Posting at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at The Atlantic last week, Colorlines' Julianne Hing wrote about how to humanize the immigration debate, illuminating a broken system not with "facts and figures" but by telling stories of immigrants' broken lives. The post is a must-read in its entirety, but in the midst of the stories Hing tells, it's important not to miss her concerns:
The public discourse around immigration has moved so far to the right that there are only really two acceptable public identities for immigrants to have—the good, deserving, law-abiding, and hard-working immigrant or the criminal, suspect immigrant. One deserves our pity, the other ought to be thrown out of the country...
I realize how deeply I too have become trapped by the discourse when I get disappointed in people's stories and how difficult their real life struggles will make my job as a storyteller. Looking for that perfect sympathetic story is a stupid pursuit. We need an immigration system that's equipped to recognize immigrants as people, because that's what immigrants are, complex and messy human beings.
There are actually two interrelated problems with trying to humanize immigrants by telling heartbreaking stories. One, which Hing identifies, is rhetorical: It's incredibly hard to talk about sympathetic immigrants without reinforcing the notion that the ones you're not talking about are unsympathetic. Just think about supporters of the DREAM Act during the debate last fall, who talked about young people "who are here illegally, through no fault of their own." Even though many of these politicians also support comprehensive immigration reform, which would give both DREAMers and many of their parents a path to citizenship, they couldn't avoid the implication that the parents were at "fault."
The other problem is one of policy: It's easier to create an exception for an immigrant with a sympathetic story than it is to change the unjust rule that put him or her in that situation to begin with. In December, for the first time since 2006, Congress passed a pair of private laws -- laws to help a particular individual "when no other remedy is available" -- to give two Japanese citizens legal status in the U.S. Both of their cases were unusual, and Congress could have saved itself some trouble -- and some people some suffering -- by taking the opportunity to make laws for such cases in the future. But "because immigration policy has become such a thorny political issue," the Washington Post reported at the time, "lawmakers couldn't agree on a way to change" even the specific laws in question. In other words, it was easier to save the two people who'd been able to lobby their legislators and avoid the "thorny" issue of large-scale injustice.
These exceptions can get carved out on the eve of deportation as well: Take Eric Balderas, the Harvard student who was detained and almost deported by ICE officials last summer only to have his deportation postponed indefinitely after everyone, from Harvard officials to Sen. Dick Durbin, lobbied on his behalf. Balderas' case helped spark interest in the DREAM Act, but ultimately, stories like his weren't enough to persuade 45 members of the Senate that the bill was worth passing. Without a fix to the system, an honors student with "that perfect sympathetic story" might have the tiniest chance at deferred action -- as long as he has the ear of his member of Congress, both senators, and ideally a newspaper reporter or two. But the overwhelming majority of those detained and deported don't have even that glimmer of a chance.
Ultimately, this is a familiar dilemma for progressives: reminding the public and policy-makers that systemic injustice can't be fixed one individual at a time, while trying to help as many of those individuals as possible. Obviously, some "remedies" are better than none at all. But ideally, the exceptions politicians make to save individuals wouldn't be seen as "remedies" -- each one would increase public pressure to fix a system that breaks more lives in half every day.
-- Dara Lind