BY LAURA GARZA
After attending a celebration of the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo - to mark the day Mexicans defeated French colonial occupation - President Bill Clinton promptly announced he would step up efforts to deport immigrants. Specifically, he promised to expedite deportation of any immigrant who has simply been charged, not yet tried or convicted, with breaking U.S. laws. In a bid to take the lead in acting against the rights of immigrant workers and fueling a campaign to justify more border cops and quicker deportation proceedings, Clinton said the United States government "must be able to control our borders."

His announcement was saturated with references describing immigrants as lawbreakers, people crowding jails, and causing backlogs in courtrooms. There are 100,000 people awaiting some form of deportation hearing. The Washington Post cited a pledge by Clinton to "streamline" this process, thereby speeding up the pending deportations. Clinton also asked the Justice Department to identify what he estimated as hundreds of thousands of people ordered out of the United States but who "then disappear back into the population."

"Our nation was built by immigrants," Clinton said. "But we won't tolerate immigration by people whose first act is to break the law as they enter our country," he went on. "We must continue to do everything we can to strengthen our borders, enforce our laws, and remove illegal aliens from our country."

Earlier in the week, the White House sent Congress legislation that includes proposals to add 1,500 Border Patrol cops, establish a pilot worker-identification system, speed up the deportation process, and authorize border-crossing fees if the individual states agree to them. The proposals are similar to others recently submitted by Republican and Democratic officials.

Congressional representatives passed a bill in February that would hasten the deportation of undocumented workers who have been convicted of crimes. It also expanded the number of offenses for which undocumented persons would be subject to deportation. Moreover, it included $650 million for the federal government to reimburse states for the cost of jailing people. This is one of the measures also being pushed as part of the "Contract With America."

California senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, proposed the Illegal Immigration Control and Enforcement Act of 1995, which includes many provisions similar to the package submitted by the White House. It also included a proposal to grant courts the authority to force immigrants seeking probation to "consent" to so-called voluntary deportation as a condition of probation.

"Too many people are still able to illegally cross our borders, and too few states, most notably California, carry the burden of having to support, educate, and often incarcerate the hundreds of thousands who enter this country illegally," she said.

Alongside the bipartisan campaign in Washington to limit the rights of immigrant workers, state and local politicians have chimed in and begun pushing further proposals in a number of areas. In Florida, two groups are organizing efforts to place an anti-immigrant proposition on the ballot modeled after California's Proposition 187.

Meanwhile the state House of Representatives passed a law aimed at restricting the ability to obtain a drivers license by demanding proof of citizenship or legal immigration status.

The general framework of all these capitalist politicians pursuing limits on the rights of immigrant workers gives a wider berth to more right-wing figures, like Patrick Buchanan, Republican presidential candidate. Buchanan has called for a moratorium on legal immigration, for building a fence along a 70-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border, for 10,000 more border cops, and for use of the military to crack down on workers crossing the border. He also issued a call to make English the official language of the United States. These proposals are to deal with what he termed, "an invasion of the country."

Using the same scapegoating rhetoric as Clinton and Feinstein, Buchanan said, "It is outrageous that American taxpayers, as hard-pressed as they are- have to provide social welfare benefits for those whose accomplishments are to break the laws to get into the United States and to get on welfare."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home