Talking Sense About Immigration
By Aviva Chomsky, NACLA
20 March 18
Its crucial not to be swept away by Trumps Manichaean view of the world
when it comes to immigration.
The immigration debate seems to have gone crazy.
President Obamas widely popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program, or DACA, which offered some 750,000 young immigrants brought to the
United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation, is
ending... except it isnt... except it is... President Trump claims to
support it but ordered its halt, while both Republicans and Democrats insist
that they want to preserve it and blame each other for its impending demise.
(Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently stepped in to allow DACA recipients
to renew their status at least for now.)
On a single day in mid-February, the Senate rejected no less than four
immigration bills. These ranged from a narrow proposal to punish sanctuary
cities that placed limits on local police collaboration with Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to major overhauls of the 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act that established the current system of
immigration quotas (with preferences for family reunification).
And add in one more thing: virtually everyone in the political sphere is now
tailoring his or her pronouncements and votes to political opportunism
rather than the real issues at hand.
Politicians and commentators who once denounced illegal immigration,
insisting that people do it the right way, are now advocating stripping
legal status from many who possess it and drastically cutting even legalized
immigration. These days, the hearts of conservative Republicans, otherwise
promoting programs for plutocrats, are bleeding for low-wage workers whose
livelihoods, they claim (quite incorrectly), are being undermined by
competition from immigrants. Meanwhile, Chicago Democrat Luis Gutiérreza
rare, reliably pro-immigrant voice in Congress--recently swore that, when it
came to Trumps much-touted wall on the Mexican border, he was ready to
take a bucket, take bricks, and start building it myself... We will dirty
our hands in order for the Dreamers to have a clean future in America.
While in Gutiérrezs neck of the woods, favoring Dreamers may seem
politically expedient, giving in to Trump's wall would result in far more
than just dirty hands, buckets, and bricks, and the congressman knows that
quite well. The significant fortifications already in place on the
U.S.-Mexican border have already contributed to the deaths of thousands of
migrants, to the increasing militarization of the region, to a dramatic rise
of paramilitary drug- and human-smuggling gangs, and to a rise in violent
lawlessness on both sides of the border. Add to that a 2,000-mile concrete
wall or some combination of walls, fences, bolstered border patrols, and the
latest in technology and youre not just talking about some benign waste of
money in return for hanging on to the DACA kids.
In the swirl of all this, the demands of immigrant rights organizations for
a clean Dream Act that would genuinely protect DACA recipients without
giving in to Trumps many anti-immigration demands have come to seem
increasingly unrealistic. No matter that they hold the only morally
coherent position in town--and a broadly popular one nationally as
wellDACA's congressional backers seem to have already conceded defeat.
Good Guys and Bad Guys
It wont surprise you, Im sure, to learn that Donald Trump portrays the
world in a strikingly black-and-white way when it comes to immigration (and
so much else). He emphasizes the violent criminal nature of immigrants and
the undocumented, repeatedly highlighting and falsely generalizing from
relatively rare cases in which one of them committed a violent crime like
the San Francisco killing of Kate Steinle. His sweeping references to
foreign bad guys and shithole countries suggest that he applies the same
set of judgments to the international arena.
Under Trumps auspices, the agency in charge of applying the law to
immigrants, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has taken the concept
of criminality to new heights in order to justify expanded priorities for
deportation. Now, an actual criminal conviction is no longer necessary. An
individual with pending criminal charges or simply a known gang member
has also become an ICE priority. In other words, a fear-inspiring
accusation or even rumor is all thats needed to deem an immigrant a
criminal.
And such attitudes are making their way ever deeper into this society. Ive
seen it at Salem State University, the college where I teach. In a recent
memo explaining why he opposes giving the school sanctuary-campus status,
the chief of campus police insisted that his force must remain authorized to
report students to ICE when there are cases of bad actors... street gang
participation... drug trafficking... even absent a warrant or other judicial
order. In other words, due process be damned, the police, any police, can
determine guilt as they wish.
And this tendency toward such a Trumpian Manichaean worldview, now being
used to justify the growth of what can only be called an incipient police
state, is so strong that its even infiltrated the thinking of some of the
presidents immigration opponents. Take chain migration, an obscure
concept previously used mainly by sociologists and historians to describe
nineteenth and twentieth century global migration patterns. The president
has, of course, made it his epithet du jour.
Because the president spoke of chain migration in such a derogatory way,
anti-Trump liberals immediately assumed that the phrase was inherently
insulting. MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid typically charged that the
president is saying that the only bill he will approve of must end what they
call chain migration which is actually a term we in the media should just
not use! Because quite frankly its not a real thing, its a made up
term... [and] so offensive! Its shocking to me that were just adopting it
wholesale because [White House adviser] Stephen Miller wants to call it
that... [The term should be] family migration.
Similarly, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand claimed that when someone
uses the phrase chain migration... it is intentional in trying to demonize
families, literally trying to demonize families, and make it a racist slur.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed: Look what they're doing with
family unification, making up a fake name, chain. Chain, they like the word
chain. That sends tremors through people.
But chain migration is not the same as family reunification. Chain
migration is a term used by academics to explain how people tended to
migrate from their home communities using pre-existing networks. Examples
would include the great migration of African Americans from the rural South
to the urban North and West, the migrations of rural Appalachians to
Midwestern industrial cities, waves of European migration to the United
States at the turn of the last century, as well as contemporary migration
from Latin America and Asia.
A single individual or a small group, possibly recruited through a
state-sponsored system or by an employer, or simply knowing of employment
opportunities in a particular area, sometimes making use of a new rail line
or steamship or air route, would venture forth, opening up new horizons.
Once in a new region or land, such immigrants directly or indirectly
recruited friends, acquaintances, and family members. Soon enough, there
were growing links--hence that chain--between the original rural or urban
communities where such people lived and distant cities. Financial
remittances began to flow back; return migration (or simply visits to the
old homeland) took place; letters about the new world arrived; and sometimes
new technologies solidified ongoing ties, impelling yet more streams of
migrants. Thats the chain in chain migration and, despite the president
and his supporters, theres nothing offensive about it.
Family reunification, on the other hand, was a specific part of this
countrys 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which imposed quotas
globally. These were then distributed through a priority system that
privileged the close relatives of immigrants who had already become
permanent residents or U.S. citizens. Family reunification opened paths for
those who had family members in the United States (though in countries where
the urge to migrate was high, the waiting list could be decades long). In
the process, however, it made legal migration virtually impossible for those
without such ties. There was no line for them to wait in. Like DACA and
Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the two programs that President Trump is
now working so assiduously to dismantle, family reunification has been
beneficial to those in a position to take advantage of it, even if it
excluded far more people than it helped.
Why does this matter? As a start, at a moment when political posturing and
fake news are becoming the norm, its important that the immigrant rights
movement remain accurate and on solid ground in its arguments. (Indeed, the
anti-immigrant right has been quick to gloat over Democrats condemning a
term they had been perfectly happy to use in the past.) In addition, its
crucial not to be swept away by Trumps Manichaean view of the world when it
comes to immigration. Legally, family reunification was never an open-arms
policy. It was always a key component in a system of quotas meant to limit,
control, and police migration, often in stringent ways. It was part of a
system built to exclude at least as much as include. There may be good
reasons to defend the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Act, just
as there are good reasons to defend DACA--but that does not mean that a
deeply problematic status quo should be glorified.
Racism and the Immigrant Threat
Those very quotas and family-reunification policies served to illegalize
most Mexican migration to the United States. That, in turn, created the
basis not just for militarizing the police and the border, but for what
anthropologist Leo Chávez has called the Latino threat narrative: the
notion that the United States somehow faces an existential threat from
Mexican and other Latino immigrants.
So President Trump has drawn on a long legacy here, even if in a
particularly invidious fashion. The narrative evolved over time in ways
that sought to downplay its explicitly racial nature. Popular commentators
railed against illegal immigrants, while lauding those who do it the
right way. The threat narrative, for instance, lurked at the very heart of
the immigration policies of the Obama administration. President Obama
regularly hailed exceptional Latino and other immigrants, even as the
criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation of so many were, if
anything, being ramped up. Criminalization provided a color-blind cover
as the president separated undocumented immigrants into two distinct groups:
felons and families. In those years, so many commentators postured on
the side of those they defined as the deserving exceptions, while adding
further fuel to the threat narrative.
President Trump has held onto a version of this ostensibly color-blind and
exceptionalist narrative, while loudly proclaiming himself the least racist
person anyone might ever run into and praising DACA recipients as good,
educated, and accomplished young people. But the racist nature of his
anti-immigrant extremism and his invocations of the threat have gone well
beyond Obamas programs. In his attack on legal immigration, chain
migration, and legal statuses like DACA and TPS, race has again reared its
head explicitly.
Unless they were to come from countries like Norway or have some special
merit, Trump seems to believe that immigrants should essentially all be
illegalized, prohibited, or expelled. Some of his earliest policy moves
like his attacks on refugees and his travel ban were aimed precisely at
those who would otherwise fall into a legal category, those who had
followed the rules, waited in line, registered with the government, or
paid taxes, including refugees, DACA kids, and TPS recipients--all of them
people already in the system and approved for entry or residence.
As ICE spokespeople remind us when asked to comment on particularly
egregious examples of the arbitrary detention and deportation of long-term
residents, President Trump has rescinded the Obama-era priority
enforcement program that emphasized the apprehension and deportation of
people with criminal records and recent border-crossers. Now, no category
of removable aliens [is] exempt from enforcement. While President Trump has
continued to verbally support the Dreamers, his main goal in doing so has
clearly been to use them as a bargaining chip in obtaining his dramatically
restrictionist priorities from a reluctant Congress.
The U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) made the new restrictionist
turn official in late February when it revised its mission statement to
delete this singular line: USCIS secures Americas promise as a nation of
immigrants. No longer. Instead, we are now told, the agency administers
the nations lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and
promise... while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring
our values.
Challenging the Restrictionist Agenda
Many immigrant rights organizations have fought hard against the
criminalization narrative that distinguishes the Dreamers from other
categories of immigrants. Mainstream and Democrat-affiliated organizations
have, however, generally pulled the other way, emphasizing the innocence
of those young people who were brought here through no fault of their own.
Dreamers, TPS recipients, refugees, and even those granted priority under
the family reunification policy have all operated as exceptions to what has
long been a far broader restrictionist immigration agenda. Trump has now
taken that agenda in remarkably extreme directions. So fighting to protect
such exceptional categories makes sense, given the millions who have
benefited from them, but no one should imagine that Americas policies have
ever been generous or open.
Regarding refugees, for example, the State Department website still suggests
that the United States is proud of its history of welcoming immigrants and
refugees... The U.S. refugee resettlement program reflects the United
States highest values and aspirations to compassion, generosity, and
leadership. Even before Trump entered the Oval Office, this wasnt actually
true: the refugee resettlement program has always been both small and highly
politicized. For example, out of approximately seven million Syrian
refugees who fled the complex set of conflicts in their country since
2011conflicts that would not have unfolded as they did without the American
invasion of Iraq the United States has accepted only 21,000. Now, however,
the fight to preserve even such numbers looks like a losing rearguard
battle.
Given that a truly just reform of the countrys immigration system is
inconceivable at the moment, it makes sense that those concerned with
immigrant rights concentrate on areas where egregious need or popular
sympathy have made stopgap measures realistic. The problem is that, over
the years, this approach has tended to separate out particular groups of
immigrants from the larger narrative and so failed to challenge the
underlying racial and criminalizing animus toward all those immigrants
consigned to the depths of the economic system and systematically denied the
right of belonging.
In a sense, President Trump is correct: there really isnt a way to draw a
hard and fast line between legal and illegal immigration or between the
felons and the families. Many immigrants live in mixed-status households,
including those whose presence has been authorized in different ways or not
authorized at all. And most of those felons, often convicted of recently
criminalized, immigration-related or other minor violations, have families,
too.
Trump and his followers, of course, want just about all immigrants to be
criminalized and excluded or deported because, in one way or another, they
consider them dangers to the rest of us. While political realism demands
that battles be fought for the rights of particular groups of immigrants,
its no less important to challenge the looming narrative of immigrant
criminalization and to refuse to assume that the larger war has already been
lost. In the end, isnt it time to challenge the notion that people in
general, and immigrants in particular, can be easily divided into deserving
good guys and undeserving bad guys?
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