Arizona has passed a new “immigration” law, which gives local law enforcement officers the authority to stop and arrest anyone who “looks” as if they might be in the country illegally and is unable to produce an Arizona driver’s license, passport, tribal identification card, or green card. If you’re here legally that should be no problem, right?
How about residents of other states traveling through Arizona? You and all your ancestors might have been born in this country, but if you’re not carrying your passport through Arizona you’re subject to arrest. It’s like a whole other country.
Worse, the Arizona law even entitles private citizens to sue local law enforcement if they don’t think they’re doing enough to arrest illegals. This has the effect of making immigration enforcement, which is actually a violation of federal law, not local or even state, a local police department’s number-one priority, or risk possible lawsuit. More than one judge has suggested that this provision alone is likely to bankrupt Arizona—compounded by the lawsuits filed by citizens claiming wrongful arrest.
Just as with the healthcare reform debate, privileged Americans (those who already have health insurance in the former controversy, or those who are white in this one) often fail to see that this law endangers them as well as those less-worthy “others.” Those who are healthy and insured and “didn’t want to have to pay for other people’s coverage” failed to realize that they too could fall ill one day and subsequently be denied coverage. By the same failed empathy, many “legal, law-abiding citizens” fail to realize that they too can be arrested if they aren’t carrying approved forms of ID. All that is required is that a police officer “suspect” you of being here illegally. Maybe you’re speaking Spanish to your girlfriend. Maybe you have an accent. Maybe you’re gay. Or a long-hair hippie freak. Or snubbed a peace officer’s sexual advances. Whatever.
The thing I find most disturbing about the whole immigration “debate” (if it was a reasoned debate, I could handle it) is the hatred and animosity directed at people who, for the most part, are here for the most understandable of reasons: to support their families and give themselves a shot at a better life.
“Yeah, but they’re here illegally! They don’t respect the law!”
Since I don’t know a single American who has not broken some law at some point or other, this fails to have the persuasive force intended.
“They come here and have babies, who are citizens and entitled to public services, and they don’t pay taxes!”
Really? How do you know? Most illegals who are working in this country have some form of ID that includes a social security number. In fact, many of them are paying into a system from which they will never be able to collect because the social security number actually belongs to someone else.
Granted, many illegals work “under the table,” for cash, which means they don’t pay taxes. Nor do their employers pay payroll taxes. This seems to be the crux of the argument against illegal immigrants: some poor people—predominantly Latin Americans—are getting into this country and reaping services and benefits they don’t contribute to.
If we could step back for a moment and look at this issue historically, and a tad more compassionately, this is what I see:
The states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California were once part of Mexico. The United States (or what would become the United States, in the case of Texas) took them by forceful means. (As some immigrants say, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”) Adding insult to injury, the passage of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) resulted in the flooding of Mexico with subsidized corn and other commodities from huge American agribusinesses, putting an estimated 1.3 million (in 2003; the number has since increased) Mexican farmers out of business. (See, among other sources, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-just-foreign-policy/reclaiming-corn-and-culture: “By 2003, 1.3 million Mexican peasants had lost their livelihoods because of NAFTA. Many of the displaced farmers came north in search of work. Mexican migration to the U.S. increased an estimated 75 percent in the five years after the trade agreement took effect.)
So we in the U.S. took first their land, then their livelihoods, and yet we’re the ones who cry foul when they cross our border to work. (The Mexican government is also complicit in this, yet our government does little to push it to improve the prospects of its own people.)
Consider the qualities of the people who arrive here illegally. They’re tough, resourceful, risk-takers, willing to swim a river and cross a desert, often on foot, to have a shot at a better life for themselves and their families. I have a friend who walked here from Honduras, a journey of more than 2,000 miles that took her three months. Her father had paid a “coyote” $7,000 to escort her, but the man abandoned Carmen and her friend as soon as they crossed the border into Guatemala. Rather than return, the two 19-year-olds pressed on, escaping rapists, defying employers who wanted to press them into prostitution, enduring cold nights, hunger, and the agony of an uncertain future.
Many immigrants are skilled: plasterers, tile-setters, metal workers, stone masons. Even the so-called “unskilled” have a work ethic superior to that of many unskilled Americans; they have to, to survive. Ask any farmer. They’ll tell you how difficult it is to find people born in this country willing to do back-breaking work in the heat and cold and to give it the care it deserves so that crops aren’t trampled, lost, or spoiled.
How about the various Cubans who have tried over the years to immigrate to the U.S. in retrofitted vintage automobiles? The U.S Coast Guard has routinely turned them away. Shouldn’t people this ingenious and committed be welcomed to our country? I’d have given them an escort, rather than returned them to Cuba.
It’s my opinion that immigrants contribute as much to our society as they take. For starters, they still believe in the American dream: the idea that if you work hard and save your money, you too can lift yourself up. My husband and I know many immigrants—skilled construction workers—who own several homes in the United States. We, educated professionals that we are, have not yet paid for one.
Second, diversity is a benefit in itself. A diverse ecosystem is more stable, offering more habitats, more potential food sources, more opportunities for survival. Same with agriculture, where monocrops are more vulnerable to disease and infestation, deplete the soil more rapidly, and require massive inputs of fertilizers and pesticides as a consequence. Similarly, cities are hotbeds of creativity, while homogenous suburbs and housing projects are not—not because creative people don’t live in them, but because there’s less cross-fertilization of ideas. Everyone is operating from too similar a set of assumptions. Diversity exposes individuals to new ways of solving all of life’s challenges—from ways of preserving and preparing food, to ways of clothing the body, creating music, celebrating milestones. Hasn’t American culture been enormously enriched by ethnic food, fashions, music, art, architecture, and even expressions of speech?
Diversity also teaches tolerance. Children who grow up exposed to only one set of ideas can be shocked to find that other people see life differently—have different values and priorities, worship different Gods, practice different rituals—and are still excellent people.
Legalizing immigrants so that they can pay taxes is one of the win-win benefits possible if we reform our immigration laws humanely. We in the U.S. face a demographic problem because of the aging of the baby boomers. This huge cohort will be retiring to draw Social Security while we have fewer young people in the workforce to contribute to the Social Security fund. What we need to keep Social Security solvent is an influx of younger workers paying in to help balance the glut of retirees cashing out. As Studs Terkel famously said, “Fortunately, they are available. They’re called immigrants.”
The underlying cause for anger against immigrants, it seems to me, is the age-old suspicion people feel for “the other,” the newcomer, the one who is not like us. For white males, in particular, this fear can be acute because, after all, their days as a majority are numbered. White males have always been a minority in the world, though they’ve never acted like it. Now the world is coming to their neighborhood, to their very doors. Whites will be a minority in the U.S. by the year 2042. They are already the minority in some American cities. And is that so bad?
Given the way we’ve treated minorities, I could see why whites might be fearful. As my friend Katie says, “Karma’s a bitch.”
But wouldn’t this be a great time, while they still have a chance, for whites to enact really humane, compassionate laws and policies towards immigrants, minorities, and all oppressed peoples? Wouldn’t this be the pivotal moment for us to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us”?
I lived for six years in Hawaii, where no one ethnic group has a majority and whites have had to learn, sometimes not very gracefully, how to share power; how to get along. Yes, haoles, as whites from the mainland are called, come in for their share of thumping—just as brown kids have for centuries. I’m not in favor of it, but it happens. And the different ethnic groups do talk smack about each other in the privacy of their own enclaves. But you know, you never hear of race riots, or border skirmishes, or other major ethnic clashes in Hawaii. We really can all learn to get along.
More to the point, we who call ourselves spiritual, or Judeo-Christian, or conscious, have a moral obligation to advocate for compassion and justice for immigrants—legal, or illegal. As Rabbi Michael Lerner reminds us, the Torah calls for the cancelling of debts every seven years and a return to the original equal distribution of land every 50 years. To those who say this is unrealistic, God responds: “The land belongs to me.” It’s not ours. It never has been.
