Who Is and Isn’t “Legal”

There has been a strong nativist streak in the United States for much of our history. In the mid-1800s, the Know-Nothing Party was created to stoke fears of the Irish Catholics who had fled famine to come here. And a couple of decades later, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed to protect America from the growing “yellow peril.”

My grandparents, Eastern European Jews, fled waves of pogroms to come to the New World before WWI. They both came to Canada, because they each had family there, but after finding very little work to sustain his growing family, my grandfather put his wife (pregnant with my mother) and their three children on a train bound for New York City in 1926.

They arrived in the US after passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which banned immigrants from Asia and restricted immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. It was enacted by White Protestant elected officials of Northwestern European descent to curtail the huge wave of Italians, Greeks, Slavs and Jews that were coming here for a better life.

And so, my grandparents were undocumented immigrants (“illegals” in common parlance). My grandfather recalled looking for work and seeing signs that said, “No Jews Need Apply.” Eventually, he found work sewing ladies’ garments for long hours in a sweatshop. He became active with the Ladies Garment Workers Union. My grandparents remained “illegal” here for 30 years. In 1956, families of soldiers who served during WWII who were undocumented were granted an amnesty. My grandparents had to go back to Montreal, where they’d lived when they first arrived in North America, and then return to the US as citizens.

The question of who is and who isn’t “legal” is always determined by those in power. Because the US considered Communist Cuba an enemy, if an anti-communist Cuban could make it onto dry land (the “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy), they were welcome, while El Salvadorans fleeing from a right-wing dictatorship that we supported had to stay in the shadows.

Vast numbers of Mexican peasants left their farms and fields after NAFTA destroyed their livelihoods by allowing the import of cheap American corn. While American corporations were allowed freedom of movement across the border so they could build maquiladoras employing cheaper Mexican labor, Mexican laborers were not accorded the same freedom of movement to seek better jobs here.

As the grandson of undocumented immigrants, I’m thinking a lot about immigration in the wake of the repressive ICE raids being conducted against largely law-abiding, hard-working Latino immigrants here in Los Angeles, the city I live in.

The battle against these people isn’t just being waged in restaurants and Home Depot parking lots, it’s also being waged in language and messaging. During the Third Reich, German media portrayed Jews as a disease, as vermin that had to be exterminated. Donald Trump portrays undocumented immigrants of color as an invasion of criminals.

He highlights the anecdotal evidence of the infrequent undocumented person who commits a heinous crime while ignoring the inconvenient truth that the undocumented are much less likely to commit crimes than the native population—these folks try to keep a low profile—getting into legal trouble means possible deportation. Trump’s audience of white nativists hears this and is sent into paroxysms of disgust and horror at the advancing menace.

But here in LA, the undocumented among us are an essential part of our communities. These are the people who come and take the jobs that no one else will take, and work for low wages, all to try to support impoverished families in their home countries or to feed their growing American families here. These are our friends, our colleagues. We are outraged at seeing these people show up for scheduled immigration hearings only to be snatched up by ICE, taken from their families and deported, often not to their country of origin, but an El Salvadoran concentration camp that no one ever emerges from.

If America is indeed being invaded, it is being invaded by an army of hard-working, law-abiding, disciplined people who bring so many rich gifts to our society as they strive for a better life. Every country should be so lucky to be invaded this way!