At the dawn of the 21st century, Americans are engaged in a national conversation about immigration–in particular undocumented immigration. The debate is fueled by ignorance: political leaders, pundits and the media make inaccurate claims about immigrants and American immigration law.
To some extent influenced by the debate, state legislatures, generally presumed to have little power under the Constitution over foreign affairs (and, thus, over immigration), have unleashed a wave of legislative schemes targeting unauthorized or undocumented immigrants, inevitably bringing within their ambit both documented immigrants and U.S. citizens.
The conversation would benefit from a better societal understanding of our immigration laws and policies. To that end, I offer the following:
American immigration law is complicated. It is hard to reduce to sound bites and simple rules. Persons can migrate to the U.S. in a variety of ways and also enter the U.S. as nonimmigrants for temporary but relatively long periods of time. Notwithstanding their documented entry, a variety of activities may render them “out of status.”
Whether a person who is “out of status” is actually deportable is determined again by reference to other rules and regulations that are in themselves complicated and sometimes, reflect international concerns like a sudden natural disaster; for example, the earthquake in Haiti or floods in Pakistan, or the outbreak of war in some part of the world, like the Serbia-Croatian conflict or the Iraq war. Thus, determining at any one point whether a particular individual is here with authorization is not always an easy matter.
That we are a “nation of immigrants” has never prevented waves of anti-immigrant hysteria, such as during the Chinese Exclusion years, in the late 19th century, when we stripped from Chinese immigrants the right to stay in the U.S., and prevented them from naturalizing or from owning property, despite the fact that we had invited them to come; or during World War I which witnessed a wave of hostility against German immigrants (one of the largest immigrant groups in the U.S. in the 19th century) and an “English only” movement in schools; or during World War II when we excluded U.S. citizens of Japanese origin from the West Coast and detained them in concentration camps.
For much of the 20th century our immigration laws were racially restrictive. But perhaps it is because we are a nation of immigrants, whose earliest inhabitants themselves were migrants, that we have successfully weathered past anti-immigrant hysteria, and thrived as a country from the influx and mix of travelers, movers and doers.
Because many citizens and lawfully admitted immigrants are physically indistinguishable from undocumented immigrants, they bear the brunt of discrimination. Because the face of undocumented immigration is that of persons of color, and in particular, Hispanic or Mexican American faces, when we target the undocumented, Mexican-American and/or Hispanic U.S. citizens suffer from racial profiling and discriminatory treatment in a variety of contexts from employment to encounters with law enforcement officers.
Last, our current debate ignores the fact that globally, most people don’t migrate – they stay put. The ones that migrate show incentive, strength, will and the persistence to face adversity and an endless stream of challenges in the spirit that we are accustomed to celebrating when we reflect on the immigrants who arrived on the Mayflower and all the other vessels that made their way in the 17th and 18th centuries.
I’m not referring to those who smuggle or traffic sex workers, drugs or low-skilled workers, but the vast majority of persons who enter our country without inspection or who overstay their visas are basically good people in search of the same thing as the European settlers of the 1600 and 1700’s–a better life. We all share that goal; it deserves respect and those who seek it are entitled to dignity.
Maria Medina is a professor in the College of Law. She can be reached at
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