How Do We Define US?

They Are America

As someone who has spent a lot of time studying social sciences and humanities, I find our problems regarding immigration puzzling. While we have had movements to restore rights for women, African-Americans and, most recently, the homosexual and lesbians among us, we have largely ignored our particular despicable history of discriminating against immigrants as a long process that has helped our businesses grow rich, our established ethnic groups to climb higher, and allow institutionalized racism and prejudice to breed and flourish in our society.

While I am very concerned about securing our borders and developing an effective immigration plan for our future, I am in "negative awe" of how we all seem to be ignoring the plight of those that come to our nation seeking even the tiniest hope of making a better life for their families.

While there are some that come to this nation with a criminal record, and maintaining their criminal intent upon arrival, most people coming to the United States are seeking nothing more than a chance to improve their lot in life. Very few immigrants come to the US seeking a hand out. Many do not even want a hand up. In fact, most that come here only want an opportunity to work hard, improve the condition of their lives, offer their family a chance for a better future and are among the hardest working souls any of us might ever meet. But their struggle is met with a lot of disdain, a lot of hatred, a lot of misinformation (such as the e-mails circulating that claim illegal immigrants get more benefits than citizens) and a lot of hardship thrust upon them be the way we act and react toward them.

I am not a fool and I am not advocating we throw open our doors to whomever gets a whim to visit the US. Nor am I saying that we should open our coffers and supply immigrants--legally here or not--with a host of benefits and entitlements that we do not even provide for our own. But I am advocating for a more rational, sound and effective approach that recognizes our own history as immigrants, our basic human values as compassionate people, and the basic decency that all people deserve. The way we allow enslavement of immigrants seeking illegal entry into the US is despicable. The way we treat others that come to the US seeking economic freedom is also despicable. The way we have institutionalized our prejudices--changing the object of our hatred based on which new wave of immigration is upon us--is outrageous.

Today our immigration hatred is geared toward the Hispanics that are coming to our nation. A short time ago it was the Slavic peoples, the Central Eastern Europeans, and the Jews coming from Russia and elsewhere. But throughout our history we have targeted Blacks and poor Whites coming up from the South, the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis, and others. Our recent hatred has grown to not only include those coming from Arab nations of origin, but also anyone that practices the Islamic faith. We have used race, ethnicity, country of origin, religion and origin within the United States as a basis for our hatred and institutionalized prejudices. While this has primarily occurred through our immigration policies and procedures, I have to ask what is the origin of those policies...

The editorial offered in the NY Times exposes some of these issues... but I think it is high time that we addressed the causes, biases, hatreds and prejudices that have fed our institutionalization of our fears and our use of the government to hate others. Consider the views offered in this editorial and ask yourself if we are living up to our standards as Americans or even as compassionate human beings.

Almost a year ago, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and their families slipped out from the shadows of American life and walked boldly in daylight through Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, New York and other cities. “We Are America,” their banners cried. The crowds, determined but peaceful, swelled into an immense sea. The nation was momentarily stunned.

A lot has happened since then. The country has summoned great energy to confront the immigration problem, but most of it has been misplaced, crudely and unevenly applied. It seeks not to solve the conundrum of a broken immigration system, but to subdue, in a million ways, the vulnerable men and women who are part of it. Government at all levels is working to keep unwanted immigrants in their place — on the other side of the border, in detention or in fear, toiling silently in the underground economy without recourse to the laws and protections the native-born expect.

The overwhelming impulse has been to get tough, and tough we have gotten:

Border enforcement. What little the last Congress did about immigration was focused on appeasing hard-line conservatives by appearing to seal the border. President Bush’s new budget continues that approach, seeking 3,000 more Border Patrol officers and another $1 billion for a 700-mile fence, adding to the billions spent to militarize the border since the 1990s. That still isn’t enough to build the fence and it hasn’t controlled the illegal flow; you need more visas and better workplace enforcement to do that. It has directed much traffic into the remote Southwest desert, making more immigrants vulnerable to smugglers and leaving many people dead.
Federal raids. In December federal agents stormed a half-dozen Swift meatpacking plants, rounding up hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants and exposing the secret that is no secret: America’s dirtiest, hardest jobs are done by people too desperate to shun them and too afraid to complain. The raids have been replicated in other states and industries, on day-labor street corners and in homes from Connecticut to California. In immigrant communities, the undercurrent of fear has been replaced by terror, and employers are jittery, too. The immigration agency says it singles out only fugitives in Operation Return to Sender, but the sweeps are broad and panic is indiscriminate.

Local crackdowns. State, county and local officials have picked up where they left off last year, introducing bills to get tough on illegal immigrants. They cannot control federal policy, so they try other ways to punish those they see as unfit neighbors, to stifle their opportunities, extract money, expose them to legal jeopardy and otherwise inflict suffering, in the deluded hope that piling on miseries will make them disappear. In suburban Long Island, where resentment over an influx of day laborers has festered under a hapless and intolerant county government, lawmakers are considering banning workers from county roadsides. Texas legislators are mulling a bill to reject the 14th Amendment and deny the benefits of citizenship to children born in this country to undocumented parents. Local officials all over are trying to deputize police officers as immigration agents, causing overburdened police forces and prosecutors to bristle. Some bills are symbolic, most are simply spiteful, and their effect is a chaotic patchwork, not a sane national policy.

Gutted due process. Laws enacted a decade ago and tightened after 9/11 distance even legal immigrants from the protection of the law. Immigrants are routinely detained without bond, denied access to lawyers, deported without appeal and punished for one-time or minor infractions with a mechanistic ferocity that precludes a judge’s discretion or mercy. Several of the immigration bills that Congress has considered seek to heighten the efficiency with which immigrants who run afoul of the authorities can be railroaded out of the country. This gums up another aspect of the legal system, which deals with refugees and asylum seekers. A much tighter web for immigrants has been erected, and it catches many blameless victims.