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A day without an immigrant

Dear America, #adaywithoutanimmigrant. I am an immigrant. I was born in another country, a beautiful place of deep blue skies, deserts, and mountains that dwarf the Rockies. And garrulous, generous people. I have come to love, however, the idea of a country where rules protect everyone irrespective of color, culture, wealth, gender, sexuality, or religion. I love people in this country. My children were born here.

I chose a profession that would allow me to pay forward to other generations by teaching them how to think and value life, liberty, and equality. I love what I do and have wealth beyond the ledger, in the currency of my colleagues' and students' esteem. I wake up every day and know I am privileged to have the life I have and to be able to invest in the future of our young people.

When I hear the hate and vitriol against immigrants, the insistence on being "a country of rules" that don't apply to the rich, famous, armed, and racially privileged, I take it personally. When I see white supremacists take a seat in the White House and grab the open mike on mainstream media, I take it personally. When I hear immigrants described as criminals of the worst kind, I take it personally. When people are banned from coming to our country because of their religion and despite having suffered terribly, I take it personally. When you give my wife a hard time because of her adorable accent, you KNOW I take it personally.

So I think America needs a time out. Today think about the who educate your kids, discover things that make your life better and healthier, and make us the most innovate places on earth. Think about the people around you who grew, picked, and packed your food. Think about who takes care of your kids and cleans your home. And those who will care for you and wipe your butt when you move into the last chapters of your life. Think about who fills your dying churches. Think about how we are connected to the rest of the world, and how other countries might feel about constant humiliations at the hands of brash American leaders.

I am an immigrant. I am an American. I do something for this country EVERY day. What about you? #adaywithoutanimmigrant

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The refugee crisis

Here are 5 sources to consider in thinking about the refugee crisis of 2015:

* Where do refugees come from? See this chart. 

* UNHCR map of populations of concern

* 5 things you need to know about the european migrant crisis

* Why it matters if we speak of “migrants” or “refugees”

* How to really help the world’s refugees (and other important stuff)

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Some categories last a long, long time....

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Use mindful skepticism to make sense of the claims on this website. 

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This is why social analysts become nervous when they see human population mappings that use chimps as a reference point and in close proximity to the African branch of the human family. Sorry, KGM, I did find the image on wikipedia :-), which incidentally has a very interesting entry on scientific racism. 

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Check out the underlying documents and policies that make these practices possible

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I guess sociologists can get a rise out of people even if it takes a half century.

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A DREAM ACT TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC TRUST (unpublished op-ed)

Senators who voted against the Dream Act (HR 5281) missed an historic opportunity to show they can put American interests ahead of narrow partisan politics. By not passing HR 5281, Senators like Charles Grassley from my home state of Iowa risk squandering a generation of American raised and trained students who have demonstrated the immigrant resolve and determination that has made this country great. If these students are left in limbo we will have invested public resources in an opportunity on which we will see no return. The Dream Act would have granted “conditional nonimmigrant status” to a select group of unauthorized young immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service, and met a series of stringent requirements including a criminal background check. Immigrant youth who failed to meet legal requirements during a five year conditional period would have become subject to deportation.  HR 5281 would have been a less than generous path to legal status but a path nonetheless. Its final draft was written largely in response to objections raised by Senator Grassley and other anti-immigrationists. It had the support of groups as different as the College Board, conservative evangelicals, and the Armed Forces. 

As an educator, I can attest that some of the brightest students I know came to the U.S. when they could not distinguish an international border from the fence around their favorite playground. As a scholar of international migration law, I find it perplexing that we hold people responsible for decisions they were legally incapable of making, especially when many of our legally capable ancestors came to the United States in violation of existing laws albeit at a time when the government did not have today’s power to control entry. And, yes, we have more control over our borders today than at any time in the country’s history whatever the claims of anti-immigration ideologues. 

I am also confused by the way we talk about immigration laws as if they’d been handed to Moses on a tablet. In the West, people since the 16th Century decided to organize political communities as nation-states. Governments made laws and bureaucracies to choose who could enter their territories and who could become a national. At times our forebears made shameful decisions to exclude people from Asia, among others, as well as to usurp the land which Native Americans had freely roamed for millennia. A case in point is the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) for which Francis Pixley spoke before the Congressional Committee of 1876 in representation of San Francisco: “it is now settled that the …White Race, is to have the inheritance of Europe and America and that the Yellow races are to be confined to what the Almighty originally gave them; and as they are not a favored people, they are not to be permitted to steal from us what we have robbed the American savage of…” The statement is striking not only as a demonstration of how racism sustained nation-state formation but for its acknowledgement that building a country is an activity done by mere mortals even when they adduce divine sanction. WE have made borders, WE have made laws to regulate those borders - for a good part of our history using racist and xenophobic reasons - and WE can make smarter and more just laws to take advantage of a motivated, well-trained and much needed population of young people. 

The mantra that “we are a country of laws” ignores that these can be fashioned to fit the common interest. At a time when states like Iowa suffer the effects of an aging and slow growing population - we are about to lose a congressional seat because of this - it strains credulity that the 41 Senators who voted against the Dream Act are willing to squander public investment in a generation of highly trained and gifted young people who could make us more competitive in the sciences, meet demand for skilled workers, buy homes of retiring baby-boomers, heal their bodies, and contribute to coffers that will sustain a growing number of retirees. Iowa, incidentally, is a preview of demographic trends to come soon to a state near you.  

The Senators who voted to sacrifice precious human capital on the altar of partisan politics have put the yield on our investment at risk. In the next legislative session, they have the option to continue with politics driven by a two-year election cycle or to recover the public trust by supporting future versions of the Dream Act. It is a no-brainer as a first step to much needed immigration reform. 

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Tea partier Phillips is worried that the left will take advantage of this shooting to blame the right just like they did after the Oklahoma bombing. Boohoo.

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Arizona's ethnic ban

I wrote this op-ed in August 2010 and in it linked Arizona's educational ethnic ban and immigration measures (since called into question in the courts). An abridged version of this piece appeared in The Gazette.

Alicia in Arizona

Recently, Arizona approved laws enforcing tough new immigration measures and opposing ethnic studies education programs. Passage of these laws has left me feeling like a bewildered Alice arriving in Wonderland. I am confused by the gap between the serious consequences of these laws and the rhetoric of supporters who make it sound as if these laws conform to American values of universal equality. They do not. 

The severe effects on people are easy to predict. Arizona’s laws encourage racial profiling and silence the histories of the underprivileged. The immigration law (SB 1070 as revised by HB 2162) requires that law enforcement make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of any person suspected of being unlawfully present in the US during any stop, detention or arrest. Tucson police officer Martin Escobar has filed suit against the federal government to challenge the law partly because it would force police to apply the law "based on how a person talks or what they look like." Other jurisdictions with similar programs have found it difficult to avoid profiling. Proposed solutions to this problem – such as deciding to “card” someone based on their footwear and attire – confirm that even supporters of the law recognize that it makes profiling inevitable.

The ethnic studies law (HB 2281) bars Arizona public schools from offering courses or classes that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group”, or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” I have two grounds for questioning this constraint on curricular freedom. First, “U.S. History” cannot be told other than from an ethnic or racial perspective. A “color-blind” history simply records a white, privileged account which is not only a dishonest silencing of other people’s histories, but just bad pedagogy because it discourages critical interpretations of how we narrate our history. Second, by the logic of HB 2281 African American or Asian American history should be banned because they foster particularistic group solidarities and are often aimed at kids from specific racial backgrounds. This logic would ban from schools subjects such as slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act in effect until 1943, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; studying these events could, after all, divide rather than unite.

Students of American history may be tempted to interpret these laws and their nefarious consequences as a return to 1920s style nativist fervor. In those days, the Saturday Evening Post channeled Madison Grant’s racist lament that hordes of inferior immigrants had led to the “passing of the great [Nordic] race” and legislators passed the Nationality Origins Act (1924) to stem the tide of undesired Polish Jews and Italians among others.

However, while the Arizona laws bear a family resemblance to old school nativism, they are dressed up in the universally accepted language of civil rights. They decry racial profiling and restrictions on teaching about the “historical oppression of a particular group or people based on ethnicity” (text of HB 2281) even as they set the stage for these bad practices. Tom Horne, proponent of the ethnic studies ban, cites in its defense Martin Luther King’s dictum that people are to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. And yet his law targets a particular group of color. Governor Brewer maintains that she will “NOT tolerate racial discrimination or racial profiling in Arizona”; but the new immigration law will result in discrimination against Latino citizens and their unauthorized families and friends.

As a scholar of immigration and nationality law, however, I find that history offers a revealing perspective on the contradictions of Arizona’s laws. When World War II drew to a close, countries in the Western Hemisphere decided that they would no longer exclude immigrants by race or ethnicity; instead, they would choose would-be newcomers based on the perceived likelihood of assimilation. In view of how the outright ban on Jewish refugees in the 1930s had contributed to the Nazi perpetuated genocide, policymakers opted for a more politically palatable way of controlling who entered their countries. To justify this move, they used a rhetorical trick: they weren’t discriminating against someone (as they had with the “No Chinese Allowed” rules earlier); instead, they were expressing a positive preference (we want people who will integrate quickly). Supporters of Arizona’s laws are using a similarly cynical sleight of hand; they co-opt the language of civil rights and equality to defend racial profiling and ethnic bigotry. Like Alice in Wonderland, we would do well to expose the bizarre logic of Arizona’s new nativists.

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Tom Horne's patently xenophobic if not racist ban on ethnic studies programs goes into effect. He wrote the law as Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction and now enforces it as the newly elected Attorney General of Arizona.