Week 9; Jonathan Hilton

Week 9: Rethinking Immigration – Jonathan Hilton

From "Field Day" at AMIS

Looking back over the past eight or nine weeks, it seems strange that we never as a class delved deep into “immigration reform” in its politicized sense. This class was, I think, more about learning about immigrants than about immigration. That is what has set it apart from the other classes relating to immigration I have taken—the strong focus on the immigrant experience rather than immigration itself as a socioeconomic phenomenon. The fact that the course dealt with immigrant children had a lot to do with this: the “immigrant experience” is fascinatingly real to them as youngsters caught up in the middle of something gigantic. The stories in the book by Igoa really brought this point home to me. Issues faced by immigrants that I had studied in previous courses became much more than observable anthropological phenomena—they became “real” in a way that I had never seen them before.

Immigrant children exemplify the idea of the
"immigrant experience" because it is so real to them

How can we “rethink” immigration? Much of the debate that goes on in politics has to do with topics such as “amnesty” for undocumented workers, control of the border with Mexico, halting human smuggling, deciding from which countries we will accept asylum seekers and so forth. But I think that rather than debating these issues endlessly, it would be more useful to try to envision a more humane immigration experience: one in which families didn’t have to live in fear of having mothers and fathers arrested at Wal-Mart and deported the next day; victims of violent crimes weren’t forced to testify in court to avoid deportation; workers weren’t exploited by bosses who confiscate their passports; undocumented workers could pay bail for incarcerated family members without fearing for their own safety; and lawyers didn’t exploit them by telling them that they have to hire a legal expert to go pay a traffic ticket. There are some things that are basic and obvious and have less to do with complex models of immigration flows than with goodwill and common sense. We should cultivate an environment that discourages the exploitation of immigrants. This is a principle that doesn’t have to do so much with “controlling” or regulating immigration as it does with changing something in our own culture: not allowing our culture to be infused with fear. Pluralism (Vaughn, 94) means respecting others. So long as there is rampant exploitation of some groups, we will never, as a society, reap the full benefits of the multiculturalism we enjoy here in the United States.