Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Can homo contraceptives compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren't controlled? Or is advice to limit one's family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space? Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down? -John Tanton, founder of FAIR[3]

 

 

Women who immigrate face multiple and overlapping oppressions. Foreign-born women are recruited to United States to do jobs once performed, often for free, by native born women-cleaning, nursing, nannying. They are actively recruited to fill the lowest paid, least stable and physically dangerous de-skilled industrial positions, thanks to sexist and racist assumptions: that women of color can afford to work for less, that they are inherently suited to work that is dead-end, uncertain, detailed, and routine, and that, lacking legitimating documents, they simply do not matter.

The US government and employers benefit from a low-cost, temporary labor reserve to which they have no obligation to provide representation, education, health care, and other services. While the profits from such labor are enjoyed, the government and employers do not wish to bear its true costs. The burden is placed on immigrant-receiving communities, which may be stressed or overwhelmed, and easily stirred to resentment. Given the rhetoric of the anti-immigrant movement, that this desirable, compliant, low-wage labor reserve is increasingly and preferably female is a sad and bitter irony.

While men are most typically imagined as the immigrant pioneers-the ones who immigrate, establish themselves and then send for their families-it is increasingly women who are imagined by post-industrial US employers as desirable workers. California's urban and suburban labor markets, for example, tend to favor women from Central America over men. They earn more, find work faster, and work more hours. This does not translate automatically or easily to more egalitarian family relations. The employment advantage may inflame family tensions and aggravate household inequalities, much as it has for white middle-class native born women. Single female-headed immigrant households, however, may be desperately poor. The advances made for some women in the United States have not translated to improved conditions for others.[4]

Immigrant survival strategies for patching together extended households with non-kin multiple wage-earners are specifically and increasingly targeted by anti-immigration activists (see "The New Battleground," Building Democracy Monthly, Feb. 2007).

Simultaneous to their recruitment, women who immigrate are attacked via policies popularized with too-familiar misogynist and racist tropes-ungovernable fertility, financial incompetence, incapacity for civic virtue, dereliction of civic responsibility.

Immigrant women are vulnerable to such accusations-despite an abundant scholarly literature documenting their ingenuity, resourcefulness and diligence as financial providers for their families who, at enormous personal cost, navigate cross-culturally and trans-nationally.[5] They are vulnerable in the way that all people of color in the United States are vulnerable, and all women-and their human rights have terribly few and fragile protections in an increasingly contentious and violent political climate.

The anti-immigrant movement has shrewdly attempted to position itself with regards to environmentalist and reproductive rights constituencies. Women who immigrate are pathologized by the population-control branch of the anti-immigrant movement as cancers. In the words of FAIR:

Normal growth, the stable production of new cells at the right rate to replace old ones, is healthy. Runaway growth, the creation of new cells that are not needed and that damage the environment for all cells, is not healthy-we call that cancer.[6]

Morally deplorable strategies of attrition are rationalized and justified with reference to the imagined hyperfertility of immigrant women of color-a hyperfertility which studies of immigrant women have failed to discover. The politics of population control are often linked with biological determinism. Such theories link innate human capacity to race and even suggest eugenicist solutions to the current "excess" fertility of people of "inferior" races.

If we are unwilling to permit the re-establishment of disease as a population control device, the social problem then hinges on political questions. We suspect that taboo inhibits the discussion of many issues that, if carried far enough, might lead to acceptable solutions.... Without profound and courageous investigation and discussion we are brought up short by this dilemma: If the solution is acceptable, it won't work; if the solution might work, it isn't acceptable.[7]

Garret Hardin, anti-immigrant ecologist and FAIR board member, wrote those words in 1996. Were he alive today, he could only be pleased with recent developments in US federal, state and local policy. Strategies of attrition-that is to say, policies that involve depriving women and children of resources necessary for barest survival-have become acceptable to portions of the American electorate. How the suffering, desperation and disease produced by such strategies can be construed to be of benefit to immigrant receiving communities is beyond imagination.

Contrary to the dehumanizing images of Latina immigrant women as breeders with large families, used in the campaign to pass California's Proposition 187, about 47% of these women have only one or two children. And more to the point, considering the hardships imposed by US border policy, is the painful fact that 40% of those women with children have at least one of their children "back home" in their country of origin-children for whose sake these women emigrated, in order to provide.[8]

Pending are many state and local measures to block access to public services, including prenatal care, schooling for immigrant children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and non-emergency health care. All such measures are punitive assaults on the well-being of immigrant women and their children. An Urban Institute study points to a noticeable "chilling effect" on immigrants' willingness to access health care and other benefits, indicating that the nationwide decline in immigrants' access to such programs is due less to eligibility changes than to fear and suspicion of using these programs.[9]

This is a situation calling for sound public policy, and strategies that return more tax dollars-tax dollars from the relevant industries, and tax dollars withheld from immigrant wages-to the communities in which workers and their children reside. Unfortunately, the levels of violent emotion result in ad hoc policies which only serve to increase the burdens on immigrants and receiving communities alike.  Long-term neglect of the problems related to immigration in combination with racism, have created an environment in which extreme responses-punitive measures, hate politics, and companies building detention centers-now flourish.

One example of such poor policy is our militarized border-the "funnel effect" created by US immigration policies. Safer, urban border crossings have been closed down, funneling people through the most perilous portion of the southwestern US desert. While there are no substantive efforts to recover the bodies of those who do not make the crossing, the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office (PCMEO), in Tucson, did handle nine bodies-in 1990. In 2005, they handled 201 recovered bodies. Before the funnel effect, 12% of the recovered bodies were female. And since, that number has jumped to 26%. The actual numbers of deaths are widely reckoned to be unknowable, given the difficulty and remoteness of the terrain. It must be emphasized as well that these numbers are only for one county.

Autopsy data from the recovered bodies in Pima County indicates women are 2.87 times more likely to die of exposure/heat exhaustion than men. (Men are more likely to be victims of homicide.) For the women who survive, permanent kidney damage is a common though uncounted side effect of the severe exposure and dehydration. Anecdotal evidence from EMTs and hospital emergency room personal also indicates that women who survive the crossing are losing unborn children as a result of the exposure: "intrauterine fetal demise."[10]

The border militarization now makes it impossible for immigrant women working in the States who wish to return to their families to do so. Many women left children in the care of their families and communities of origin, hoping to provide for them financially and to return to them as often as possible. Families and individuals who never intended to make the United States their permanent home are now trapped.  Women are far less able to maintain deeply desired connections with family and community.

Immigrant women on US soil have a special power-the power to give birth to American citizens. This power is granted to them by the Fourteenth Amendment, the constitutional foundation of all civil rights legislation in the United States. For this power they are loathed most of all by the explicitly racist, white nationalist wing of the anti-immigrant movement-the wing most articulate about the threat to white privilege posed by changing United States demographics. The terrifying specter of a unified majority electorate of color seems sufficient, to white nationalists, to justify any and all possible actions against men, women and children who immigrate.

Several anti-immigrant groups advocate for a constitutional amendment that would in effect revoke the Fourteenth Amendment and deny citizenship to children born to undocumented parents. It is beyond the scope of this article to consider the consequences of such a proposal for American democracy.

[1] BBC News, "Japan gaffe minister 'must quit'" Tuesday, 30 January 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6313265.stm 

[2] Yen Le Enspiritu, Asian American women and men: Labor, laws and love (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), as cited in K. Hossfeld, "Hiring Immigrant Women: Silicon Valley's ‘Simple Formula,'" in Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 65.

[3] John Tanton, paper for the WITAN study group (1986), as quoted in Jean Stefanic & Richard Deldago, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 11. 

[4] Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, "‘I'm Here, but I'm There:' The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood" in Gender and U.S. Immigration, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

[5] See, for example, the essays collected in Hondagneu-Sotelo (ed.), Gender and U.S. Immigration. 

[6] FAIR, How to Win the Immigration Debate, (Washington, D.C.: FAIR, 1997), 62.

[7] Garret Hardin, "Population Control: Dare We Face the Taboo?" in Stalking the Wild Taboo (Petoskey, Michigan: American Immigration Control Foundation, 1996), 347, emphasis in original. 

[8] Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila "‘I'm Here, but I'm There:'"

[9] Michale Fix and Jeffrey S. Passel, Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 1994), cited in National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, "Immigrant Rights: Striving for Racial Justice, Economic Equality and Human Dignity," in Defending Immigrant Rights: An Activists Handbook (Somerville, Massachusetts: Political Research Associates, 2002), 18-32.

[10] Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, M. Melissa McCormick, Daniel Martinez, Inez Magdalena Duarte, 2006. The Funnel Effect and Recovered Bodies of Unauthorized Migrants Processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 1990-2005: Report Submitted to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. University of Arizona: Binational Migration Institute. http://www.ailf.org/ipc/policybrief/policybrief_020607.pdf