WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT

IMMIGRATION

by Sara Mayeux
PART I
Often in the national conversation on immigration--which has lately devolved into more a of
a fist-fight--you hear some version of an argument that today's "illegal aliens" should all be
deported, because "my great-grandparents" came here "legally," assimilated into the
"melting pot," learned English, and "built this country," while Mexicans are sneaking over
the border, retreating into ethnic enclaves, imposing Spanish on the rest of us, and,
apparently, not "building this country." Vernacular pundits make such pronouncements
every day on Internet comment threads throughout the land--often invoking Ellis Island,
although for almost half of that facility's history, the government used it not to welcome but
to detain and deport Europeans, but nevermind. Pat Buchanan thinks the Mexicans are
literally invading.

My goal for today is not to poke holes in these accounts; the holes are already there (see,
e.g., this podcast). Rather, I want to borrow a tack from cultural historians, who are less
interested in whether popular narratives are "accurate" and more interested in why they
feel "true" to so many--that is, in why the particular narratives take hold that do. What work
do those mythical Legal Aliens Who Built Our Country do for those who believe in them so
fervently?
But I do want to begin by summarizing some points of departure between popular beliefs
and the scholarly consensus, just so we are all on the same page (sorry if this is old
news). First, many European-Americans continued to speak only their native language for
two or three generations. I find odd the notion that there's some value to having
subsequent waves of immigrants from different continents all follow the same pattern--that
this is possible, plausible, or desirable. But even if you accept the premise, Mexican
immigrants have not been so radically different from their predecessors as some pundits
(and while we're at it, more scholarly folks like Samuel Huntington) have claimed. The
"invasion" thesis is also hard to swallow in light of social science findings that "the rate of
undocumented migration has not increased in over two decades" and that "rates of
migration between Mexico and the United States are entirely normal for two countries so
closely integrated economically."

Second, and the nub of our collective amnesia about the history of immigration policy, is
the supposition that until Mexicans started jumping over the Rio Grande, everyone came
into this country "legally," and if they didn't, they were dealt with. First, of course,
immigration was hardly regulated at all until the 1870s and '80s (and even then, mostly just
if you were Chinese). Second, as the immigration historian Mae Ngai explains, for as long
as the U.S. has been restricting immigration, "we have had provisions for both deportation
and legalization." Soon after the U.S. imposed the 1920s quotas on European immigration
(Western Hemisphere immigration was not subject to quotas until the Hart-Celler Act of
1965), it also introduced procedures for helping the undocumented avoid deportation and
regularize their status. Moreover, as Ngai found when she combed through INS archives,
Europeans (as long as they were not political "radicals") historically benefited most from
after-the-fact legalization mechanisms. It's only since 1996 and the passage of IIRIRA that
the U.S. has elevated deportation into its go-to policy response to undocumented
migration, while also making it harder for many to enter the country legally.
In other words, while your great-grandparents may well have arrived through Ellis Island,
it's also quite possible that they snuck in without papers, continued to speak their native
language, yet also got a job and built strong community and family ties in this country, and
later sought discretionary relief from deportation so they could continue to live here, their
new home. Sound familiar?

Some will wonder why I'd bother engaging with arguments made by people they see as
fringe xenophobes, but it's essential to do so because they have successfully framed a lot
of mainstream discussion. Even commentators sympathetic to the plight of illegal
immigrants tiptoe around this history; perhaps out of reluctance to provoke the vocal
defenders of those mythical Legal Builders, they often concede that today's illegal
immigration is unprecedented or that Arizona had to act when the feds wouldn't. William
Finnegan recently wrote an effective piece in the New Yorker critiquing the fact-free quality
of this debate, and noting that illegal immigration has actually declined in recent years. But
Finnegan nonetheless allows that "the problem of illegal immigration has been left to fester
for decades."

I'm not sure that's right. To me, it seems that if we now have 11 million undocumented
men, women, and children within our borders, it's not because the federal government
hasn't acted. To the contrary, it's the fairly predictable result of relatively recent actions the
federal government has taken, (1) to make it more difficult than it has ever been in our
history for undocumented immigrants, even those with longstanding family and community
ties in the U.S., to regularize their status, (2) to push them further underground by
heightening the risk of deportation, and (3) to militarize the border, which keeps the
undocumented in the U.S. just as effectively, maybe more so, as it keeps them out. In
Douglas Massey's summary from the podcast linked above:

If we had done nothing at the border since 1986, spent no additional money, just kept the
border patrol's budget and activities pretty much on the same growth path that they had
experienced before, we would have had at least half the undocumented population we
observe now and it would have been much more confined to California, Texas, and Illinois
rather than being a fifty-state phenomenon.

So it's worth interrogating what cultural and political work the myth of the Legal Builders
might be doing. One answer might be that lazy history serves as a veil for bigotry--that, as
Ngai suggests, "anxiety over migrant illegality" is "a proxy for racism against
Latinos." Finnegan summarizes what might be called the economic hypothesis: that "anti-
immigrant backlashes" coincide "with unemployment, popular anxiety, and a fear of
displacement by strangers."

Another possibility, and a more intriguing one, I think, is that obsessing over transnational
migration serves as a convenient way to deflect any reflection about the burdens that all of
us impose upon the land. In that vein, maybe it's no accident that the anti-immigration
backlash has become especially ugly in Arizona and Nevada, which both experienced
spiraling population growth in recent decades on top of a desert landscape that requires
heavy-duty irrigation, among other interventions, to support modern American life. In 2007
alone, Arizona experienced net migration from other states of 287,000 people, most of
them white.

So, ever-insightful commentariat: What do you think we're really talking about when we
talk about immigration? All of the above, none of the above, some combination? I'd be
especially curious to hear from readers in Arizona, since admittedly, I'm just speculating
here.

A CAVEAT: I anticipate that some commenters will point out that some of the articles I've
cited above date from before the most recent wave of drug-related violence and organized
crime in Mexico. But since these broader narratives about immigration are not new, I don't
think that undermines my general points. To the contrary I think the even more hysterical
punditry we've seen most recently is building off of an assumed platform that even in
"normal" times, the situation was already out of control.

PART II:
I've been puzzled, recently, by the reification and
demonization of the "Illegal Alien" as Public
Enemy No. 1. (The image at left is by Chris
Granillo and comes from the Alto Arizona Art
Campaign).

First there's the bare irony of the nomenclature.

Here's the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, in
one of my favorite books about the West, The
Legacy of Conquest:

"In the mestizo, Indian and Hispanic

backgrounds met. Accordingly, as the historian
George Sanchez has put it, the Mexican
'presence in the Southwest is a product of both
sides of the conquest--conquistador and victim.'
It is surely one of the greater paradoxes of our
time that a large group of these people, so
intimately tied to the history of North America,
should be known to us under the label 'aliens.'"

Second and relatedly, there's the selective nature with which the epithet is applied. Funny
how Canadian housewives without proper papers, Irish bartenders who overstayed their
tourist visas, Australians who remained abroad when their study abroad was through all
seem to escape the opprobrium.

Third, there's the curious fact that an inelegant piece of legalese would be lifted from the
stacks of bureaucratic paperwork and transformed into a workaday phrase of American
English. We don't generally go around calling people "legal permanent residents" or
"priority workers" in everyday conversation, even though the government might call them
that.

So why has the phrase "illegal alien" taken hold and how did Mexican immigrants get
defined as the quintessential "illegal aliens"? In my earlier post I cited the immigration
historian Mae Ngai, and her book Impossible Subjects provides the full answer to this
question. But the nutshell answer is that U.S. policy bears much of the blame.
Until 1965, Mexican immigration had never been numerically restricted, although it was
certainly regulated in other ways, and although Mexicans were not exactly welcomed with
open arms. (Witness the forced "repatriation" of Mexicans--including American citizens!--
during the Depression, and "Operation Wetback" in the 1950s.) The Hart-Cellar Act of
1965 is remembered for abolishing quotas, but in fact, it placed a numerical ceiling on
Western Hemisphere immigration to the U.S. for the first time. Compared to historic
migration patterns, and particularly in light of American agricultural industry's dependence
upon Mexican laborers, the ceilings established were, arguably, unrealistically low.

So, U.S. immigration policy can be blamed for creating a system in which Mexican
immigrants became the largest and most identifiable class of "illegal aliens." Why, though,
have the chattering classes picked up this phrase and run with it? Perhaps the answer lies
in that seductive adjective "illegal," which offers a government-sanctioned way of
portraying these people as lawbreakers. After all, you can't accurately label them all
"criminals" (not that many don't do it anyway), since simply being in the U.S.
undocumented is not, without more, a crime (except, maybe, in Arizona); deportation
proceedings are civil. (Moreover, while there certainly exist undocumented immigrants who
have committed crimes, immigration-related, violent, and otherwise, sociologists suggest
that immigrants are on average more law-abiding than the native-born population.)

Perhaps the noun "alien" is appealing, too, to those would taxonomize the Mexican as "the
other." It's somewhat of a stretch to call Mexicans "foreign" considering that the blend of
Spanish and Native influences that formed their culture is the very same that formed much
of the American West, and considering how intertwined Mexican and American lives have
been for both of our countries' history. But if even the government calls them "aliens"...

Most nefarious to me, though, is when the "alien" drops off altogether and the adjective
"illegal" is transmuted into noun, as when politicos rail against the masses of "illegals"
running rampant through the land. It's not as though undocumented immigrants have
some special claim to disregard for federal regulations. At any given moment someone not
far from you is probably doing one or more of the following: smoking marijuana, selling
cocaine, exceeding the speed limit in a national park, downloading pirated videos,
possessing an unregistered firearm, or committing any number of the vaguely defined
federal crimes that populate the U.S. Code. This week law students throughout the land
are taking the bar exam and I don't doubt for a minute that some of these presumably law-
respecting folk studied for it under the influence of Adderall that they didn't get from a
prescription bottle with their name on it. Don't take it from me; take it from Ninth Circuit
chief judge Alex Kozinski (no liberal, he): "You're (probably) a federal criminal."

Now obviously, there are degrees of lawbreaking and lots of people believe that laws
involving lines on the map matter more than any other (I seem to lack that chip), but I've
never understood the assumption you sometimes hear from vernacular pundits that once
you disregard one legal provision it's all just a slippery slope to rape and murder.