Last week, a majority of Democrats in the U.S. Senate, including New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, joined forces with Republicans to vote 80 to 19 to begin construction of an expensive set of Berlin Wall-like barriers across this nation's southern border. This measure was not attached to any other proposals - such as amnesty for illegal immigrants - so all the Democrats who voted in favor have nothing to show for it to Mexican-Americans and their supporters.
The debate over illegal immigration, like most political debates, is heavy on ideology and scare tactics. Illegal immigrants are America's new bogeyman, joining drug addicts, pot smokers, single welfare mothers and inner-city blacks as our newest internal national security threat.
As is usually the case, people's ignorance feeds their fear. I have worked alongside illegal immigrants, and anyone else with this experience will likely agree they are some of the hardest-working people in this country. These are individuals who are tired of listening to politicians promise them solutions to their problems, people who have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Hard-working, determined, risk-taking, optimistic... these are what the whole world considers to be "American" values. Perhaps mistakenly - the average American embodies Homer Simpson's values. America-the-reality is putting a wall up against America-the-ideal. This is only one of many ironies that are becoming apparent as our nation prepares to erect a wall along its southern border. I wonder if the wall itself will be built by illegal immigrants - after all, they provide cheaper labor.
So much in this debate, in which white Arizonans tote shotguns on behalf of what they call "native" Americans, is counter-intuitive. At first, it might seem that illegal immigrants would be the primary victims of harsher anti-immigration policies. But really, we'd be blowing a smoking hole in our own national foot. Believe me: I've had the experience of being shot in the foot, and it isn't pleasant. At first, you can't even feel the pain, but a generation down the line, our children would still be paying billions of dollars in taxes so that the National Guard could chase after a new generation of Wily Coyotes. By that time, the people they'd be chasing would have bought homes, established families and their kids would have spoken fluent English had they been allowed to stay legally in our country.
However, the opposite approach - a legal amnesty for immigrants - could only be a first step. One of the more justifiable arguments against illegal immigration is the effect it has on the lives of domestic unskilled workers and their families. Immigration from a poorer country should not, and does not have to, translate into undermining labor laws and working standards that brings the third world workplace into the United States.
Mexicans, Latin Americans and people from other impoverished countries are just as capable as every previous wave of immigrants of coming to this nation, competing for fair wages, and raising kids who are more fully assimilated than they are - kids who are then able to compete on an equal footing in the job market and in the market for a good education. If we don't help them along this path, however, we risk creating a new underclass in this country, resulting in problems that no amount of law enforcement could ever solve.
Certainly, some immigrants never learn to speak English, many hold on to their native cultures, and a tiny fraction of them are criminals. However, none of this is any different from any previous wave of immigrants. All these issues reveal is that there is really no such thing as an immigration problem. There are only problems related to a lack of assimilation.
Societies could once close themselves off by building walls. The same instinct in the age of globalization does not prevent outsiders from coming in, it merely prevents them from integrating. Though the barriers we build may be physical, the real barriers we create are self-destructive, internal barriers, barriers of fear and prejudice that prevent integration.
The solution to our immigrant dilemma is to focus our legal sanctions on the employers who would do everything - including breaking the law - to keep illegal immigrants poor, unprotected, unassimilated and easily exploitable. The real reason illegal immigration into this country is so massive is that there are millions of underpaid, exploitative jobs waiting to be filled all along our border. Illegal workers aren't coming to Texas or Arizona because they like our stretch of the desert more. They're doing it to find jobs. If immigrants were given legal status and forced to compete for fair wages, migration across the border would regulate itself - according to supply and demand in the workforce.
We don't need any new laws to tackle the problem of immigrant assimilation. We need to start enforcing existing laws: laws that say you can't hire labor for less than the minimum wage, in unsanitary conditions and without giving your workers recourse to public authorities. As a side effect, this would take immigrants out of isolated workplaces where they meet only other migrants and speak only Spanish and make them mix with the rest of society.
People assume there are two groups in this debate - Americans and illegals - that have colliding interests; that an advance for one means a loss for the other. In reality, we are all already part of the same group, because from the moment an immigrant sets foot in our country, they and their children become Americans. Touching Yankee soil is the only way that anyone has ever become American.
Even slaves who were brought here by force from Africa became Americans when they touched that soil, though tens of thousands of their countrymen had to die in a bloody war and a southern Texan president had to sign a civil rights bill before the rest of us realized this fact.
Civil Rights legislation did not make blacks equal to whites. It merely allowed the rest of us to see what was already the truth - that equality was a fact that had to be acknowledged, and that these were therefore our countrymen.
It would save us all a lot of blood and tears to realize the same thing about this new wave of Americans, without having a civil war over the issue.
Just in case, first-generation immigrant Michal Zapendowski '07 is stashing away rifles in the state of Texas.
