., is just one exam­ple of the lengths to which some con­ser­v­a­tives will go to defy an admin­is­tra­tion whose immi­gra­tion poli­cies are already remark­ably conservative.

Expos­ing the myth of the “anchor baby”

True to form, those call­ing for a repeal of the 14th amend­ment are now out­do­ing one another in an effort to appear even more extremely anti-immigrant. This week’s “ter­ror baby” threat has eclipsed last week’s “anchor baby” threat, as some con­ser­v­a­tives claim that preg­nant immi­grants are not only com­ing to the U.S. to give birth, but to raise their Amer­i­can babies as terrorists.

Robin Tem­ple­ton of GritTv and Seth Hoy of Alter­Net jumped on the issue this week. Both argue that, in far too many cases, the cit­i­zen­ship of an immigrant’s chil­dren has lit­tle bear­ing on whether or not she stays in the coun­try, let alone become a U.S. citizen.

Tem­ple­ton dri­ves the point home by cit­ing the case of Fatoumata Gas­sama, mother of six U.S. cit­i­zens, who fled Sene­gal to escape gen­i­tal muti­la­tion and is now faced with depor­ta­tion. If deported, Tem­ple­ton writes, “She will have no choice but to return with her children…including her 4 daugh­ters, who would almost cer­tainly be sub­jected to the same tor­ture from which their mother sought refuge in the United States.”

The “anchor baby” threat is just the lat­est in a long list of sen­sa­tional and unfounded claims put forth to demo­nize immi­grants. Accord­ing to the anti-immigrant con­tin­gent, we are at risk of los­ing jobs to immi­grants, los­ing social ser­vices to immi­grants, and even being crim­i­nally vic­tim­ized by immi­grants. Prop­a­gat­ing such base­less mis­in­for­ma­tion is a com­mon tac­tic, as most may remem­ber from the health care reform debates.

Check­ing in on Arizona

Mean­while in the nation’s anti-immigrant epi­cen­ter, Ari­zona, Tea Partiers are enjoy­ing their hey­day, and immi­grants’ rights activists have yet to see any pos­i­tive change result­ing from the fed­eral law­suit against SB 1070.

As Naima Ramos-Chapman reports at Col­or­lines, gun-toting tea party activists kicked off the week with a bor­der rally head­lined by Sher­iff Joe Arpaio, who adver­tised some of his own immi­gra­tion solu­tions includ­ing “a pre-emptive strike to hunt down immi­grants on the Mex­i­can side of the border.”

Arpaio’s appar­ent dis­re­gard for Mexico’s sov­er­eignty notwith­stand­ing, his anti-immigrant zeal is noth­ing new. As Aura Bogado reports for Mother Jones, the sher­iff tor­mented immi­grants for years before SB 1070 became a hot topic, indis­crim­i­nately round­ing up peo­ple of color and jail­ing them under such poor con­di­tions that many have left prison severely injured, while oth­ers have died.

On top of that, fed­eral pros­e­cu­tions of immi­grants in Ari­zona are at a record high this year. Accord­ing to Elise Foley at the Wash­ing­ton Inde­pen­dent, newly released data shows that immi­gra­tion cases made up 84.5 per­cent of pros­e­cu­tions in Arizona.

That’s good news, no doubt, to Arpaio. Mari­copa county ranks among the high­est in its pros­e­cu­tions of non-criminal immi­grants. Such find­ings are harder for reform advo­cates to swal­low, par­tic­u­larly in light of Obama’s repeated assur­ances that his immi­gra­tion mea­sures pri­mar­ily tar­get crim­i­nals. The divide between Obama’s promises and the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion on the ground is glar­ing, and anti-immigrant forces know it.

In Ari­zona, for instance, both the state leg­is­la­ture and Gov­er­nor Jan Brewer remain defi­ant even in the face of the fed­eral law­suit against SB 1070 (which itself chal­lenged the president’s resolve on immi­gra­tion reform), and have since passed or intro­duced other anti-immigrant bills, in addi­tion to sev­eral cur­rently in the works—Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez at Ms. has a good break­down of recently passed and pend­ing anti-immigrant leg­is­la­tion in Arizona.

Curb­ing Arizona’s reach

But while numer­ous states have come out in sup­port of SB 1070, many copy-cat bills have already failed in other states. Many more are likely to meet the same end.

Suman Raghu­nathan at YES! Mag­a­zine sug­gests that states are broadly reject­ing Arizona—thereby demon­strat­ing that the intense anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment cur­rently dom­i­nat­ing the media belongs to only a small fac­tion of extrem­ists. Raghu­nathan fur­ther­more argues that it is actu­ally the anti-immigrant move­ment that is failing.

Given the highly-criticized events at the fed­eral level, such as the sign­ing of the new bor­der secu­rity bill and the expan­sion of the Secure Com­mu­ni­ties pro­gram, Raghunathan’s posi­tion is opti­mistic, to say the least. But maybe, at this point in the game, the immi­gra­tion reform camp needs a lit­tle optimism.

This post fea­tures links to the best inde­pen­dent, pro­gres­sive report­ing about immi­gra­tion by mem­bers of The Media Con­sor­tium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Dias­pora for a com­plete list of arti­cles on immi­gra­tion issues, or fol­low us on Twit­ter. And for the best pro­gres­sive report­ing on crit­i­cal econ­omy, envi­ron­ment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Con­sor­tium, a net­work of lead­ing inde­pen­dent media outlets.

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