The Minuteman Who Came to Dinner
What the left can learn from my anti-immigration father.
By Bryan Collinsworth, Sarah Lawrence College
Wednesday January 18, 2006
 I can’t say I was surprised, upon arriving home to California for the holidays, to find Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo’s official Christmas card sitting on my parents’ mantle beside greetings from close friends and family.
Nor was I shocked a few days later when I saw my father quoted by a National Review Online reporter who interviewed him during his recent stint as a Minuteman on the U.S.-Mexico border.
No, events like these have become a matter of course in a house where archconservative Tancredo’s campaign stickers already adorn the bumper of my father’s car; where Lou Dobbs blares from the TV every night and anti-immigration websites like FAIR and VDare are favorites on the family computer; where the lingua franca around the dinner table includes phrases like “broken borders” and “out-of-control immigration.”
Yes, my father is a bona-fide anti-immigration activist. That said, everything else you might assume about him is wrong. He spent four decades as a public school teacher in a low-income, mostly immigrant school district, and remains a card-carrying member of the National Education Association. He’s a longtime Sierra Clubber, outdoor enthusiast, and environmentalist. And his talents for Bush-bashing would make Michael Moore blush.
Slowly but surely over the last several years, however, I have watched opposition to the current state of immigration—particularly illegal immigration—grow into my dad’s number-one issue.
I have certainly found plenty to disagree with throughout this transition. I am staunchly skeptical, for instance, of my father’s warnings about monumental clashes of civilization or insurmountable cultural dissonances between “Americans” and the latest wave of Hispanic—particularly Mexican—immigrants. At the level of day-to-day living, cultural differences often appear vast, but in the broad scope of American history they have never brought the grief that immigration opponents predict. Rather, it is a rich irony that what one generation of xenophobes decries as a cultural threat that will shred the U.S. social fabric, its descendants defend as an integral part of “traditional” America that must be protected from the next wave of cultural outsiders. (The recent rush to defend Christmas trees—a 19th-century German import—is a perfect example.)
No, if anything creates discord when cultures meet in America, it is the fear spread by natives (properly, “older immigrants”): the fixations on frightening anecdotes; whispers about sexual depravity and criminal tendencies; and of course, the constant rediscovery of the immigrant’s singular ability to industriously snatch up all our jobs while doing nothing but sitting at home mooching off our welfare system.
I could go on critiquing many of my father’s views all day. But what’s far more interesting (some may say horrifying) is that he has started to make sense to me on a couple of very important points.
The first is that the woeful instability of the U.S.-Mexico border poses a potentially dire threat to America’s national security, and already threatens the safety of the millions who seek to cross it or survive near it each year.
My dad’s favorite right-wing websites swirl with allegations: Al Qaeda has already acquired loose nukes from the former Soviet Union; Al Qaeda is planning to take advantage of highly developed drug- and immigrant-smuggling networks on the southern border to transport nukes, other weapons, or operatives into the U.S.; Al Qaeda has already done this and is now simply waiting to attack.
I don’t trust the sources of these claims any farther than I can throw them. But I’m starting to share my father’s view that the silence on such questions from mainstream and progressive voices is dangerously deafening.
Is a nuclear weapon—or more transportable chemical weapons, biological weapons, or terrorists themselves—coming across the southern border a real threat? While I won’t just swallow Joseph Farah’s arguments that it is, I’ve found disturbingly few explanations of why it isn’t. It’s particularly terrifying that our current Commander in Chief has only spoken with any urgency about nuclear terrorism when he wanted to make a war of his choosing our top national security priority. And he only started talking about border security after the grassroots outcry became overwhelming.
True, the few mainstream investigations I have found conclude that there hasn’t been any significant terrorist activity on the U.S.-Mexico border thus far. But that’s probably not because U.S. border forces could successfully stop it if there were. On the contrary, the governors of both New Mexico and Arizona found their southern borders so chaotic last year that they declared states of emergency. Illegal immigrants are nothing compared to the vicious opportunists who transport them and the drug traffickers and gangsters who cross alongside them. Combine this with hundreds of miles of inhospitable desert, and you have a situation that’s not safe for Americans who fear terror, not safe for those who live near the border, and certainly not safe for all those who attempt to cross it each year.
Which brings me to the next point on which my dad and I are beginning to see eye to eye (or at least exchange glances every now and then): Progressives need to start talking about illegal immigration.
My dad says we should do this because it’s the perfect wedge issue with which to divide the right’s unholy union of corrupt corporate superpowers (pro-immigration—cheap labor) and white working-class middle Americans (anti-immigration—not so hot on new competition or new cultures).
I say we should do it because our own values demand a better way. Progressives believe in developing sustainable systems for the long-term well-being of humanity; we believe in granting dignity to every human being regardless of class, race or country of origin.
The immigration status-quo fulfills neither ideal, especially for those who need them fulfilled the most: undocumented immigrants themselves. This is a system that forces people to risk death crossing deserts or paying criminals to transport them to places where they slave away for laughable wages under employers who tell them that if they make so much as a peep about decent treatment, they’ll “accidentally discover” their undocumented status and report them to immigration authorities.
This is a system that does not even offer illegal immigrants a shot at that most sacred of American immigrant dreams: upward mobility. According to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, unauthorized migrant incomes barely increase or even decline after 10 years in the United States—a stark contrast with the gains of legal immigrants and natives.
There are some progressives—mostly students, grassroots organizers, and members of Hispanic communities themselves—who are actively working to offer the undocumented something more than second-class noncitizenship. But these are only localized and short-term responses; meanwhile, the broader left-wing discourse tends to treat immigration issues the way conservatives treat gun control or health care: constantly criticizing the proposals of the other side, but rarely seeking serious solutions of our own.
What might those solutions be? In the short term it seems pretty clear that we do need to restabilize the border; we need to determine whether terrorism coming across it is a serious threat and respond accordingly; and we need to crack down on corrupt employers who exploit immigrants in a way that punishes the exploiters more than the immigrants themselves.
The only long-term solution I can see is, fortunately, the same solution that most potential migrants from Latin America seem to seek as well. What I clearly heard when I was traveling in El Salvador several years ago was that our southern neighbors don’t want to come here. They don’t want to be reliant on remittances from relatives in the U.S. as a primary source of income — as Salvadorans are. And they don’t want to lose almost an entire generation of their sons and daughters to a faraway country offering questionable jobs — as Salvadorans have.
No, the solution that most Latin Americans really want on this issue is the most far-reaching and effective one: stable, well-developed economic conditions in their native countries. But this is the solution that virtually no one in the United States immigration debate wants to consider, because it forces every faction to confront some of their biggest demons.
For the grassroots anti-immigration folks, it means conceding that nativist culture wars and literal border wars aren’t long-term solutions. For many Washington elites and business leaders, it means acknowledging that half-hearted temporary worker programs that legitimize short-term, low-wage exploitation aren’t lasting answers, either.
And for progressives, it means facing our deepest divides. On the one hand, we must think long and hard about the value of “free trade” policies that have thus far offered our southern neighbors development only in the form of three-dollar-a-day maquiladoras that can’t even compete with risking life and limb for three-dollar-an-hour jobs to the north. On the other hand, the rising generation of understandably skeptical activists must move beyond endless protests and acknowledge that alternative visions for growth, however radical, must also be complex and concrete.
On the one hand, progressives as a whole must face up to the fact that, for far too long, we’ve been using our reputation as the defenders of minority rights as an excuse to shamefully neglect real minority gains. On the other hand, even those who have been valiantly addressing day-to-day minority needs must confront the possibility that such advocacy may not necessarily translate into long-term minority gains, either.
We can’t start to deal honestly with immigration issues until we start to deal honestly with these dilemmas. But we’d better start soon, because this issue will only get bigger, and its right-wing element will only grow stronger. This month, President Bush is expected to devote a significant portion of his State of the Union Address to immigration reform. In February, the sweeping anti-immigration bill just passed in the House comes before the Senate.
Back home in Southern California, local Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist recently won the majority of election-day votes in a Republican congressional primary race for a vacated House seat (though he lost when the absentee ballots were counted). Unless a better alternative is available by the time he makes his bid for Senate next year, my father will be right beside him.
Illustration: Matt Bors
--------
Comments
Leave a comment about this article below. For more discussion, visit our community page and sign up for your own Campus Progress blog!
|
!
