Immigrants Are Not the Enemy

I grew up hearing stories about how one of my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. I also knew my father’s family of English and Welsh immigrants were among the original Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley. Some of them later married Irish immigrants and raised families in Utah and California. Then there were the greatgreat-grandparents who emigrated from Sweden to Minnesota in the 1890s. Myself, I am a California native of no particular religious bent who has lived in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Oregon. When I was younger I married an Iranian living in the United States on a student visa. I have a brother whose girlfriend is from China, living in the United States on a work visa. Another brother married a woman whose long family lineage in California’s central valley includes Native American ancestry. 

Our family story is an American story, not unlike countless other American stories. It is a family history of hopes for a better life, of uprooted lives and new, unfamiliar landscapes, of years of hard work and confrontations with adversity and discrimination. It is the story of a Swedish great-grandfather who came to this country in the 1890s as a farmhand, working his way up to an accountant’s position with a Minneapolis home heating company. In the bleak Depression era winter of 1931-32, he faced arrest when his employer discovered he had arranged for off-the-books coal deliveries to families who could no longer pay. Distraught, he killed himself. It is also the story of my father, a man with an entrepreneurial spirit whose life was marked by continual success in business. It is the story of other generations who have walked many paths in life. It is an immigrant’s story. 

The immigrant experience in the U.S. was never just a glorious tale. But in the United States today the darker side of the immigration story is repeating itself. President Bush has apparently been advised that leadership on the immigration issue means being pro-active, which is another way of saying send in the troops. The White House Deciderator’s latest stab at deciding something involves plans to significantly increase the presence of National Guard troops along the southwestern border. Hearing this latest news I can’t help but wonder if the Guard troops will be checking the papers of corporate executives from the United States who are shipping good-paying American jobs to northern Mexico where the plants they operate pay subsistence-level wages. Where I live in Bloomington, Illinois the local newspaper reports that the General Electric plant is laying off another 56 workers and their jobs are being moved to Apodaca, Mexico and Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. So far I haven’t noted any protest by local or state politicians otherwise known for their concerns over the influx of “illegals.” 

Immigrants have once again become the target of xenophobic voices who seek to blame the reported 12 million “illegals” for every evil under the sun, taking jobs and draining social services. In the spirit of the Anti-Exclusion Act of 1882, which sought to keep Chinese “coolies” from U.S. shores, the House of Representatives bill passed last December, under the sponsorship of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), would transform millions of undocumented families into criminal felon families. With visions of building the “Great Wall of the Southwest,” the bill’s flair for the police state is embellished by a provision that criminalizes anyone who provides assistance to undocumented workers. 

Unfortunately, the Senate’s “compromise” bill sponsored by Senators Kennedy (D-MA) and McCain (R-AZ) constitutes a compromise only in the justice it also denies to immigrant workers. The bill proposes stepped-up border enforcement measures, but no border wall with Mexico. It would raise the wall of second-class status for immigrants consigned to labor’s bargain basement in a greatly expanded “guest workers” program. This proposed ten-year guest worker system represents another way to permanently structure a large, two-tier workforce into the U.S. economy, as the AFL-CIO’s executive council recently charged. The result can only lead to a further deterioration in the quality of the job market, as once decent-paying, permanent jobs continue to be transformed into temporary, benefit-starved jobs employing foreign “guests” who will be inherently more vulnerable to employer abuse. 

The folks in Congress likely assumed they could tighten the immigration knot without worrying about what those directly affected by more restrictive legislation thought about all this. They were mistaken. In a display of grassroots activism as unprecedented as it is understandable, immigrants responded. Mass protest marches involving millions have made it clear that immigrants want what everyone else wants—equality. 

In Mexico, of course, the situation is more dire. The impact of NAFTA has flooded the country in recent years with cheap, subsidized U.S. corn, forcing some two million Mexican farmers into poverty and ruin. Wages in Mexican industry have also fallen precipitously. Many Mexican immigrants who come to the United States are victims of these unjust corporate trade policies. We should ask ourselves: “Why should they be punished for trying to survive?”