In the Sherlock Holmes short story "Silver Blaze" the famous detective focuses his analytic prowess on the "curious incident" of the dog that did not bark in the nighttime.
In the recent mid-term elections there was a similar "curious incident" in Illinois that is important nationally. No major candidate in Illinois from either the Republican or Democratic Party demagogued the immigration issue. Neither the ultra-conservative Republican candidate for Governor, Bill Brady, nor the supposedly "moderate" candidate for Senate, Mark Kirk, ran ads, did mailers, or used talking points about the supposed scourge of illegal immigrants taking jobs or sponging up our tax money. Nor did any major candidate for Congress.
It is definitely true that a number of the Republican candidates that were elected to Congressional seats hold anti-immigrant positions. But they did not choose to use those positions as wedge issues in the recent election. Why not?
A possible explanation is that Republicans in Illinois are a kinder, more reasonable group than Republicans elsewhere. That, I'm afraid, does not pass the laugh test.
You could argue that it's because Illinois has a large immigrant population in general and a large Latino population in particular. But so do Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and California where Republican Party candidates tried to use "illegal immigration" and "amnesty" as wedge issues to galvanize their base.
It is true that Illinois has a more immigrant-friendly tradition than some of the states in the Southwest. Much of the Caucasian population in Illinois comes from recent immigrant stock themselves - from Ireland, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Croatia and Serbia.
But there is also a more old-fashioned reason. Demagogues and bullies tend to prey upon those whom they consider too weak to strike back. It turned out that in Nevada, California, and Colorado they made the wrong call, since their demagoguery galvanized turnout among Latino voters that defeated right-wing candidates for the Senate.
In fact, the Latino vote saved the Senate for the Democrats.
But in Illinois the right didn't even try their demagogic tactics. That's largely because the immigrant communities in Illinois have worked hard over five election cycles to build a muscular political organizing vehicle that gets out the immigrant vote -- and can bite back fiercely at anti-immigrant demagogues.
In 2008, Jim Oberweis ran for Congress against Democrat Bill Foster on a heavily anti-immigrant platform and was flattened by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. That experience sent a lesson through Illinois' right-wing political class. Nothing like watching one of their own get scalded to teach others not to touch the stove.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) no leads The New Americans' Democracy Project . This year, 13 electoral organizers worked for months in both the City of Chicago and the Suburbs. They targeted 133,128 infrequent immigrant voters for a multi-contact phone and door operation, and before the election was done the volunteers they recruited did a total of 549,000 live phone calls to their universe of Latino, Asian and Muslim voters.
This work has been growing in scale and bite since 2002 when it began with no funding and in only nine precincts. At this point the immigrant vote can no longer be ignored by either party. Here are several key lessons from the Illinois immigrant organizing experience:
1) Consistency Counts: ICIRR has had between 10 and 20 full-time immigrant election campaign organizers every election since 2004. They begin their work in July and work through November, building a "recent immigrant" field operation. In every single cycle they add new skills to their electoral organizing.
2) Numbers Count: The immigrant voter program has registered over 90,000 new immigrant voters. They door-knock between 35,000 and 60,000 doors every election cycle.
3) Diversity is Strength: The Democracy Project works with leaders and organizations in Latino community, but also the Asian, Arab, and Polish immigrant communities.
4) Mine the "Base" and work the "Swings": The electoral work is done in the immigrant "base" Chicago port of entry neighborhoods to generate numbers, but also in swing suburban political districts where multi-ethnic immigrant organizing multiplies the voting power of Latinos. The activation of new immigrant voters in suburban "swing" communities forces Republican attention to immigrant issues.
5) Reward Friends, Punish Enemies: ICIRR keeps track of who engages in immigrant bashing -- and stikes back. When Republican anti-immigrant candidate Jim Oberweis polarized voters against "illegal immigrants", ICIRR released to the media a film of undocumented immigrants cleaning his business while being paid only $3.23 an hour. When old-school Democratic Mayor of Waukegan, IL attacked "illegals" with local law enforcement of immigration laws, he went down to defeat in the next election because Latinos in Waukegan mobilized to support his opponent.
6) Naturalize, Naturalize, Naturalize: ICIRR has one of the most aggressive citizenship programs in the nation. All told, an additional 170,000 immigrants were naturalized in Illinois over the last five years. The coalition itself directly assisted over 48,000 of those legal immigrants to become citizens, and thus voters.
ICIRR is not a partisan organization. In fact, their most recent fundraiser was headlined by the popular former Republican Governor Jim Edgar. But because of the track record of Republicans across the country, its organizing definitely benefits Democrats. In fact, Democratic Governor Pat Quinn - who won by fewer than 20,000 votes -- would not likely have been re-elected had it not been for their work.
On the policy side, ICIRR works for immigrant-friendly policies, and by any definition they have succeeded in winning some of the most immigrant-friendly policies in the nation at the state level in Illinois.
The state of Illinois leans Blue, but it has wide swatches of Red. In the recent elections the Democrats barely lost the Senate race and took some terrible losses in the Congressional delegation. But in addition to electing a Democratic Governor, both the State House and Senate remained in Democratic hands. The immigrant vote was critical to these Democratic victories, but it is also a force that Republicans ignore or abuse at their peril. In this election, at least, Illinois Republicans generally had the good sense not to bait the immigrant community.
In the current environment of racialized fear and polarization against immigrants across the U.S., the hard work of immigrant advocates in Illinois provides two key lessons:
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.
And before any one gets upset, that is GOP and DEM governments, it is both sides.
Maybe if our laws on immigration were enforced for a while, we would not like them and want them changed. But what we know we don’t like is being played for fools by our own government.
We were told in 1986 under the Simpson-Mazzoli Act,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control_Act_of_1986
that if we just legalized the illegals, then no more would come, how did that work out?
We were told in 1986 that if we would agree to grant amnesty, then the federal government would enforce our immigration laws and all future immigration would be legal, and all these years latter they still refuse to do it. We legalized 4 million and 15 million more came!
The DEMs say “if we just knew who was employing these workers we would fine themâ€
The GOPs say “if we just knew where the illegals were we would deport themâ€.
Both DEM and GOP Governments knew we had 15 million illegal workers in this country, they KNOW where almost each and every one is employed, they KNOW who is employing almost every one and their employers MAILING ADDRESS. They play us for complete fools! And we are tired of it!
You don’t believe that?
Read our own government website:
http://www.ssa.gov/employer/noMatchNotices.htm
Likewise there is the issue of people on this blog who claim they are ok with regular immigration and they are just aganst illegal immigrants and they feel that legal immigrants can and should and do get equal rights. God knows best -- many of them, but not all, are probably being dishonest in what they say. Many despise all types of foriegners that don't have the same background and ethnicity and religion and native language as them --- even if they are legal immigrants and are 100 times more productive and beneficial to American society than they are.
Your arguments smack of those used to justify the Jim Crow laws.
Thats total BS, Jim Oberweis is a terrible canidate, he loses every race he enters here in Illinois. Bill Fosters district (speaker Dennis Hastert old seat) isn't a district that has alot of Latino's in it. Oberweis lost because he was and always a crappy candidate. Just ask Bill Foster who lost to a TEA PARTY candidate a couple of weeks ago not named Oberweis
if someone follows the rules and comes to this country- WELCOME! if you break the law by illegally crossing the border -you ARE a criminal and need to be treated as such
most have no desire to assimilate into our society, and refuse to learn the language.
I have not seen ONE person ar article against LEGAL immigrants, not one.
There is also probably no small amount of union involvement here, most likely there are ties between this entity, and the SEIU, Service Employees International Union, which is a large, well-heeled labor organization of some note and no small amount of political clout, some of which became rather outstanding in terms of connections to one Rod Blagojevich, former (impeached, unanimously at that) governor of that state. Illinois is also one of the 50 states deeply in arrears. Coincidence? Well, probably not.
I'd say that the lion's share of the immigration debate revolves not around immigrant's rights, because lawful immigrants automatically have rights when they do what's necessary to become US citizens, but rather cheap labor, and this political effort is little more than an attempt to guarantee the steady flow of same from beyond our borders. Money, in final analysis, talks louder than votes...so, who ARE the financial backers of this new political entity? Who, indeed.
And it makes sense that unions would OPPOSE illegal immigration, it takes jobs away from their members. So I don't know what connection you think unions have, but then again your post didn't make much sense overall.
After all, no one really thinks that Obama is an illegal immigrant but we all understand the snide references to "not a REAL American", "doesn't share OUR values", don't we? And it has nothing to do with his education or maternal upbringing ... does it?
It's about race.
I don't like oversimplification, but statistically, you have to take a lot more crap if your ancestry isn't correct. To quite a few people, it really doesn't matter if you are legal or not---an illegal immigrant from Europe will usually be a lot more welcome in some communities than someone legally here from Mexico or India.
I'm especially concerned about the political effects of massive Third World immigration. These are people for whom government corruption and elitist tyranny are a matter of course. As the US plunges down that same road I doubt if they will share any outrage about it.
It helps them to keep their"Republicans are racists" mantra alive and well. Meanwhile they are the ones passing laws and enacting policies that keep minorities beholden to them.
This is a nation of immigrints and has been since the New Stone Age. Most people who come here, legally and illegally, add a lot. Not everyone is (or needs to be) an Indian computer scientist or a Chinese engineer or a business executive from Brazil or a pharmacist from Ghana. There are places for masons from Mexico.
Lots of people who came here illegally left after the downturn. For the people who came here illegally and worked here even in bad times, that should be part of the calculus when issues of deportation come up. If some one serves in our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, especially in war time, they ought to get citizenship on an expedited basis.
On the other hand, we do need to control our borders and we need to be sure that no one coming in is a threat. Some kind of Guestworker program can help, but German experiance proves that is NOT a cure-all.
There are no pat answers here.
I love people who always say "it's complicate, it's not always black and white."
Yes it is.
Send the illegals that you catch home.
Finish building the wall.
Start locking up employers who hire illegals.
When the job market dries up, the majority will go home.
Sometimes it is black and white.
A-You were born here.
B-You entered here with a visa issued by the US government. That visa was either for permanent residency, or it had a date by which you were obliged to leave. If you entered without permission or stayed past your leave date, you are illegal.