Immigration Reform and the Presidential Race

There has been much ado about President Obama's announcement last week that he would use his executive privilege to use discretion regarding dealings with unauthorized immigrants who meet certain criteria. This discretion is focused on Dreamers, the self-named group of young people whose parents brought them to the United States illegally when they were very young, who attended and completed their schooling in the U.S., have no criminal background, and/or have served in the military. Obama has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will now use discretion with regards to this group, halting their deportation if they meet certain criteria, and even granting them temporary 2-year work permits. 

Initially, there was elation from immigration reform advocates, especially the Dreamers, but upon further examination that excitement was tempered. 

First, they had to respond to critics that this executive order was unconstitutional and sidestepped the legislative process and Congress. This was despite an open letter to Obama sent by a large group of legal scholars and lawyers  two weeks prior to the President's announcement, criticizing the President for not using executive powers around immigration. They argued that historical actions by other presidents and legal precedent would allow Obama to exercise his authority to halt deportations and grant temporary legal status to some immigrants. 

A second point, was the issue of political pandering by Obama. Some argued that Obama's decision to defer action on the deportation of some unauthorized immigrants was reacting to this pressure and the pressure from Dreamers who were occupying some of his campaign offices. They suggested that Obama's act was purely political, but pragmatically for them it was a step in the right direction. 

This raised a third area of doubt, because the order did not represent any sort of permanent change. Obama had a longstanding position that discretion should be used with regards to unauthorized immigrants who had no criminal records. Despite that he still holds the dubious distinction of deporting record numbers of unauthorized immigrants compared to other administrations. Actually, some wondered if anything changed at all because his current announcement is really just "old wine in a new wineskin." 

These previous points relate to the issue of the President's commitment to immigration reform and  Latinos more generally. Despite promises of comprehensive immigration reform that would occur in his first year in office, he did nothing to move the issue forward. When the less comprehensive DREAM Act reached Congress for a vote, he expended very little, if any political capital to get it passed. When called out by immigration reform advocates regarding his lack of support, Obama has proven "testy" and even "hostile." An extended Washington Post piece cites numerous examples of Obama's defensiveness around immigration issues, and a seeming overall unwillingness to change his actions, leading some to question where he really stands on the issue.

Romeny's political reaction was muted at first, but he finally proposed some potential reforms to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) yesterday. Ironically, despite calling the president's immigration policy unconstitutional, he proposed very similar unilateral executive policies as part of his immigration stance. Overall, though, he presented little of substance in the way of immigration reform, perhaps showing that he still stands on his simplistic "self-deport" platform.

Perhaps Romney believes that his immigration and Latino trump card is Marco Rubio. An article by African American writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson seems to suggest this might be true. In this article I think that Mr. Hutchinson's lens is clouded by the Black-White binary paradigm that pervades American thinking. Latinos are really diverse and complex. While there are some trends such as being opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage, IN GENERAL, when you look at Latino sub-groups, such as generational status, age, specific country of origin, these overall trends disappear; One trend that does seem to trump that complexity and gives Latinos something to stand together on is immigration; we are all still pretty closely tied to our immigrant roots AND many people (using the Black-White paradigm) assume that Latino is synonymous with immigrant. Because we realize that having our nativity questioned is a big source of bias, we tend toward favoring immigration reform that might remove that stigma. We would probably be much more likely to vote on that issue alone, as the Obama bump in the last week shows. That is much more a reason for us to vote as a bloc than whether someone with a Spanish surname was on the ticket of either party. While Rubio may offer some moderate views that are agreeable to Latinos, especially given his Democratic past and love of hip-hop (sarcasm), he too has been pretty much in the background in terms of his immigration stance, with the public still awaiting the immigration reform legislation that he said he would be putting forward a while ago. 

All of this is to say that immigration will certainly be a big deal this election. And, with the Census releasing more evidence of the ever-growing Latino population, it really is time that politicians of both parties stop talking and start acting. 

Whose America?

For those Latinos who live in the United States and have visited their ancestral homelands, they may have encountered friends or relatives as I have who enjoy utilizing the following gambit: “So, what nationality are you?” Naively, a Latino might say that he or she identifies with the country they are visiting. So, twelve-year old me telling my cousins in Mexico City that I am “Mexican” is met with uproarious laughter. “How cute, he thinks he is Mexican.” They may follow up with questions like, “Really, you’re Mexican, so what do you eat?” “Tacos,” I might say, “chorizo con huevos, enchiladas, tortas, frijoles, mole.” Again, laughter that is enough to make even the most radical Chicano separatist exclaim, “Well, then I’m American!” In spite of every playground argument I’ve had, every ignorant teacher who asks where I am from, all which tell me that I am not of this country, only in it, to paraphrase a repeated saying by African American leaders, in that moment I conclude that I am not Mexican either; so, I say I am American. But that is the trap. The argument up to this point was only a prelude to the main event.

“So, you are American?” “What country is that?” “There is no country America.” “Your country does not have a name, so you take a name that belongs to all of us.” “No,” I argue, “Our name is the United States of America.” “But that is not a name,” they say. “That only describes your location and government. We are the United States of Mexico. Mexico is the name. The United States part only describes how our government runs and the same is for you.” “OK then,” I say, “I am American, you’re right about the United States part, but that doesn’t change that I am American just like you are Mexican.” Now the fireworks fly, because this was the trap all along. “No, we are both American.” “No you are not, you’re Mexican.” “No,” my cousin says, “I am American, just like you.” We both live in North America, so I am American too.” “And Brazilians are American and Ecuadorians and Argentines, and so on…” And because I am only twelve and don’t really speak Spanish well enough to continue the conversation, and because it seems that I was destined to lose, and honestly it does seem that my cousin has a point, the conversation ends.  

I have heard this line of reasoning many times and it is at this point a bit tired and cliché, but I have taken it for granted that it is not really a conversation worth having. I imagined that the argument was also a bit disingenuous, an attack meant to put down Americans in at least one way, when materially and in terms of power they have so much. Much to my chagrin, I saw the seeds of the same recently on a Facebook status update of a graduate student I know, “I learned today that America does not have a real name, but nobody questions that. Think about it.” I believe it was the “think about it” part that actually got me thinking. Could it be true that the U.S. of A. does not have an official name and if not, so what?

Upon a quick Google search I learned that our country’s official name is outlined in the Articles of Confederation, section I, ratified in 1777, where it states: “The Stile of this Confederacy shall be ‘The United States of America’". I posted this as a response to the initial FB post, to which I got a response that followed the “who is American” line of argument I described above. To paraphrase how the student elaborated, American hegemony leads it to believe that it has power and dominion over the Americas. That belief manifests itself in the way that “Americans” believe that they have exclusive right to the demonym, when it can apply to people of all of the Americas, North, South and Central.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that it just doesn’t work out chronologically. The signatories of the Articles of Confederation were members of a colony themselves. They were the subjects of British hegemony at that time. They decided to create an independent federation of states to be free of British rule and taxation. There is no way they could have had the foresight to know that they would be an imperial power even greater and at times more oppressive than the monarchy they lived under.

As was noted in a previous post, the U.S. has been screwing Latin America for a while, despite public relations efforts that try and support the contrary. The most recent time happening in both literal and figurative terms. So, trying to return the favor and sticking it to the U.S. can be fun for our friends south of the border; but if they loathe us so much why would they want to share a moniker with us, and if we actually decided to call them Americans, would they even respond? I think energy would be better used to show the innumerable other ways that the U.S. has intervened in Latin America to its own advantage rather than focusing on such a trivial issue as I just have.