On the Border:
The liberal pragmatist is frustrated with the leftist. I understand that, we are frustrated with them too. For the liberal pragmatist, the left’s preoccupation with ideology and doctrinal purity is a potentially catastrophic hindrance to beating the reactionary right and realizing any sort of liberal policy. Take #AbolishICE for example. In the wake of kids in cages and the renewed zeal with which ICE and CBP under Trump pursued migrants, leftists and social dems rallied around the idea of doing away with the agency altogether. After all it was a creation of the war on terror. We had existed just fine without it for the vast majority of this nation’s history. But then came the polling. Turns out most Americans are fine with ICE existing even if they don’t like the agency’s direction under Trump. And so #abolishICE is a political non-starter.
The calculation is simple. So simple that it perplexes the liberal pragmatist as to why the leftist can’t understand it and get on board. In order to change things you must get elected. You can’t get elected if you project unpopular opinions. So in order to realize your agenda you must abandon the parts of your platform that are unpopular. If Americans broadly support border enforcement then Democrats have to support border enforcement because we can’t win elections otherwise. We can support a less draconian, less racially animated form of border enforcement but we must have secure borders.
But let us forget electoral politics for a moment. I would say that most of the reasons why the left is so frustrated with the liberal pragmatist can be summed up in one question:
And then what?
When you win elections based on compromise with the reactionary right and the promise to never attempt anything approaching radical reform, what comes next? How do you address systemic problems created by the racist and reactionary genesis of this country without directly challenging the core concepts on which these systems were built? I know the response to this is “Well how do you change anything if you don’t win elections dummy?” and to that I can honestly say I don’t know for sure. I have ideas and theories. But the wages of the left are paid in failure, marginalization, and violent elimination so I can’t in good faith say that we’ve cracked the code yet. So let’s put aside the political ramifications of the border debate and just take a look at what we are being asked to ignore for the sake of electoral expediency. Because what I do know is that America’s history of border enforcement has been one long unbroken chain of racism and genocide.
Can an institution founded on racist principles ever be reformed? It’s a very salient question for Americans to ask ourselves, considering that almost all of our institutions were in fact founded on racist principles. Off the top, I can think of firefighting and the post office as two institutions that were probably not based on racism when they were created. And of course the post office is in more trouble than ICE right now.
When a nascent American government was deciding whom among those who had been living in the former British colonies could become Americans, they limited naturalization to “white persons”. The first law restricting immigration to the United States passed by congress was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This was followed by a succession of different quota laws, restricting immigration from mostly East and South Asian countries and encouraging immigration from Western European ones. The main one being the 1924 Immigration Act. This led to a litany of court cases where the finest legal minds did battle over whether or not Japanese, Indian, Persian, Armenian and several other nationalities could lay claim to whiteness. I’m going to go ahead a quote liberally from the book “White by Law” by Berkeley legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez:
The principal locus of the debate, however, was in the courts. From the first prerequisite case in 1878 until racial restrictions were removed in 1952, fifty-two racial prerequisite cases were reported, including two heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Framing fundamental questions about who could join the citizenry in terms of who was White, these cases attracted some of the most renowned jurists of the times, such as John Wigmore, as well as some of the greatest experts on race, including Franz Boas. Wigmore, now famous for his legal treatises, published a law review article in 1894 asserting that Japanese immigrants were eligible for citizenship on the grounds that the Japanese people were anthropologically and culturally White. Boas, today commonly regarded as the founder of modern anthropology, participated in at least one of the prerequisite cases as an expert witness on behalf of an Armenian applicant, whom he regarded was White. Despite the occasional participation of these accomplished scholars, the courts struggled with the narrow question of whom to naturalize, and with the categorical question of how to determine racial identity.
This legal debate was perhaps best exemplified by two supreme court cases that pretty much laid bare what this country was trying to achieve with it’s immigration and naturalization laws. In Ozawa vs the United States, a Japanese man tried to gain access to naturalization by claiming whiteness. Scotus ruled against him citing that Japanese people did not meet the commonly held definition of white. But the court didn’t need to solely rely on squishy subjective definitions of whiteness. At the time race science was widely accepted as a serious and fact based categorization of races and ethnicities. (spoiler alert: It most definitely was not) Since white people were of the Caucasian race and Japanese people did not have much to do with the Caucasus mountains, it’s pretty much an open and shut case. A few months later an Asian Indian man brought a similar case to the Supreme Court, and that man, Bhagat Singh Thind, had good reason to be hopeful. See while Japanese people don’t share a common ancestry with the so called Ayran races from the Caucasus mountains, Indian people sure as shit do. In United States vs Thind he argued that his scientifically codified Ayran ancestry meant he met the definition of the “free white persons”; the only people legally allowed to become citizens without restriction at that time. So how did the court rule? Let’s go back to “White by Law”.
Reversing course, the Court repudiated its earlier equation and rejected any role for science in racial assignments. The Court decried the “scientific manipulation” it believed had ignored racial differences by including as Caucasian “far more [people] than the unscientific mind suspects,” even some persons the Court described as ranging “in color . . . from brown to black.” “We venture to think,” the Court said, “that the average well informed white American would learn with some degree of astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements.” The Court held instead that “the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man.” In the Court’s opinion, science had failed as an arbiter of human difference, and common knowledge was made into the touchstone of racial division.
Not only was Thind not allowed to become a citizen at that time, but the court's decision prompted action to remove the citizenship of American Indians who had already been naturalized. Including Thind’s own American Indian lawyer. Coupled with laws like in California that barred legal aliens from owning land, Thind’s loss in the courts hit the Indian community in America pretty hard. But before you feel too sorry for old Bhagat and his lawyer just keep in mind that part of his petition for whiteness was the idea that "The high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint." Basically since Thind would never be caught boning a darky, let alone marrying one, he must be white. Yes folks, there was a legal argument that being racist is what makes one white.
There has never been a case to overturn the legal precedent that Indian people are not white. It’s not the most important thing ever. Racial classifications were removed from immigration quota law in 1952 and more importantly there is no such thing as “white”. But it’s very important to note for the purposes of this conversation that up until a generation ago, this country was pretty adamant that only white people should be able to immigrate here and become American. But as the U.S. engaged in Olympic level mental gymnastics in order to ban damn near all of the continent of Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, there was one group of people who consistently allowed passage into the country unrestricted by quotas.
Mexican people.
See, the story of America is not one of freedom, or bravery, or rugged individualism, or some quixotic never-ending struggle for “what’s right”, or any bullshit like that. The story of America is the struggle between two different ideas on how to maintain “white” hegemony. There are the nativists who pathetically believe that “white” culture is the pinnacle of human civilization and that the presence of unassimilated non white peoples and cultures is an existential threat to the virtue and progress of a proper society. And then there are the capitalists who also believe all of that shit but they care about having a cheap workforce much more than racial purity.
The early history of the southern American border is basically a war of attrition between these two franchises of white supremacy. White southern ranchers and factory farmers advocated and fought for the right of Mexican migrants to cross the border not because they felt bad about all the land we stole from Mexico over the course of several imperialist wars, but because they had become dependent on the cheap labor supplied by people of tenuous legal residency status and even more tenuous financial prospects. The nativists, while buoyed by their victories over the “Yellow Peril” and their legal establishment of whiteness, where nevertheless very concerned about the numbers of Mexican migrants reaching a critical mass in the American southwest. The nativists tended to be poorer working class white folks who blamed their lack of economic opportunity in part on their proximity to people who properly season food. Because they lacked class solidarity with land owning and mostly wealthy ranchers and farmers who employed migrants, they did not much care about the capitalist right to exploited labor. It was these former stockboys, mail clerks and border town cops who were hired to staff a new government agency created in 1924 alongside the Immigration Act.
The US Border Patrol.
Due to the fairly recent wars with Mexico over land in the southwest, Americans along the border were very extremely racist toward Mexicans. The myth of the Texas Rangers as an heroic force for good is based on the reality that their main mission was terrorizing Mexican people, stealing their land, and defending whiteness. Along with representing the financial advantage of a new kind of elite and landed gentry, Mexican immigration also represented the creeping “mongrelization” of America. And so the only proper response to this state of affairs was unrelenting and unimaginable violence.
When the Immigration Act of 1924 established that entry into the United States must take place at established points of entry, it created a legal justification for the racists of the Border Patrol to detain, harass, and brutalize Mexican migrants for the terrible crime of crossing the border to go to work. There were arbitrary literacy tests and bribes to be collected. There were investigations of illegal immigration that mainly consisted of beating migrants until they confessed to crossing illegally. Whether they had done so or not. Let’s check in with The Intercept and their 2019 piece on Border Patrol Brutality:
Border agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas Rangers, tied the feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out of a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California. “Practically every other member” of El Paso’s National Guard “was in the Klan,” one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment.
Much like the professional police before them, the Border Patrol was created with the sole intent of protecting whiteness and violently suppressing everything else. And I guess this is as about a good a time as any to talk about Operation Wetback. Yup, you read that right.
Operation. Wetback.
If you aren’t aware, wetback is an extremely derogatory term mainly for Mexican people but can be applied to anyone of Hispanic descent. The name comes from the act of illegally entering the United States via crossing the Rio Grande river. Wetback wasn’t just a horribly offensive name that Border Patrol goons would use to refer to their quarry. It was the official language of Border Patrol when referring to Mexican people. So much so that when President Eisenhower in 1954 appointed army general Joseph Swing to the head of INS with the remit of forcibly removing the entire population of undocumented Mexican workers in one huge operation, that plan was called Operation Wetback. Originally Eisenhower wanted to use the military for this, but Posse Comitatus stopped him. So the next best thing was militarizing the Border Patrol.
The U.S. claimed at the time that 1.3 million illegal migrant workers were deported over the several years that the program was active. Quite a few of that number were American citizens, although the government didn’t keep up to date numbers on that. The Mexican government was complicit in the operation. They were suffering a labor shortage at the time and the low wages offered by Mexican agribusiness were somehow lower than the low wages that American ranchers were offering. So if you couldn’t pay your workers competitively, why not let an army of untrained racist jackals round up your countrymen and stuff them into boats, buses and planes, and dump them in unfamiliar lands with no way to contact friends or family. People were crammed into cages and packed into boats so tightly that they drew comparisons to slave ships. Migrants died of disease and heat stroke while left unattended in open air prisons operated by the indifferent and callous Border Patrol.
Does any of this sound familiar yet?
Yes current president and former rejected orange Teletubby Donald Trump has unleashed the full racist power and fury of the border security apparatus. What was once one Border Patrol agency operating under the aegis of the Immigration and Naturalization Service is now several agencies (including our friend ICE) operating under the relatively new Department of Homeland Security. But it’s very important to understand Donald Trump is only making more visible a problem that has been endemic to our way of border security and immigration since its inception. Post WWII when the Red Scare replaced the Yellow Panic on the color wheel of American reactionary xenophobia, the CIA sent border patrol officials down to places like Guatemala and Ecuador for the purposes of training local police forces to fight terrorism and keep dangerous radical elements from making their way to Mexico and eventually to our borders. One such Border Nazi John P. Longan took the tactics he learned and developed during Operation Wetback and taught the military and intelligence apparatuses of Guatemala how to more effectively massacre millions of indigenous Mayans and leftist Guatemalans. A civil war and massacre whose effects are still compelling scores of Guatemalans to leave their country and claim asylum here.
The history of the Border Patrol is indeed an unbroken chain of misery and racist violence. But we haven’t even touched on the wanton criminality of its agents yet. We are talking about mass rape on a systemic basis, including attacks on minors. There’s the facilitation of drug smuggling, often with agents working directly for cartels. Corruption got so bad that in Obama’s first year DHS had to change the definition of “corruption” so that CBP would only appear to be extremely corrupt instead of massively and comically corrupt. And lest you think that the comically blatant racism of a Border Patrol that used the term wetback as official language was left behind in our shameful racist past, allow me to refer you to the Facebook group uncovered by Pro Publica in 2019 where border agents joked about “hurling burritos at these bitches” in reference to an upcoming visit by Latina lawmaker to a border facility. They don’t call them wetbacks anymore, they now call Hispanic people “tonks”. Tonk being the sound a flashlight makes when you hit a migrant on their head with it.
Also, they hire fucking serial killers.
If you are looking for the simple explanation as to why Border Patrol is absolutely lousy with criminals, it’s because they have the least amount of required experience and training of any federal law enforcement agency. Any thick necked former high school football star too violent and unhinged to make it onto a local police force has a home at CBP. This has been the way for Border Patrol since it’s inception. Because the job of the agency is not to protect Americans for any serious threat from it’s southern border. It’s purpose is to enact violence on laborers of color, preserving the illusion that whiteness is precious and must be defended while simultaneously managing the supply of low wage workers that our agricultural economy is built on. You don’t need a college degree to do that job. You don’t even need to obey the law.
There it is folks, the past and present of an institution dedicated to white supremacy, looking forward to a future that honors that tradition. And I didn’t write all of this to say that I have the ultimate answer to this problem. This is a very messy topic and there is a lot that I left out. You might notice that when you clicked some of the links in the piece, quite a few of the offending agents mentioned had Hispanic last names. And even it’s earliest days, when the racism was slightly less concealed, the border patrol hired Mexican people to be agents. But those agents would likely want to fight you if you called them Mexican, because they were Spanish Americans. And that’s just how deep white supremacy goes.
The fact is immigration wasn’t that much of hot button issue until Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade agreement tanked the Mexican labor economy and our imperialist chickens came home to roost in the rest of South America as CIA backed right wing death squads and narco terrorists drove people from their homes. The reactionary right was able to use the increase in immigration, both undocumented and legal, to reignite the racist fires of xenophobic border fetishization. And the Democrats, in their never ending zeal to appear pragmatic and sensible, helped them do it.
This is the point I’m trying to make with all this. People don’t like #abolishice but it’s not because they have personal anecdotes of their local ICE agent rescuing a kitten from a tree. It’s not because they have personally experienced violence at the hands of an illegal immigrant. It’s because they have been conditioned to see America as whiteness and any threat to whiteness is a threat to America. This is what our immigration system and it’s enforcement is protecting. And I’m sorry, giving amnesty to a talented tenth of Latino immigrants or allowing people brought here as kids to stay isn’t going to allay that original sin. Maybe there is a way to pull an anti-racist border policy out of the current system, but no one has figured out a way to do that yet. You can’t be anti-racist and pro border enforcement because borders are almost by definition racist. Otherwise what is the material difference between a Mexican national and Mexican American? Neither one can trace lineage to the Caucasus mountains. So while it may be electorally pragmatic to not advocate the complete dissolution of our Border enforcement apparatus, we should be honest about what we are defending when we say that we need it. You are trading lives for votes, lives that you can’t just go back and make whole once you are in power.
The liberal pragmatist calls this “purity politics”. I call it solidarity. Solidarity can’t be limited to those who don’t upset the current national attitude. Especially when that attitude is based in deep seeded racism. So deeply ingrained in our history that it’s barely noticeable. Solidarity isn’t found on the path of least resistance. It’s hard and messy and historically very dangerous. But so is being human. And what is the point of coming to power if we can’t bring our humanity with us.
Solidarity forever.