one of his nightly Fox broadcasts on The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly, a former mainstream reporter who had gained prominence as the host of a syndicated “tabloid” news show called Inside Edition in the early 1990s, laid down his edict for the bounds of acceptable discourse:
Everybody got it? Dissent, fine. Undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.
Throughout right-wing media the defense of the Bush administration remained consistently eliminationist in tone. When critics questioned the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq based on dubious information about weapons of mass destruction—which indeed were never found—they were accused of “hating America” and committing treason. At one point, O’Reilly hosted a discussion on whether Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado and a critic of the Iraq War, should be charged with treason and sedition. Others received similar treatment if they critiqued the execution of the war: the botched occupation of Fallujah, or the scandal that arose when torture and inhumane conditions at a US-run prison in Abu Ghraib were revealed in a series of horrifying photos. For most right-wing commenters, the sin was never the incompetent or illegal behavior revealed, it was daring to reveal it at all. For example, the popular Fox Network talk-show host Sean Hannity accused the Democratic National Committee of conspiring to have the Abu Ghraib photos released to the public.
The eliminationist rhetoric became commonplace in movement conservatives’ attacks on liberals, embodied in the book titles that flooded the marketplace. Sean Hannity’s bestselling screed, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (2004), summed up in its title the general conservative view that liberals were not just wrong, but evil. Other iterations of this meme were Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007); Michael Savage’s The Enemy Within (2003), which claimed that the nation’s real enemy was liberalism; Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003), in which she argued that Senator Joe McCarthy was right about Communists infiltrating the government in the 1950s, and charged that today’s liberals were actively undermining antiterrorism efforts.
Conservatives during the Bush years did not reserve their eliminationist rhetoric for antiwar liberals alone. During those same years their most popular and durable target became Latino immigrants.
By 2006, Americans were seeing many, many more Latino faces in their midst. Millions, in fact.
Between 1990 and 2000, the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the United States more than doubled, from 3.5 million to 8.6 million people. The vast majority of them were from Mexico: the number of documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States doubled in that same time span from 4.5 million to 9.7 million.
Most of the deluge was a result of circumstances arising from twofold conditions: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had resulted in significant loss of employment in Mexico; meanwhile, the American economy was booming.
NAFTA, approved under the Clinton administration in 1993 and intended to spur business between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, had had a disastrous side effect: its requirement to lift protections for corn prices forced millions of Mexican corn farmers out of business, because they could not compete with cheap American prices. Moreover, the promised job gains in Mexico to compensate for any losses, mainly in the form of American auto and other manufacturers moving their factory operations there, turned out to be ephemeral: many of the corporations that opened plants in Mexico soon abandoned those expansions and shifted their manufacturing operations to plants in China and elsewhere in Asia.
Further, the booming American economy was creating a massive job market—not only in such skilled labor markets as the new tech economy, but also in the unskilled labor markets such as agricultural production (that is, managing and harvesting crops). There was a huge demand for labor to harvest crops and process meat that was largely going unfilled by American workers. The legal immigration system was not set up to accommodate this need: the US economy generally produces 500,000 unskilled labor jobs per year, but the US Immigration Service issues only about 5,000 green cards to foreign workers.
So the vast majority of the immigrants found themselves without legal status, having either crossed the border legally and overstayed their visas, or crossed the border illegally. These immigrants generally figured they could at least come and work for a few years and send their earnings to their starving families back home; some came intending to leave, others came intending to stay, and fate was often known to play jokes that undermined those intentions. Virtually all, however, came intending to work, and that was primarily what they did, laboring in the shadows with fake Social Security numbers that allowed their employers to pay taxes in their names—even though they, as undocumented immigrants, would never receive any direct benefits from the system they were paying into. Thus, anti-immigration forces who charged that immigrants were a burden on taxpayers because they were able to collect benefits while paying nothing into the system were turning reality on its head. Working immigrants were actually subsidizing those legally in the system.
Before the passage of NAFTA, most illegal border crossings had occurred near one of a handful of major border cities—Nogales on the Arizona border, Ciudad Juarez in Texas, and Tijuana in California being the primary crossing points—where crossing illegally had been a relatively simple matter of skirting barriers. But after NAFTA was passed and its effects began creating a wave of Mexican immigrants, the Clinton administration, under pressure from Congress, moved to crack down on illegal crossings in those towns, beginning in 1996.
The crackdown stanched the flow for a few months. Soon, however, the wave of attempted border crossings began spreading out into the surrounding deserts. Longtime “mules” who helped people cross illegally reported having to move their operations farther and farther away from the border towns. Eventually this meant that human smuggling was rising like a bad flood tide out in the remote reaches where it previously had been only a rare thing. Ranchers along these borderlands began reporting having more and more problems with border crossers, from thefts to vandalism to threatening encounters to deaths of migrants in the desert. Many people living along the border who had in previous years gone out of their way to help stray border crossers now avoided them out of fear, especially as Mexican drug cartels became involved in the human smuggling. At the same time, thousands of border crossers began dying out in the lethal deserts where they now crossed, mostly of exposure and water and food deprivation. Some met violent deaths at the hands of human smuggling vultures.
These changes at the border were creating waves inland. In rural America, economic changes had transformed the landscape as small family-run pig and dairy farms were replaced by large industrial food-production operations. Like the agricultural operations in California’s Central Valley, these food-production plants also ran on cheap, low-skilled workers willing to do harsh and unpleasant work. Cheap and often illegal labor brought in from Mexico and Central America filled the bill. Soon small Midwestern towns in Nebraska and Ohio were filling up around the edges with more and more Latinos who spoke little English and for a number of reasons tended to keep to themselves. Now there were brown faces in places where for generations just about the only faces to be seen had been white.
Even in the suburbs, there suddenly were many more brown faces—people working in landscaping and construction, in housekeeping and child care. Most American suburbs were predominantly white, often according to their original designs in the 1940s and ’50s when race-based exclusionary covenants were still perfectly legal, and so the arrival of a tide of brown faces came as something of a cultural shock for many whites living there.
By 2000, anti-immigration organizations
