The Patriot Post® · America's Cloward-Piven Approach to Illegal Immigration

In 1966, Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven formulated the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was a plan to overthrow America’s capitalist system by overloading the welfare state bureaucracy with demands that were impossible to meet, thereby precipitating a revolution. Today, the effort to “crash the system” is to overload it with the foot soldiers exploited by Democrats, their media allies, illegal aliens pouring across our “open” southern boarder. They are doing so at the invitation of Democrats, who refuse to enforce immigration laws and are hiding the new class of welfare recipients in their sanctuary cities.

How does one foment a revolution? First, give its foot soldiers a veneer of legitimacy. In 2013, the Associated Press decided to drop the term “illegal immigrant” from its news coverage. Others soon followed suit, and now the majority of the media use terms like “undocumented immigrant” or “migrant” to describe illegals.

Second, reward those who broke the law. Twelve states and the District of Columbia give illegals drivers’ licenses. The Mexican government issues them Consular ID cards allowing them to open U.S. bank accounts. Five states grant illegals in-state college tuition. Nearly 500 hundred municipalities now define themselves as sanctuary cities, shielding illegal immigrants from the law. Moreover, California has not only declared itself a sanctuary state, but has enacted laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and prohibiting employers from providing voluntary cooperation with ICE agents, absent a warrant or court order. And in a first for the nation, the state’s Senate Rules Committee has appointed an illegal immigrant to a statewide government job.

This is nothing less than nullification. And nothing made that clearer than a 2010 lawsuit filed by the Obama administration against Arizona, when it attempted to enforce immigration law the administration was conspicuously ignoring. In a 5-3 decision two years later, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Arizona law and in the process, “reinforced the federal government’s primacy in immigration policy,” as The Washington Post crowed at the time.

To his credit, current Attorney General Jeff Sessions has filed a lawsuit against the state based on that premise, but it remains to be seen if this signals a paradigm shift, or merely a long-winded legal fight awaiting a future Democrat administration — one that will undoubtedly withdraw the suit.

In the meantime, Congress is doing absolutely nothing to hold law-defying politicians accountable.

Third, accuse those who would resist the revolution of being small-minded, nativist bigots. The same year the AP changed its stylebook, New York Times editor Lawrence Downes made sure those who resisted would castigated, insisting that “illegal” is often “a code word for racial and ethnic hatred.” Currently, Nation columnist Suman Raghunathan characterizes resistance to illegal immigration as an “ethos of exclusion.” Root columnist Michael Harriot asserts that white people simply hate immigrants. And, Huffington Post contributor Dr. Alvaro Huerta asserts, the Trump administration’s effort to enforce the law is “a racist political platform based on anti-Mexicanism — a long-standing American tradition embraced mostly by millions of white citizens/voters.”

Fourth, institute a disinformation campaign. Americans have been told approximately 11 million illegals reside in the U.S. — for more than a decade. This means we’re supposed to believe just as many illegals have died, or repatriated themselves, as have snuck into the nation or overstayed their visas in that same time period. We are assured that illegals commit fewer crimes than native Americans, or are less likely to be incarcerated, even as the reality that these are wholly avoidable crimes is conspicuously absent from such “analyses.” We are told illegally crossing the border is an “act of love”, that a border wall will be completely impractical, and that mass deportation is impossible, even as the reality of self-deportation, which could be engendered by genuine law enforcement efforts, is no longer part of the conversation.

Fifth, secure federal government collaboration in the effort to advance wholesale lawbreaking. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration and Reform Act that granted unambiguous amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. It was supposed to be a one-and-done amnesty, accompanied by promises to seal the border and crack down on businesses who hired illegals. The latter two promises were ignored, and thus we have at minimum a four-fold increase in the number of illegals now demanding amnesty. Moreover, Barack Obama’s unconstitutional granting of temporary legal status to a newly protected subgroup of illegals euphemistically referred to as Dreamers is a direct consequence of that failure.

What about visa over-stayers who outnumber border crashers? Despite the explosion of technology, the Department of Homeland Security cannot track visa overstayers.

Cracking down on businesses that hire illegals also remains a farce. As columnist Theodore Kupfer reveals, an E-Verfiy system that would be the most effective tool by far for combating further illegal immigration, and incentivizing many illegals already here to return home “is not mandatory — and nobody, even among the most restrictionist Republicans, is demanding that it become so,” he writes.

Orchestrated corruption is also part of the mix. A CNS News investigation reveals “more than 1.3 million cases of identity theft were documented by the IRS involving illegal aliens who had been issued Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers” in a five year period between 2011 and 2016. In addition, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) discovered around 1.2 million cases in 2017 alone where illegal aliens filed tax forms using Social Security Numbers that belonged to someone else, or were fabricated.

Both crimes are felonies — yet the IRS couldn’t say whether even a single case had been referred for criminal prosecution.

In the meantime, Congress is doing its best to maintain the odious status quo: the latest gargantuan spending bill will fund sanctuary cities, but unless the GOP capitulates to Democrat demands for a “pathway to citizenship” for the 1.8 million illegals no longer covered by DACA, funding for a border wall will not be part of the package.

Sixth, get the media to continually advance a pro-illegal immigration narrative, or completely ignore the issue when an uncomfortable counter-narrative emerges. For at least four days, Americans were inundated with stories about the bridge collapse in Miami that killed six people, replete with investigative reports regarding why it happened. Yet in 2014, when the EV-D68 enterovirus killed nine children and afflicted over 50 more with full or partial paralysis — likely engendered by “Obama’s decision to allow tens of thousands of Central Americans across the Texas border, according to a growing body of genetic and statistical evidence,” as The Daily Caller put it — the mainstream media’s silence, coupled with their calculated lack of interest, was nothing short of appalling.

In 1993, Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the term “defining deviancy down.” In today’s America, nothing is more deviant than the ongoing attempt to foster the idea that the Rule of Law can be ignored when it doesn’t accrue to one’s political interests or ideological sensibilities — and that doing so constitutes “compassion.”

That mindset is the driving force behind the revolution envisioned by Cloward and Piven, and those who embrace it must be seen as the cancerous anarchists they truly are.

Our national sovereignty is at stake.