Dissecting Rhetoric on Immigration

Perhaps a piece of good news in this hellscape is that my city just passed an ordinance to become a sanctuary city and refuse to cooperate with immigration officials hunting undocumented people. I’m pleased with my city for rallying to do anything at all, and I have been heartened by the turnout of people and groups who came together to rally, testify, and pack city council meetings.

However, I am also disappointed, or concerned, with the frames and messaging and rhetoric that they’ve been using in this campaign, which finds a wider parallel, to some extent, in the immigrant-ally demonstrations in general.

Instead of genuinely centering on the issue of undocumented people who are in a state of heightening danger, my city has chosen to center the police forces: I attended a meeting in which the top priorities in nearly every speech made, either for or against the sanctuary city ordinance, was concern for the safety of the police and assurance that their ability to do their jobs would never be constrained; the second priority seemed to be concern over violating federal law.

It is, of course, important to tailor a frame to an audience, but that can be done without fully misplacing our concern and priorities. Neither is it just the city council, from whom perhaps this diluted, cautious concern and hailing of our law enforcement officers is all we could expect. It's also the community as a whole, illustrated unnervingly by kids at rallies with Thank You, Police! signs. There is a curious total amnesia and disconnect between the perception and reality of the the police. People ardently defend the police and credit them (rather than our overwhelming whiteness and richness) for our “safety.” US society in general has long refused to reckon with the core function of cops, which is to uphold and protect the interests of the state and ruling powers. The police are a militarized apparatus of enforcement of the status quo, resulting in massive, systematic harm to people of color, disabled people, queer people, poor people, and other marginalized groups. Yet in our meetings about making our city safer and more welcoming, in theory, it is the agents of a deadly system whose sanctity, humanity and freedom is of chief concern.

Justice should not be tailored to or contingent on approval from the forces that routinely obstruct it.

In my observation, there is a quiet, ironic process of dehumanization occurring here, dehumanizing the people we claim to aim to protect, for purposes of Cover Your Ass and self-righteousness. Besides the police, the other central actors in this debate were the privileged people of my town, who were repeatedly assured that above all “we won't put ourselves in harm’s way” by keeping the police from cracking down on crimes committed by undocumented people. Invoking the specter of immigrants bringing harm to this community relegates and dehumanizes undocumented immigrants to the role of purveyors of harm, and establishes a dichotomy wherein the “us” is protected against the “them” by the police.

The issue of hunting and deporting undocumented immigrants is further removed from its human dimension when classic white-moderate delay tactics are invoked, cautioning that we shouldn't move too quickly on this, that it might lose us money, that we need more time and more facts. And then the idea that we “don't even have this problem” or that “this isn't a local issue” just confirms that some people here do not want to see immigrants as part of their community, or consider that that community might be at all at risk from national trickle-down danger.

These unpleasant undertones to a well-meaning campaign are reflected more generally in the immigrant support rhetoric at protests and demonstrations. Much of it tries to spin Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, by talking about how “immigrants make America great” and “we are all immigrants.” Before we jump on board with these slogans, here are a few thoughts about their deeper import:

• Who are we talking about when we say “all”?
• Before we were a “country,” the land that is now called the US was (and is) inhabited by many Indigenous nations, who are not immigrants.
• Were the first European “immigrants,” who established this settler-colonial state, more rightly called immigrants or invaders? Which so-called immigrants are we talking about when we say they make this country great?
• Under what conditions did people arrive to the US? Were they immigrants or forced migrants, slave labor?
• How many were actually welcomed? Who was excluded? Who did not apparently make us great? Think Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration quotas, Bracero Program, Operation Wetback.
• Lives have value beyond patriotic contributions. We should protect undocumented people as part of a wider struggle against dehumanization, not because some of them might have useful exploitable skills.
• On that thought, do immigrants make us great because of their human contributions to our general society, or because of token diversity and/or the fruits of exploited immigrant labor?
• How well does support for immigrants transfer to support for refugees, who may lack the comforting economically exploitable skills and who frequently reflect direct human casualties of US war and imperialism? Do they make the US great, too? By what criteria is their value decided?

Also, immigrants certainly play a massive role in the advances, sustenance, economy, and social fabric of the US, but what is implicit in the claim that the US is in fact great? MAGA is a thin veneer for white supremacy, but that does not obligate us to espouse the opposite sentiment, that the US is already great and doesn't need to be made anything different. Believing that the US needs to change is not the problem. Envisioning that change as a reconquest by a nostalgized past of white supremacy, social oppressions, free markets, and national glory is the flesh that can make the skeleton of “change” a program of systematic dehumanization. The US is not great, and we do need change, but we need it through humanization, justice, and liberation.