by Eli Hager

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In 1996, a familiar Republican candidate ran for president calling himself an “America-first” populist, riling up his supporters by claiming that immigrants were “invading” our country.

“I’ll build that security fence, and we’ll close it, and we’ll say, ‘Listen, José, you’re not coming in this time!’” shouted the candidate, Pat Buchanan, to raucous applause at an Iowa rally early that year.

Anti-immigrant sentiment was simmering across the nation, and it was about to translate into federal policy. Leading congressional Republicans, channeling Buchanan’s ideas, were drafting the most restrictionist immigration legislation in nearly a century. The bill included not just a crackdown on undocumented migrants but also provisions that would cut legal immigration almost in half. It looked likely to pass.

But then the business community, so reliant on immigrant workers, showed up.

A motley crew of corporate types, including lobbyists for ascendant Silicon Valley and Seattle tech companies like Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, swarmed the nation’s capital, navigating House and Senate hallways as well as the legislative process. Alongside the National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups, they spent months in crowded conference rooms finding common ground with Hispanic and civil rights organizations. They circulated policy briefs to persuadable lawmakers. They counted votes.

They poured resources into the effort, commissioning studies and getting op-eds published defending immigrants.

That spring, their coalition defeated the proposed bill and its attack on legal immigration, forcing Republicans to pursue a scaled-back, though still very tough, illegal immigration enforcement measure.

And Buchanan, after several early victories in the primaries, dropped his bid for the presidency.

This was, for decades, the classic role of the business community in immigration politics. They rarely won total victories, and their motivation, typically, wasn’t much more complicated than economic self-interest.

From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the largest lobbying organization in the nation, representing business interests) to the “Growers” (agricultural businesses employing migrant farmworkers) to hotel, restaurant and construction industry associations, they spent time and money on Capitol Hill largely to fend off threats to their existing supply of immigrant labor. They also advocated for guest worker programs and a range of types of visas and work permits for new foreign-born workers.

But they were always there, on the Hill and in the public conversation. They built coalitions, leveraging their considerable influence over Republicans and finding the compromises with Democrats that were available to make.

And in the process, they fundamentally moderated the nation’s immigration debate.

These business groups — alongside immigration and labor advocacy groups on the left, including the National Council of La Raza (now called UnidosUS) and the United Farm Workers — helped achieve multiple overhauls of the U.S. immigration system this way. They were deeply involved in the negotiations that led to President Ronald Reagan’s sweeping legalization of the status of undocumented immigrants in 1986. Then, they successfully fought for the creation of several new and expanded visa categories, as well as the Temporary Protected Status program, in 1990.

Even when they failed to get subsequent immigration reform bills passed, their continued active presence in the debate provided a crucial counterweight to the nativist wing of the Republican Party — which was always close to power, long before Donald Trump came on the political scene.

As Virginia Lamp, who during that period was an immigration and labor-relations lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, once put it to a panel of immigration experts, the business community had to challenge the “faulty assumption” that immigration negatively affects the economy (and that the border is “out of control”). These ideas, she said, are “based on a type of selfish nationalism.”

Virginia Lamp is now Ginni Thomas, the hyperconservative wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She is better known these days as an “America First” election denier.

Indeed, things have changed.

According to ProPublica interviews with more than 20 longtime business lobbyists across a range of industries, as well as congressional staffers and federal officials, the U.S. business community has increasingly retreated from immigration politics over the past decade and especially this year. They have largely relinquished their previous role as a lobbying force and moderating presence on this issue, despite their need for immigrant workers arguably being greater than ever. And they’ve been noticeably absent even as the current Republican presidential candidate promises........

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