Immigration

I linked here the other day, and today in my email I had a link from Media Matters to read their report on the portrayal of immigrants in the media. So check it out.

Most (white) Americans need a reminder that we're all immigrants. I saw a fabulous bumper sticker a couple of weeks ago that said "Welcome to America, now speak Cherokee." How many people see that and don't even get the joke?

I know plenty of “illegal” immigrants. I know college students who’ve overstayed their visas. I know people who’ve snuck across the border in the middle of the night. I know people who work whatever job they can get, and I know people who are the highest paid employees at their workplace.

They are not all or even most of them from Mexico. They are from Argentina, Lithuania, Germany, Venezuela, Peru. They speak English.

(And how, anyway has "Mexican" somehow become the dominant picture of "illegal" immigration and a dirty word instead of a neighboring country and a beautiful culture? How many people at the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum also ate cheesesteaks at Geno's under the "Speak English" sign?)

I know schoolteachers busing tables in restaurants because it pays them better than teaching did back at home—but I know American schoolteachers who wait tables to make ends meet.

Immigrants didn’t come here to do the jobs “no Americans wanted.” They don’t deserve to be treated as though they’re some untouchable caste here for the work no one wants, cleaning toilets and looking after children and cooking fast food.

And they certainly don’t deserve what happens so often, that they get screwed out of money they have worked for because they have no recourse, no one to go to to ensure they are fairly treated.

My family is French by way of Canada and Jewish by way of Russia and Poland. We certainly aren't native. My French Canadian family grew up bilingual in their community in New Hampshire. My Jewish family had their own community in Boston where they spent time mostly with other Jewish families. Did their lack of "assimilation" hurt America? Did any of the waves of immigration destroy "American" culture--whatever the hell that is, anyway?

No human being is illegal. And no one deserves being dehumanized the way they are night after night on the network news, let alone in their homes, at their jobs, on the streets.

"By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed." -Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Monster Theory"

After all, when we create monsters out of immigrants, we may have to face the fact that they show us how arbitrary our borders really are, how not-different we are from them, after all.

(cross-posted)