Recognizing A Stranger in Ourselves

One of the biggest and painful themes throughout César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández’s book Migrating to Prison is the use of migrants by the U.S. for cheap labor. He writes, “With migration comes the possibility of exploitation. Poor people of color are dispossessed of wealth and pushed to the margins of society. Once marginalized, they can be exploited more easily” (39, 40).

This is true for military labor. Of Jerry, a green-card holder and veteran of the U.S. military, García Hernández writes, “He has the right to live and work in the United States indefinitely — even to drive U.S. tanks in U.S. wars — until he crosses paths with the criminal justice system” (6).

This is true for agricultural labor. García Hernández writes about how immigration prisons are costly to the agricultural businesses who would otherwise be using migrants as cheap labor. Prior to 1965, border policing was sparse because the agriculture business needed migrants to work in the fields. “A migrant who was locked up was a migrant who could not work” (49).

And yet, especially today, it is also true for prison labor. “Every year, private prison corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars off immigration imprisonment… inside some prisons migrants are put to work for $1 per day” (15).

These quotes, together, conjure up a terrible image of these three major industries fighting over who gets to utilize immigrant bodies for cheap labor. It seems to me like they simply trade off who gets the most people based on how laws change and shift. It’s truly horrifying to think of in that way.

On page 46, García Hernández writes, “When immigration law changed in 1965 due to the Hart-Celler Act, migration limits were set that radically changed how many Central American and Mexican migrants were allowed to legally come into the United States. And yet nothing really changed, structurally. The patterns of migration, and the reasons for it — all of those were still in place. And so people kept coming—as they do. And “the only thing that changed was the law. Before, they could do all this legally; suddenly, they couldn’t.” Subsequently, he states, “Mexican migrants were recast… as illegal.”

“These days,” he says, “illegal entry and illegal reentry make up the crimes that federal prosecutors pursue most often… Defendants charged with these immigration offenses end up jailed while they wait for the courts to hear their cases more often than do defendants charged with any other federal crime” (8).

On page 101, he states, “For most of U.S. history, second chances were built into immigration law. Most of the time, crime was irrelevant to a person’s ability to make a life here” (101).

Each of these quotes illustrate how our concepts of illegality, immigration, and crime are all ever-changing social constructs. None of this is really real. Like, half of this country used to be Mexico, before 1848. And borders are fake. Owning land is a capitalist illusion. All laws were imagined, and are re-imagined in new ways every day.

These quotes also helped me to realized how hard it must be to be a black or brown human being in this country when the concept of “crime” keeps changing to engulf you. Learning about the concept of moral turpitude (96) only solidified this in my mind. It helped me to understand that all judgement on immigrants (or on anyone, for that matter) is subjective and ever-changing.

Side note: I also want to note the connection between moral turpitude and the video we watched about the school-to-prison pipeline. The video states how white students are more likely to be suspended for provable offenses (smoking, vandalism), whereas black students are more likely to be suspended for subjective offenses (talking back, insubordination). This subjective decision process seems to parallel the decisions in the court that are made based on moral turpitude.

García Hernández writes about citizen’s unwillingness to engage with or support immigrants who have committed crimes or are considered criminals. He states that “many advocates [for immigration reform] keep migrants with criminal records at arm’s length out of concern that association with the most unsympathetic members of immigrant communities might tarnish broader immigration reform efforts” (13).

Similarly, on page 53, he writes “Migrant workers have a hard time finding passionate defenders, even among likely allies in the labor movement… Even the famed United Farm Workers Union, led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, cleaved migrants into two camps: legal and illegal. The former, it claimed, should be treated humanely; the latter should be rounded up and deported.”

Even people who care deeply about human rights and always try to give people the benefit of the doubt have trouble extending this to people who have committed crimes (or been perceived as committing crimes). We have, in this country, a pervasive mental block against migrants who commit crimes. What might be some causes for the blockage against the “bad immigrant”?

• I think in a lot of cases this blockage comes from wanting to make the best case on behalf of immigrants—people think that we have to put the “best faces forward” (especially to achieve a “greater cause,” as in the cases of advocates/organizers). And this might be true, but it doesn’t make it right. In fact, it might not even be true. I wonder if dividing migrants into two camps (legal and illegal) may even make things more complex for both groups.
• It might come out of fear of losing control of immigration. We have to put some people in boxes titled “illegal,” “criminal,” “does not belong here” simply because if we can’t fathom entirely breaking down our concept of a border. If we consider everyone as worthy of entering the U.S., then by common sense we would have to let them all in. And we just can’t handle the idea of that.
• But it can also come from, plain and simple, not seeing immigrants as full people.
• It could be because there has to be a hierarchy embedded into every single one of our systems. We can’t understand a world without hierarchies—we are fearful, deep down, of a world without hierarchies.
• I love philosopher Mladen Dolar’s explanation: “We love our victims innocent. We empathize with them as long as they appear to be innocent, but the moment that they display some trait that is not entirely amiable… the sympathy is cut short” (104, 105).

Side note: This sentiment helped me grapple with my questions about something Bryan Stevenson said in Just Mercy: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” I am able to easily apply this to people who have been marginalized by the system and ended up committing a crime due, in part, to structural/systemic factors. But I have a harder time applying it to someone who lived a life of privilege and did something really horrible from that place. I’m still grappling with the quote, but in light of Dolar’s words I’m realizing that I can more immediately and easily apply Stevenson’s statement to people I consider victims. I give them innocence, because it makes it easier to see the situation as black and white. And then when it’s time to consider privileged oppressors as complex human beings who might be, in some ways, innocent — I can’t. Because it is so ingrained in us that innocence is applied to the victim and blame is applied to the oppressor. This is such a basic narrative that pervades every part of our life and it is, in all actuality, a false narrative because humans are so much more complex than that.

• For myself, I think this separation between the good immigrant and the bad immigrant, and the devaluing of those considered criminals, has a lot to do with not knowing/not trying to understand the context of the lives of migrants who have committed crimes. I think it’s, hugely, a lack of context that, in this case, prevents me from seeing someone’s full humanity. In the case of a U.S. citizen, I am able to separate the person from their crimes and understand structural reasons why they might have been pushed to commit this crime. Why can’t I do this for the non-citizen? For some reason, I seem to be imagining them committing their crimes in a vacuum. Logically, I know many of the reasons why crime happens here are the same reasons why crime happens in other countries. But for some reason it feels different.

Going back to wanting to make the best case on behalf of immigrants (putting the “best faces forward”)—I want to note how I sometimes hear people (including myself) enacting this separation while talking about the Canal. They (we) say things like, “Some people say it’s a ‘bad neighborhood,’ but it’s mostly filled with nice, hard-working immigrant families.” Which is true — but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t also some people who are mean and lazy. And that’s totally okay. A community shouldn’t need to be filled with only “valuable” immigrants — also, why are immigrants always associated with the word “hard-working”? That seems a little suspect — in order for us to consider it’s members’ full humanity.

In the conclusion of the book, García Hernández quotes philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “The point is… not to recognize ourselves in strangers, not to gloat in the comforting falsity that ‘they are like us’ but to recognize a stranger in ourselves… we are all, in our own way, strange lunatics” (166). I love this quote in so many ways, and I want to keep it with me forever. I really think it can help us to embrace all people—even people who have committed crimes—as complex, different, and often very difficult, human beings.

And it helps me to recognize that every little weird thing (social constructs/stereotypes/assumptions/generalizations/etc.) that I put onto immigrants displays how nuts I am for thinking that, and how crazy this society is for instilling these weird reactions in me. The strangeness lives in me. And that somehow feels comforting, because it helps the world to make sense.

Much of the “othering” we do is to help ourselves feel/appear normal in comparison. But if start to consider ourselves as the Others, the urge to “other” begins to disappear.

Notes from Wednesday’s discussion

• One of the panelists (I think it was Meredith?) mentioned that people in hard-to-count communities don’t open their doors to anyone, because they’re afraid it’ll be ICE or the police and they’ll be deported. Which makes total sense. The census plays to the rules of the dominant society, which states that, generally speaking, people like to open their doors to let other people in. From what I understand, immigrant communities have a whole other set of rules for doors, which is as follows: don’t open them. ICE is really tricky, and will trick you into letting them into your house if you so much as open the door a crack. I know that sometimes officers even slide a fake warrant under the door. And even if it’s a real warrant, some of the warrant still don’t automatically let the officer(s) into your home, even if they look like they do. All in all, it makes total sense why people in the Canal generally don’t like to open their doors, and I really wish census organizers could figure out a better way to make sure that people take it other than going door-to-door.
• The main new thing I learned about the Canal was its history: that it was developed in the 1950s as housing for low-income recent college graduates, and over the years has been populated by immigrants because of the cheap housing.