Breakthrough

by Michael Shellenberger

Immigration reform advocates were surprised last year by the grassroots, populist backlash against "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. Now, a xenophobic populist backlash threatens national health care reform. What can be done about it?

During the summer of 2007, Breakthrough co-founder Ted Nordhaus and pollster Celinda Lake conducted focus groups to better understand public attitudes toward health care. While doing so, they stumbled upon an important -- and disturbing -- pattern. "In focus group after focus group, invariably somebody would say, 'I just want to make sure [health care reform] doesn't cover illegal aliens.'"

The perception that a health care reform proposal might do so, even inadvertently, was usually reason enough for it to be rejected. "We couldn't figure out where the xenophobia was coming from, but we knew we had better figure it out." Nordhaus and Breakthrough Institute have since begun an in-depth look at public attitudes toward immigrants and health care with the goal of avoiding the same kind of train wreck that derailed immigration reform last year.

"Amnesty," the Word that Brought Down Immigration Reform

In January of 2004, President George W. Bush called for a broad overhaul of America's immigration laws intended to provide a path to legal citizenship for millions of undocumented workers in the United States. For years, progressive civil rights organizations have been pushing for immigration reform, and the announcement by Bush sparked intense optimism in the reform community.

Over the next few months, a broad coalition begin to form, crossing ideological and party lines and representing some of the most powerful interest groups and individuals in the country. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy and presumptive GOP nominee John McCain authored comprehensive reform based on Bush's plan. The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other business organizations joined major unions like the Service Employees International Union, and the AFL-CIO in calling for a path to citizenship. The coalition was broad, bipartisan, well financed, and contained some of the most influential groups in the country.

Yet within a few short months, the deal was dead, and anti-immigration sentiment was being used as a powerful political weapon. Relatively obscure journalists like Lou Dobbs of CNN rose to prominence stoking populist outrage about illegal immigrants, and the issue became the prime topic of conservative commentators. Within months, the President's own party began using support for "amnesty" and "illegal immigrants" as a blunt political weapon against Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. Democratic leadership in the Congress publicly backed away from the president's plan, and some party leaders quietly urged Democratic members from swing districts to take a hard line against illegal immigration to inoculate themselves against expected political attacks.

What looked like an historic opportunity to reform American's immigration laws evolved into a harsh and unrelenting political backlash in relatively short order. What looked like a bipartisan agreement on a civil rights issue activated a relatively dormant conservative base and gave the right a powerful, effective weapon to use against progressive issues and candidates.

In fact, anti-immigration sentiments are being used by conservatives to do more than just defeat immigration reform legislation. The recent debate on SCHIP in Congress evolved into a debate about benefits for illegal immigrants, even though the underlying legislation explicitly excluded such benefits. That fact didn't stop Rep. Steve King using the debate to override the President's veto of the bill to claim that SCHIP stood for "Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents." SCHIP, of course, failed to achieve the votes necessary to override the veto, and since then, House Republicans have used illegal immigration as the basis to oppose a number of social contract and social safety net proposals. All indications are that any attempts to expand support for the poor will be forced to overcome actual and perceived benefits for illegal immigrants.

The Threat to Health Care Reform

Now, anti-immigrant sentiment is boiling over to threaten the prospects for health care reform. In a special congressional election in Ohio last year, Freedom's Watch, a conservative organization, ran TV ads in a special congressional election attacking Democratic nominee Robin Weirauch for supporting a "Medicare for All" universal health care plan. The ad was described by the Washington Post as follows:

Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and 'liberals in Congress' of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants.

The New York Times noted:

The ad suggested that Ms. Weirauch supported public health care benefits for illegal immigrants. Ms. Weirauch said she obviously does not support such a thing but instead backed a national health care plan that she said would extend to legal residents of the United States. Nevertheless, she had a tough time explaining her way out of it.

The ads correlated with a drop in the polls for Weirauch, and she ultimately lost the race. Given the bellwether nature of special elections (and the political relevance of Ohio), Democratic leadership in the Congress took notice. Commenting on the race, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and former Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee noted:

"[T]his issue has real implications for the country. It captures all the American people's anger and frustration not only with immigration, but with the economy." He added, "It's self-evident. This is a big problem."

Anti-immigration/anti-"other" attitudes also impede progress on global warming and other environment issues. Recall that in the early 1990s, we saw appeals to xenophobic values in the debate over NAFTA in some of the arguments that lower wages in Mexico would attract jobs from American workers. That same logic could apply to the adoption of tough emissions standards in the United States for American companies, without corresponding standards in Mexico and Central America.

We saw a similar dynamic at work in global warming focus groups conducted for the Foundation last fall, in which Tucson residents (especially men) were far more likely to blame global warming on developing countries than attributing the problem to U.S. sources. Results from American Environics' American Value Survey echo those views, showing that adults who are high on the "Xenophobia" values construct are significantly more likely to believe the U.S. shouldn't be required to limit its greenhouse gas emissions unless developing countries like China and India do too. In fact, AVS data reveal that being high on Xenophobia is stronger predictor of holding this opinion than either being ideologically conservative or a Republican.

Anti-immigration attitudes also hinder environmental efforts on the diplomatic front, as America's trading partners prove less amenable to negotiating more stringent environmental safeguards when American politicians are demonizing their countries and citizens.

What's Driving Xenophobia?

The strategic errors that conservatives and progressives made in crafting public policy were in large part a result of misunderstanding public attitudes. They took at face value polling data that seemed to demonstrate the public's willingness to support a "path to legalization" for undocumented workers. A late 2005 Time magazine poll, for instance, showed that 72% favored "a program that would allow illegal immigrants who have jobs in the United States to live and work legally in the United States for a fixed period of time if they registered with the government."

There is reason to believe that voters are reluctant to openly admit their anti-immigrant feelings. In a novel experiment, a University of California graduate student, Alex Janus, used a method that found stronger support for halting all immigration to the U.S. than is normally found in conventional polling. He used a methodology that protects against triggering "social desirability bias" -- the bias, for example, among liberals to espouse illiberal views, such as xenophobia. Janus concluded:

I find that the direct question dramatically underestimates support for immigration restrictionism, especially among Democrats, women, college graduates, and people who claim to feel warmly toward Hispanics or Asian Americans. Some groups that have been thought to be among a pro-immigration vanguard are, in reality, just as supportive of immigration restrictionism as the rest of the American public.

There is also reason to believe that attitudes toward immigration are more complex than they sometimes appear. A May 2007 poll by CBS News, 62 percent favored giving illegal immigrants who had been in the U.S. two years a chance to keep their jobs and apply for legal status, while 69 percent indicated that illegal immigrants should be deported, indicating that at least some sizable number of respondents favored both deportation and legalization, two seemingly contradictory and irrational responses. This may indicate the operation of two different "frames" within the same person.

A long historical review of the evidence by Harvard historian Benjamin Friedman in "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" reveals a strong correlation between rising economic insecurity (even during periods of economic growth) and xenophobia. Psychological research shows that people think more about justice -- what's fair and what's not -- when questions of national identity become salient. There may be a relationship between the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and the perceived decline in the U.S. of America's standing in the world, resulting from the protracted war in Iraq. And the increasing visibility of immigrants, the pressures of globalization, and changing of gender roles, may all contribute to nativism, traditionalism, and xenophobia.

The New Republic's John Judis comes to a similar conclusion in his article, "The Phantom Menace: The Psychology Behind America's Immigration Hysteria."

In recent years, this concern about Latino immigration has been fed by a broader anxiety about America's place in the world. That has been prompted by the failure of the Bush administration to complete its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan; by the rapid rise of gas prices (making it appear that the United States is at the mercy of foreign oil producers); and by growing doubts about the buoyancy of the U.S. economy.

If anti-immigrant attitudes are indeed driven in part by fear of ambiguity and complexity, then public policies that enhance the public's feelings of control should have great appeal. The question is how to create public policies that result in fair immigration reform and also appeal to the public's sense of fairness and desire for greater control. Stay tuned.