Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (28 page)

Toward the end of 2011, ICE began a case-by-case review of over three hundred thousand pending removal cases in order to determine which ones merited dismissal under the new guidelines. As 2012 progressed, however, immigrant advocates became concerned at the small and diminishing numbers of cases that were determined to be eligible for dismissal. By the middle of 2012, only a few thousand of the tens of thousands of cases reviewed had been approved for dismissal.
⁶⁰
Prosecutorial discretion seemed to be delivering much less than it had promised.

With the 2012 campaign in full swing, Obama finally offered his signature DACA program. DACA opened some important doors, as discussed in
chapter 7
, and may have contributed to the return of comprehensive immigration reform to the 2013 Congressional agenda. The reforms being debated in 2013, though, continued to follow the consulting firms’ emphasis on enforcement followed by a punitive path to citizenship or perhaps even something less than citizenship.

CAN WE ABANDON “ENFORCEMENT”?

The more that US authorities have tried to control or stop Mexican border crossing over the course of the twentieth century, the more people have come. Absolute numbers have increased despite the illegalizing of many border crossings. Despite increasingly harsh measures aimed at reducing or eliminating illegal crossings, these too have increased and sometimes decreased, as with those by Mexicans in recent years, due to factors unrelated to measures aimed explicitly at border control.

The past few decades have demonstrated that the more the United States tries to militarily control the border, the more out of control it gets. The huge growth in organized crime, drug smuggling, drug and smuggling cartels, kidnappings, and violent and unnecessary death at the border is the
result
of misguided policies attempting to impose control.

Supporters of the idea of border control often argue that without draconian measures to deter migrants, floods of Mexicans and other Latin Americans would overwhelm the border and the country. They forget, perhaps, that during the many decades in which the border was relatively open, there were no floods. The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States began its precipitous rise
after
the country began to try to seal the border, in large part because instead of leaving after a season of work, migrants felt compelled to stay, since they realized that returning would be difficult.

Recent trends demonstrate the extent to which structural factors still govern migrant flows. The slowing and even reversal of migration from Mexico and the concomitant rise in numbers migrating from Central America, particularly from Honduras, suggest that factors other than border policies are the ones that really affect migrant streams. Border policies can shape
where
people try to cross, how much it will cost, and how many will die in the process, but they seem to have little effect on the numbers of people crossing.

DEEPER QUESTIONS

If the United States can’t close the border, and if comprehensive immigration reform is such a flawed approach, what can we do?

By now, we have become accustomed to the notion that controlling the border is a basic prerequisite for security, safety, and sovereignty. So accustomed, that we rarely question this idea.

The drive for so-called enforcement—through militarizing the border, criminalizing the undocumented, detention, deportation, and a punitive path to citizenship based on paying society back for some supposed wrong inflicted—grows from some of the beliefs outlined in the first chapter of this book. The entire immigration apparatus is based on the presumption that we know where people belong and we need to legislate their mobility.

It’s also based on some unquestioned assumptions about
countries
. It is not OK for a public park, a town, a county, or a state to discriminate regarding who is allowed to enter its space. But it’s OK for a country to do that. It’s not OK to treat people differently based on their religion, race, gender, or many other characteristics. But it’s OK to treat people differently based on where they were born or their nationality (which is generally determined by where a person is born). US immigration laws do just that: discriminate, on the basis of nationality, regarding who is allowed to be where.

If we really want to address the problem of undocumentedness, or so-called “illegal” immigration, we need to look more in depth at why the United States made some immigration illegal to begin with. I hope that I have shown that the drive to illegalize immigration was wrongheaded from the start. It’s just the latest stage in a centuries-long process of legislated inequality, a process both global and domestic.

Rather than what currently passes for comprehensive reform, some organizations are pushing for what they call a “cultural strategy” that challenges the nationalist—and racist—underpinnings of popular views of immigrants. The new generation of undocumented youth—the DREAMers discussed in
chapter 7
—has taken this approach. Rinku Sen emphasizes that their goal goes beyond gaining their own access to citizenship: the bigger aim is to challenge the anti-immigrant culture. “Young, savvy with social media, and artistically inclined, DREAMers have compensated for their lack of political power by telling their stories in many forms and venues.” With their stories, they sought to reframe the entire debate.
⁶¹

The Applied Research Center launched its Drop-the-I-Word (i.e., illegal) campaign in 2010 in another attempt to challenge the terms of the mainstream debate about immigration that directly contradicted Westen’s advice. Arguing that the very term “illegal” (or “illegal immigrant”) “opens the door to racial profiling and violence and prevents truthful, respectful debate on immigration,” and that “no human being is illegal,” supporters challenged politicians, the media, and others to stop using it.
⁶²
By 2013, numerous mainstream news outlets had shifted their usage. “Illegal immigrant isn’t always accurate because it implies that somebody illegally immigrated when it fact a lot of people who are here illegally are here because their documentation expired after they came,” the Associated Press explained when its new style guide recommended against using the term.
⁶³
The
New York Times
and
Los Angeles Times
soon followed suit.
⁶⁴

In December 2012, Mexican American columnist Ruben Navarrette penned a controversial column in which he chastised DREAMers—and implicitly, others who are explicitly challenging the official terms of the debate—for acting “like spoiled brats.” “They don’t ask, they demand,” Navarrette complained. “These kids want it all . . . what some seem to really want is the golden ticket: US citizenship.” They are “drunk on entitlement,” he wrote, and will “alienate supporters.”
⁶⁵

At my own university, Salem State, in Massachusetts, a group supporting undocumented students engaged in a similar debate a few years ago. Should the university openly admit and support students who were undocumented? Or should it quietly open some back doors? One local high school guidance counselor cautioned us that the anti-immigrant climate at her school was so virulent that she preferred to counsel students individually and would not recommend that we hold a public event at her school. A faculty member worried that if we raised the issue publicly, it would imperil our undocumented students. Another retorted: “Do you know of any historical example where social change has come about by people keeping quiet?”

That question has stayed with me over the years and seems to surface again and again, as in Navarrette’s column. There are those who truly believe that the best way to help the undocumented is through backroom deals that may bring some benefits for some people without addressing the larger structural issues of unequal international relations, an economy based on the use of labor kept cheap through legal marginalization, restrictive immigration policies, discrimination, and inequality before the law. History shows, though, that whether we are trying to change foreign policy, domestic and global economic structures, or laws that discriminate, Frederick Douglass was closer to the truth when he argued that change “must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
⁶⁶

Although the cultural strategy is a very important way to raise awareness and open a real debate about immigration policy, we also need to address the root global and economic factors that have contributed to today’s problems. In the most immediate terms, we as a society created illegal immigration by making immigration illegal. In larger terms, we created illegal immigration by fostering a global system that bases the prosperity for the few on the exploitation of the many and enforcing it, in the modern era, through borders and exclusive citizenship. It’s up to us to change it.

Many people contributed their ideas and feedback, and offered me spaces to present and discuss the material in this book. The idea was born at a café in Philadelphia, where Sandi Aritza helped me think through the outline. Gayatri Patnaik at Beacon Press supported the project enthusiastically. Andy Klatt at Tufts University, Gus Cochran and Juan Allende at Agnes Scott College, María Cruz-Saco at Connecticut College, Rob Young at the University of Oregon, and Victor Silverman at Pomona College gave me the opportunity to present and get feedback on my work in progress. Gustavo Remedi at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo and Victor Silverman at Pomona College in California each offered me the immense privilege of teaching a course related to the topic of the book while I was working on it. My students in both institutions moved and inspired me with their responses and with their own stories about migrations. Pomona proved to be the ideal place to finish writing this book. I am especially grateful to Carolyn Angius, Daniella Barraza, David Baxter, Felipe Cárdenas, Monica Dreitcer, Ahtziri Fonseca, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, Morgan Mayer-Jochimsen, Diana Ortiz, Alejandra Rishton, Jeremiah Rishton, Cristina Saldana, and Nidia Tapia for their careful reading of the manuscript and helpful comments.

INTRODUCTION

1.
Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,”
Population and Development Review
38, no. 1 (March 2012): 6–7,
http://wws.princeton.edu/coverstories/Massey_LatinAmericaImmigrationSurge/Unintended-Consequences.pdf
.

2.
See Thomas L. Friedman,
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005); reissued as
The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Picador, 2007).

3.
This concept has been suggested by a number of authors and organizations; see, for example, Joseph Nevins,
Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid
(San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008).

4.
Evan Pellegrino, “Factory Justice? An Effort to Prosecute Illegal Immigrants Is Expensive and Time-Consuming—but Proponents Say It’s Worthwhile,”
Tucson Weekly
, February 11, 2010.

5.
The differential was sometimes enforced by paying Mexicans in silver and “white men” in more valuable gold currency. See Rachel St. John,
Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 72.

6.
Charles C. Teague, “A Statement on Mexican Immigration,”
Saturday Evening Post
(March 10, 1928), reproduced in Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez,
Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 26.

7.
Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences,” 18.

8.
See Frank Bardacke,
Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers
(New York: Verso, 2012), chap. 24, “The Wet Line.”

9.
“California’s 1971 Employer Sanctions Law,”
Rural Migration News
1, no. 3 (July 1995),
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=62_0_4_0
.

10.
Peter Brownell, “The Declining Enforcement of Employer Sanctions,” Migration Information Source, September 2005,
http://www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=332
.

11.
Elizabeth Llorente, “Immigration Summit: Are Undocumented Workers Really Taking ‘American’ Jobs?” Fox News Latino, June 12, 2012,
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/06/12/immigration-summit-are-undoc-workers-really-taking-american-jobs/
.

12.
United States Sentencing Commission, “Overview of Federal Criminal Cases: Fiscal Year 2011,” September 2012, 4,
http://www.ussc.gov/Research/Research_Publications/2012/FY11_Overview_Federal_Criminal_Cases.pdf
. The federal government and most other official sources use the term Hispanic to categorize peoples of Latin American or Spanish descent. Many Latin Americans find the term awkward or offensive, since it erases the indigenous and African populations of Latin America and creates a meaningless sociological category that lumps Spanish-speaking Latin Americans with European Spaniards. Many Latino activists prefer the term Latino as more inclusive of Latin Americans of all ethnicities. In this book, I use the term “Hispanic” when referring to government or other sources that use that term; otherwise, I use “Latino.”

13.
Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: New Press, 2010), 2.

14.
Ibid., 13.

15.
Ibid., 4.

16.
See ibid., 148. Alexander is quoting Bruce Western,
Punishment and Inequality in America
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 90.