By ANDREW LAM, New America Media
SAN FRANCISCO — Recently, in front a packed crowd at Duke
University, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she regretted the
failure of passing the comprehensive immigration reform act and the shift in
Americans’ attitude toward immigrants.
Accepting and welcoming immigrants “has been at the core of
our strength,” she said. “I don’t know when immigrants became the enemy.”
These days it is refreshing, if rare, to hear someone of
Rice’s stature to speak on behalf of immigrants. Over the last few years the
public discourse has been shrill and, if anything, media coverage seems to
stoke anxiety to an unprecedented level.
Instead of a larger narrative on immigration — from culture
to economics, from identity to history — what we have now is a public mindset
of us versus them, and an overall anti immigrant climate that is both troubling
and morally reprehensible.
America’s difficult love
story
Yet I often see the story of immigration in America as a
kind of difficult love story.
Take the scandal involving Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal
County, Ariz. Running for Congress, the sheriff is tough on undocumented
immigration — but he had a secret: a love affair with Jose Orozco, an immigrant
whose legal status remains in question.
The romance went sour, alas, and the immigrant lover
alleged that the sheriff threatened to deport him if he came out with their
story. Babeu vehemently denied the deportation threat. Orozco promptly filed a
lawsuit.
What struck me most about this story is the contradictory
nature of the relationship and how emblematic it is to the larger American
narrative. We want and benefit from immigrants’ cheap labor, but we don’t want
to acknowledge our relationship with them. We need them; we don’t want to be
associated with them.
Meg Whitman, the billionaire who ran for governor in
California in 2010, wanted to “hold employers accountable for hiring only documented
workers.” But she didn’t include herself.
The year before Whitman’s campaign, she’d fired Nicky Diaz
Santillan, who in a spectacular press conference revealed that she was
undocumented. She had been taking care of the Whitman’s household for nearly a
decade.
When Santillan reportedly asked Whitman for help finding an
immigration attorney after she was fired, Whitman allegedly told her, “You
don’t know me, and I don’t know you.”
In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the
scapegoat. He becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of
recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in time of crisis.
The master narrative regarding immigration seems to require those it vilifies
to obey the rule of silence. Their tongues are often kept in check through the
threat of imprisonment and deportation.
God forbid if they become articulate, organize, participate
in union politics and demand better wages and fair treatment. God forbid if
they hold a press conference or get together to make an updated movie version
of “The Help.”
Immigrants: Canaries in
the coal mine
Yet, in the context of a
free and open society, the immigrant is often the canary in the coalmine. The
horror stories from detention centers are just too many:
“Pregnant women shackled to a hospital bed while
giving birth”
“Inmates shackled and paraded in pink underwear on the
streets of Arizona, a scene reminiscent of Abu Ghraib”
“Rape incidents uninvestigated”
“Healthcare dangerously lacking in immigrant detention
facilities where the suicide levels are alarming”
“Deportees forced to take psychotropic drugs so they act
docile in their long journey back to their countries of origin”
Human-rights abuse by
law enforcement in America’s Southwest is so notorious that organizations like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are ringing alarm bells for the
lack of accountability. This terrible treatment reflects a legal system that’s
gone so badly wrong that America’s very humanity is now put in question.
“You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”
Perhaps we don’t want to
know about the tragedy and psychological and economic impact on tens of
thousands of American-born children whose parents have been taken away by the
authorities. But it is a fact that we are in the process of creating a whole
generation of Americans who are becoming permanent outsiders, a vast second
class of citizens.
When a society hides behind the apparatus of draconian
policies, allowing the authorities almost unchecked power to detain and deport,
the only logical outcome is injustice and cruelty.
Missing voices
Missing from the
national conversation are voices like that of the former secretary of state’s,
of pro-immigration reformers and of civil rights leaders who can speak on
behalf of those who have no voice. Where are the leaders who can speak to the
idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our
socioeconomic interest ― not to mention our spiritual health ― to integrate
immigrants, that our nation functions best when we welcome newcomers and help
them participate fully in our society?
What’s missing is compassion.
If I am sympathetic to the plight of immigrants of all
kinds, I have good reason: I was once a Vietnamese refugee. Like millions who
left Viet Nam, my family and I fled that country illegally, without passports.
We entered another country without visas. That I am a writer and journalist
today is due to the American generosity, my Americanization story is a love
story, a success story.
But that generosity has all but faded. The United States is
no doubt at a very important crossroads. In one direction is a country ruled by
distrust, xenophobia and continual exploitation — with its need to strengthen
law enforcement. That choice offers us a society willing to look away while an
entire population lives in fear, in a de facto police state. It’s a country in
which the immigrant becomes, indeed the enemy.
In the other direction is a global society defined by
openness and with the understanding that we as a nation have always depended
and thrived on the energy, ideas and contributions of newcomers. It’s a
promised land that can only be envisioned by the newcomer to our shore, who
still dreams the dream. For even if we don’t know it yet, we all desperately
need to be reborn through his eyes.
Andrew Lam is an editor of New America Media and the author
of “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres”
and “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the
Vietnamese Diaspora.” His
book of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out in 2013.
