Thread: Amnesty leader Deepak Bhargava, comments on the state of CIR

http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1780






Organizing for Immigration Reform: An Interview with Deepak Bhargava
August 17, 2010
by Daniel Altschuler

As part of a series of interviews on the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform, I recently spoke with Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change (CCC). CCC has been a core group in the movement for comprehensive immigration reform over the past several years, playing a central role in the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR) through 2007 and the current Reform Immigration for America (RIFA) campaign. Mr. Bhargava sits on RIFA’s management team, and he spoke with me on issues ranging from the prospects for reform this year, the potential impact of Latino voters and grassroots mobilizations, and the challenges facing progressive groups in the wake of Arizona’s controversial immigration law and in the run-up to the mid-term elections.

Altschuler: How did you first get involved with the movement for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR)?

Bhargava: I was there pretty much at the beginning, around 1998-1999. In that period, a group of immigrant leaders approached me and the Center for Community Change with the idea of doing a national campaign to win legalization for the growing population of undocumented people in the US. At that time, the topic was unspeakable in polite Washington conversation discourse—no politician, no national advocacy organization would tackle it. Partly because of the extraordinary quality of the leaders that approached us, and partly because it was so clear that we couldn’t be an anti-poverty organization without tackling immigration, we decided to go all-in. We helped to form what was the earliest pro-legalization coalition in the country, and we’ve been in it ever since.

Altschuler: The Center for Community Change (CCC) was a central player in the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR) in the lead-up to the immigration vote in 2007. What have immigrant rights groups learned from this last failed effort for immigration reform? Is the current movement, Reform Immigration For America (RIFA) just a larger version of its predecessor?

Bhargava: I think we learned five key lessons. The first one is that we got massively out-called in the last couple of weeks before the crucial vote [in 2007]. There was a tidal wave of hate in the country, and Congress’ switchboards lit up. And, while we did a respectable job of getting a couple of hundred thousand calls into Congress, the other side got a couple of million calls into Congress. And so, we built a whole technological platform—a phone bank system, an online system, a text messaging operation—so that that would never happen again. And, in fact, in the last year or two, we’ve outperformed the other side, or at least matched them, in every key battle.

The second lesson was that we needed power in some parts of the country that were not traditional receivers of immigrants. So we went to work building new organizations, new leadership, through movement building trainings and through helping to create new organizations in states like Arkansas, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio—places that previously didn’t have such organizations. And that’s helped enormously.

Third, that we needed to really engage a much more diverse coalition of forces. So we invested much more deeply in building relationships with African-American leadership, with Evangelicals, with local law enforcement, with business leaders. And I think a lot of that work has paid off in a substantial way.

Fourth, this ultimately is all about politics. We organized a massive Latino and immigrant voter mobilization effort in 2008 that contributed to really shifting the sense of the importance of this constituency.

Finally, communications is central to our strategy. There are radio talk shows and television networks that make a living bashing immigrants. So we built up a new organization, America’s Voice, with new capacity to communicate to the broad public, as well as to targeted audiences.

Altschuler: You mentioned voter mobilization in Latino and immigrant communities. How important are these efforts for CIR going forward?

Bhargava: Well, I think, ultimately, the political driver of this issue is growing awareness in both political parties that the immigrant vote, and also the Latino vote—they’re closely related, but not the same thing—are really critical to the future of national politics. It’s arguable that Latinos played a critical role in the 2008 election at the presidential level, in Senate races, and House races—two million new Latino voters at the polls, and pro-immigrant candidates defeating anti-immigrant ones across the board. But the key is consistency, so a big part of our strategy for 2010 is to substantially increase Latino voter turnout in key states like Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, and elsewhere, to show that we’re not a one-trick pony or one-hit wonder. If you boil it all down, consistent performance in turnout and a rising share of the electorate is probably the number one ingredient to getting us over the top.

Altschuler: At the end of April, Arizona passed its controversial immigration law, SB 1070. How, if at all, has the Arizona immigration law changed immigrant rights groups’ strategy to realize immigration reform?

Bhargava: Arizona has changed everything. We’ve gone through several paroxysms of hate over the last decade, and we’re in the midst of another one. We had the 1996 period and the welfare law. We had the post-September-11th period. We had the period after the Senate immigration law failed in 2007, where there were the local ordinances and hate radio and ballot initiatives. And we have another one here in 2010.

There is a confluence of a few factors. One issue is that there is a substantial part of the Republican base that is deeply nativist and deeply uncomfortable with the demographic shifts in the country. They are roiling Republican Party politics and exercising probably an outsized role in shaping the direction of the party. So, even though there are wiser heads in the Republican Party who acknowledge that this is bad for the long-term future of the party, there is a huge temptation that’s been waded into in Arizona by the governor, by Senator McCain, and many other politicians: to demagogue. The Arizona law has to be read in that environment: a governor who was in trouble and embraced the issue to win re-election; a senator who embraced a restrictionist stance in order to stave off a right-wing primary challenger.

I think it’s an incredibly volatile situation. While, on the one hand, the nativists are making a lot of hay, the realities of Arizona have made the issue break through in the public consciousness in a way that immigration hasn’t in the 10-plus years that I’ve been working on it. African-American fraternities and sororities, pastors, and other organizations have come out and spoken out in a way that we have never seen before. There are conservative Evangelicals who have historically been aligned with the Republican Party who are saying that enough is enough. There are law enforcement officials who have come out publicly [against the law…Immigration has now] broken through in a way that’s never happened before.

And, probably most importantly, what this has done is fuelled the identification of immigration reform with Latino identity in the country, which has made this a real attack on a very substantial and growing part of the country. So the cultural reverberations are profound. The prospects of CIR in the short-term are uncertain—it’s very murky—but I think it’s very possible that the fever will break in the next six to nine months, and that there will be a snap back to a situation where wiser heads prevail and there’s a possibility of getting a policy that would actually solve the problem and meet the needs of the community.

Altschuler: Do you see yourself right now in a wait-and-see phase, or are there things you can do now to facilitate CIR happening?

Bhargava: I think there are three core strategies that we’re focusing on.
The first is that we will be doing some major public events in the fall. There will be an event here in Washington in September under the banner of “Reform, Relief, and Respectâ€

Good find. This comment below confirms everything we have been warning America about. They will promise every type of enforcement imaginable, but once they get their new multi million illegal alien voting block in place, they can do anything they want.

The second thing I’d say is that there are certain kinds of reforms that make other reforms possible. If we are successful in the next few years in providing a path to citizenship for 12 million people, that has the potential to be a structural change in the politics of the country that will make the country more generous to immigrants in the future. In other words, it will empower a voting bloc over time, it will empower a constituency that will not stand for, or be so vulnerable to, demagogic attacks. So, if you want better immigration policy ten years from now, you’d better support and do what’s necessary to get the current undocumented population legal.

NO AMNESTY. NEVER. AMERICANS WILL NEVER SUPPORT AMNESTY FOR ILLEGALS, LAW-BREAKERS.

If it does not stop now it will only get worse. An Amnesty of any type will mean another one down the road, guaranteed.

It stops now or the flood gates will open...