“Comprehensive immigration reform”, and other phrases that mean nothing
Since President Obama’s trip to Mexico this week, immigration(that is, immigration concerning people from Latin America), never too far from the news these days, has become the sexy topic du jour. Or del dia, rather. If I had a shot of tequila for every time I have heard the phrase “comprehensive immigration reform” since Tuesday, I would be having my stomach pumped right now. Says Obama, we need it. Says Calderon, the U.S. needs it. Says Lou “Ass Hat” Dobbs, we need it. But at this point, what is anyone really calling for when they say, “we must have comprehensive immigration reform”? Like most buzzwords employed ad nauseum by the political establishment and mainstream media in this country, it has become so vague and stripped of meaning that it may as well be framed (or not) and hung in a gallery for post-modern art.
I recently had the privilege of attending the 10th annual Conference on the Americas at Grand Valley State University, a college in Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids is a small town on the conservative west side of Michigan with an exploding population of immigrants from Latin America and, to a somewhat lesser degree, East African countries like Somalia and Eritrea. The theme of the conference was “Immigration: The Art and Politics of Movement”, which sounds very exciting. Yet it quickly became clear that the topic was too broad for one day, which was crammed so full of panels, lectures and films that I felt like collapsing by 3:00. And that speaks to what is wrong with our collective dialogue about issues related to immigration (which I would argue is not an issue you can “separate” out from any kind of conversation about our nation): we can’t reform or overhaul or mend or build fences until we admit to ourselves that it is our policies, foreign and economic and domestic and otherwise, that drive immigration. I’m speaking in particular about Latin America here but the same applies, albeit under slightly different circumstances, to people from other regions of the world (Iraq, anyone?). Going back even further, the fact that we current citizens apparently suffer from severe amnesia regarding the origins of this country and our own ancestral complicity in “illegal” immigration, not to mention genocide, stunts any chance of effecting real social change.
One thing to remember, and which the first lecture I attended demonstrated remarkably well, is that our current national pearl-clutching about “these 12 million undocumented workers!” has been ongoing since the first Separatist laid eyes on Plymouth Rock. Putting aside the cruel irony* of the origins of these United States, the question of how to manage new arrivals whose language, religion, skin color, class and custom are deemed different or inferior from the less new arrivals has been one for the ages. The ideas that immigration today is occurring at a higher rate than ever before, that immigrants suck public services dry, that our national security will be weakened by the infiltration of Spanish speakers or Catholics or people with brown skin or women who wear headscarves, speak more to our fears (assimiliation! diversity! interracial minglings!) than anything else. Despite the fact that the U.S. has embraced globalization and the liberalization of trade and economic policies–major causal factors that spur immigration–we have stopped short of similarly embracing the flow of people and flexibility of borders which would logically follow from a deeply integrated, late-stage capitalist global economy. It’s an issue that overlaps and intertwines foreign and domestic policy and defies the two party approach, and as we all know, our nation is largely incapable of thinking outside the binary.
So what would an actual comprehensive approach to immigration “reform” look like? As is the case with overhauling an institution or making any progress at all, it is our ideological principles that need the adjustment. And there’s another thing our nation is largely incapable of: recognizing the ideology that drives our policies, social institutions and mainsteam culture. I am fairly certain that most North Americans think the word ideology itself is Socialist, for instance.
To be continued…
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May 9th, 2009 at 7:37 am
so funny and smart.