Latinos Divided: Pain at the Hands of Your Own People
I stumbled upon a heartbreaking news story on Facebook recently. Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzales was murdered by US Customs & Border Patrol agents on May 23, 2018 as she was attempting to cross into the United States.[1] Border Patrol agents have given different accounts as to what happened that day, ranging from a border patrol agent being attacked with two-by-fours to the group of migrants “rushing” at the agent. Claudia was an indigenous Maya-Mam woman from Guatemala, only 20 years old, and seeking a better life in the United States. She graduated as an accountant 2 years ago but couldn’t find work in Guatemala. Her and her family struggled in Guatemala, prompting Claudia to make the dangerous journey to the United States. Her struggle is shared by many other immigrants from Latin American who brave the dangerous journey of crossing the border into the US from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, etc. As I scrolled through countless comments on various threads about Claudia Patricia, I saw many pouring out prayers, hope, and anguish over what happened to Claudia Patricia and what has similarly happened to many other immigrants while crossing the border.
Of course, the worst part about Facebook can also be found in the comments and while I expect bigoted whitepeople to hold racist views against immigrants like Claudia Patricia — and truly they did — it was a different, deep-seeded pain to read the same hurtful comments made by Latinos. It was a reminder that not all Latinos think the same about immigration. We each have different histories with immigration. Some of us had families in parts of the Southwest US before it became part of the US. Others had their family enter the US with documents. Others had family that immigrated here without documents. Some are immigrants themselves. Some are children or grandchildren of immigrants. I’ve encountered Latinos who think that people need to immigrate here legally, who think that the legal channels to come into the US with permission is simply an easy task to fulfill. They also hold on to the mentality that people need to get into some arbitrary lines to immigrate legally. At the same time, I’ve met Latinos who strongly believe that borders should be open because the US has historically had open borders and the US itself is creating the conditions that has forced many to migrate from their home countries in Latin America.[2]
So what is it that drives Latinos, whose families immigrated here or who themselves immigrated here, to write that “she shouldn’t have crossed the border then” and effectively dismiss the pain Claudia Patricia’s family is going through? It comes from selfishness and willful ignorance of today’s impossibly strict immigration laws. I spoke with someone who once told me that undocumented immigrants should be deported and they should start over since they “cannot follow our laws.” I asked him about his immigration story and he told me he got his green card in the 1950s because his uncle was serving in a US military branch at the time and petitioned for his mother and him. He failed to acknowledge that the US family-based immigration policies have been tightened after the 1952 Immigrant and Nationality Act and even more so after the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. I also spoke with someone who recently applied for US citizenship and is from Peru as to why she thought undocumented immigrants were “criminals.” She mentioned that she put in a lot of effort to follow the laws of the US immigration system to immigrate here and so should everyone else. She failed to see that she probably would never have been able to immigrate here “legally” if it were not for her marrying an American citizen — something not everyone wants to or should have to do. Remember Prop 187 in California from 1994 — pre-IIRIRA — that barred undocumented people from receiving public benefits? 25% of Latino voters supported it.[3]
Many who spew ignorant comments such as “getting back in line like the rest of us did” do not recall that the US government has had a strong hand in creating situations that gave rise to many immigrating from their countries.[4] With respect to Central Americans, many fled certain death in Guatemala and El Salvador where the US was aiding those governments hunting them down and after IIRIRA was passed by Clinton in 1996, many Central American immigrants were in danger of being deported because they were never technically classified as refugees.[5] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 restricted the avenues many Latino immigrants used to come into the US in the first place by giving greater placements for immigrants from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and German by updating national origins quota to 1% of each nation’s population.[6] Latino immigrants faced more restrictions after the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act where the avenues for family reunification were broken down by relationship to the petitioner, with immediate family members receiving no annual cap.[7] The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) also restricted many from seeking to be petitioned by US citizen family members if they were already in the country without proper documents by imposing bars that would require the immigrant seeking to adjust status to remain outside the US for a period of either 3 or 10 years.[8] While I believe some of the Latinos that are staunchly anti-undocumented immigrant would not change their opinion if they learn about the increasingly restrictive immigration laws, I have some hope that some would start to question themselves.
Still, it’s difficult to not take these views personally. I have undocumented family members and friends. I remember waiting anxiously when family members were crossing the border themselves and waiting to see if I’d see them on this side, tired and scared but safe. At a broader scale, the subordination of undocumented immigrants by Latinos perpetuates the status quo. Those Latinos who are dismissing undocumented people’s stories on why they crossed the border should be standing behind them on and off the internet in order to prevent these social distinctions the US wants. As Kevin R. Johnson has written, this “discrimination serves as a metaphoric border between people of Latin American ancestry. It divides a community with members who have so much in common, including dominant society’s classification of an entire group as ‘foreigners’ to the [US].”[9]
Sources:
[1] Azad Essa, Indigenous Guatemalan Woman Shot Dead by US Border Patrol, Al Jazeera, (May 28, 2018), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/indigenous-guatemalan-woman-shot-dead-border-patrol-180526081614753.html.
[2] For more information on why we should open our borders, please click here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/open-borders_n_5737722.html.
[3] Kevin R. Johnson, Immigration and Latino Identity, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 197, 202 (1998).
[4] Roque Planes, 19 Reasons Latin Americans Come to the U.S. That Have Nothing to Do with the American Dream, Huffpost (Apr. 18, 2014, 1:56 PM ET), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/18/immigration-latin-america_n_5168356.html.
[5] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present 648 (2003).
[6] D’Vera Cohn, How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History, Pew Research Center: FACTTANK (Sept. 20, 2015), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] Kevin R. Johnson, Immigration and the Latino Identity, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 197, 200–01 (1998).
