Internet Review of Books

This land ain’t your land

THE LAW INTO THEIR OWN HANDS:
Immigration and the Politics of Exceptionalism
By Roxanne Lynn Doty
164 pp. University of Arizona Press $19.95

Reviewed by Tom Waldman

Of all the issues that inflame listeners of right-wing talk radio, illegal immigration should command the most support. Unlike outlawing abortion, lifting the ban on assault weapons, or ending same-sex marriage, adopting ever stronger measures to stop people from dashing across the American-Mexican border has strong appeal. No credible point of view openly defends illegal crossings.

Yet the war on immigrants has not been as politically successful as the war on drugs, the war on crime, or the war on terror. The lone 2008 Republican presidential candidate who based his campaign on condemning illegal immigration and had ties to several groups Roxanne Lynn Doty mentions in her short book—Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo—dropped out of the race in December 2007. Tancredo was regarded by some as the certifiable nut in a field that included three candidates—the Colorado representative among them—who rejected the theory of evolution.

Without delving much into partisan politics, Doty argues in The Law Into Their Own Hands that the dozens of what she calls civilian border groups operating in America today have played a role in the spread of extreme views against immigration—legal and illegal. She writes: “One of the major effects of civilian border groups is to bring into clear focus whom they presume is the enemy.”

Doty mentions Tancredo, though, oddly, not his run for president. Her prime focus is on the Minuteman Project, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the Tombstone Militia and other groups based in the Southwest that mobilized after 9/11 to patrol and protect the U.S. border with Mexico. Doty cites a Southern Poverty Law Center 2007 estimate of 144 civilian border groups, some of which feature such colorful names as Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, and my personal favorite, Americans Have Had Enough.

In language that reflects her mix of journalistic and academic writing styles, Doty states: “While this phenomenon [the rise of civilian border groups] has received an overwhelming amount of national and international media attention, as well as attention from rights groups and policymakers, there is no detailed, systematic, descriptive examination of the issue that is theoretically informed and conceptually sophisticated.” The American public knows that these groups are out there, even if their leaders and their ultimate objectives remain obscure.

A central problem with Doty’s book is that she doesn’t separate opposition to immigration period from opposition to illegal immigration. She continuously uses the term “anti-immigrant movement” to describe civilian border groups and their mainstream sympathizers. Her refusal to recognize the distinction suggests that Doty is too eager to demonstrate the impact of these groups on the larger society.

As she must know, millions of people in this country are bitterly opposed to illegal immigration, but nonetheless acknowledge and celebrate the fact that America is a nation of immigrants. There is a big difference between a position that advocates closing the border and one that says we should keep everyone out —as Republicans have learned. One of the difficulties their party has had in channeling the nativist views of Pat Buchanan and others into a powerful national movement is due to the ambivalence, and at times revulsion, many conservatives feel about the larger implications of immigrant-bashing.

Though Doty obviously opposes civilian border groups and what they represent, she attends their rallies and press events and interviews their members to gain perspective. She makes an extra effort to show that many of the men and women who form and join these groups are neither crazy nor violence-prone, but are just plain folks who fervently believe in this cause.

Meeting up with the Minutemen Project in Mesa, for example, Doty notes: “There is an overweight woman in her mid-forties standing next to an overweight man I presume is her husband. She announces they will be coming to this spot for the night with a camper and she’ll make coffee for everyone in the morning.” Hardly the portrait of a fanatic, and yet how many people do you know who would spend days and nights patrolling the U.S./Mexican border?

Doty analyzes these groups in the context of two identifiable and disturbing patterns within American history: Vigilantism and the politics of Exceptionalism, which she defines as “those political situations in which individuals or groups are turned into an exception by the exercise of sovereign power, resulting in their exclusion from basic rights guaranteed by the law or the constitution.”

The author references exceptionalism throughout the text without ever really telling us which rights are being denied the targeted group or groups. Living in California, for example, I know full well of organized efforts to take away basic social services from illegal immigrants, but I also know that illegal immigrants and their supporters have staged marches and demonstrations and otherwise expressed their views in the public arena. The issue is more complicated than Doty suggests.

She has a stronger case defining civilian border patrols as vigilantes. Doty distinguishes between “classic” vigilantism—targeting horse thieves, counterfeiters, and the like —and “neo” vigilantism, directed at Catholics, Jews, blacks, etc. Not surprisingly, Doty indicates the groups discussed in her book tend more toward the classic mode, although racial politics play a part as well.

Having grown up watching Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson gun down dozens of urban punks, I at first had trouble thinking of the people Doty portrays as vigilantes. I somehow can’t envision the overweight woman with the coffee convincingly telling an illegal immigrant, “Go ahead, make my day.” But Doty’s definition of vigilantes as “extra-legal groups that form in response to what they regard as a breakdown of law and order” certainly seems to apply here.

Ironically, it may not be until these groups fade that Tom Tancredo or his kind will advance further in the primaries. When the GOP began actively playing the race card in the late 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan was in decline, and so was the crude, blunt racism of southern politicians. As a result, candidates such as Richard Nixon could use racial code words and imagery to lure white voters without appearing to be aligned with hate groups and vocal bigots. It will be intriguing to see if an anti-immigrant contender emerges in 2012, and whether his or her time has come.

Tom Waldman is the author of Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America and other books. He is a former press secretary to California Democratic Congressman Howard Berman.

This land ain’t your land

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