“We decided not to be
Invisible anymore,” read one headline when those floods of people
turned out in cities around the country, from Washington, D.C., and
Denver to Salt Lake City, Reno, Phoenix and Salem.
For
more than 60 years, Hispanic immigrants have been a deliberately
created, out-of-sight-out-of-mind, disposable, low-wage work force.
Hispanics work for little, stay out of sight, and get to stay in
this country. American businesses, in return, get cheap labor.
You won’t find that agreement written in any statute
book, but it has been our de facto immigration policy with Mexico,
Central and South America since World War II.
What makes
millions of invisible Hispanics suddenly rise up and march by the
thousands in the streets of cities across the country?
The U.S. House of Representatives voted to end that 60-year-old
unwritten immigration policy. In a bill with sweeping consequences,
the House voted to make felons of virtually everyone who has come
to this country illegally over the last 60 years, and has not been
able to become a citizen. This politically inspired approach to a
complicated situation of our own making threatens to tear families
apart through arbitrary deportations with little or no legal
recourse. It’s enough to make the most reluctant take to the
streets.
“But they are here illegally,” bleat the
believers. It is also illegal to hire them. But American businesses
hire immigrants in droves because they are a cheap, docile, pliable
— and sometimes the only — labor force. The House bill
ignores the fact that immigration laws have deliberately been left
unenforced for decades, intentionally allowing this present
situation to develop.
A “compromise” bill in the Senate
is really no better. The Senate bill creates a citizenship path for
all immigrants who were here up to two years ago. If you came to
join your family in the last two years? Automatic deportation.
It appears some part of the Republican “base” will not be
appeased until Mexicans are frog-marched to buses and dumped on the
other side of the border. It will send a message, believers argue.
Mass deportations will surely send a message, but not the message
Republicans imagine.
The rest of the world will call the
dragnets and deportations the name that Americans cannot utter
— ethnic cleansing. It is unlikely to be as bloody as Rwanda
or Sarajevo. But it won’t be ignored by the world as Darfur has
been. It certainly won’t win us any respect. The price of appeasing
the Republican “base” is simply too high.
We are a nation
of immigrants. The Irish and Chinese built the Transcontinental
Railroad. Anytime there was a revolution elsewhere in the world,
America got a new cuisine — Armenian, Korean, Chinese,
Vietnamese, just to name a few. German immigrants gave us beer
— can you say Henry Weinhard or Budweiser?
I grew
up in Cleveland in the 1950s. It was a city of immigrants who
worked in steel mills, factories and machine tool companies.
Cleveland had its Little Italy, Little Poland, Little Hungary,
Little Germany, Chinatown. Those neighborhoods are all gone now.
The first generation spoke almost no English. They were too old to
learn. Their adult children became American citizens, spoke their
native language with their parents and English with their children.
Their children spoke English and rarely learned their parents’
tongue. Then they moved to the suburbs.
If today’s
Hispanics remain clannish, speak their own language and live apart,
it is in large part because they have no assured way to become
Americans. They live with the fear of an unwritten, arbitrarily
enforced immigration policy. They often live among the hostility of
neighbors. Assimilation is a two-way street. Immigrants must want
to be Americans, but Americans must want immigrants here. Only then
can we begin to have some things in common.
These
historic civil rights demonstrations have left their mark. The
House Republican leadership now says it wants to abandon the
deportation provision in their bill when lawmakers return from a
spring “district work period.”
It is worth reminding
politicians that life does not stand still. America is no longer
the America of the 1950s. America’s ethnic future is more likely to
resemble Tiger Woods than Paris Hilton. We really need to get used
to it.
Russell Sadler is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He writes in Eugene,
Oregon.
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