Columnist Razvan Sibii: Another 3 hypocrisies of the American immigration system

Razvan Sibii

Razvan Sibii FILE PHOTO

By RAZVAN SIBII

Published: 01-17-2024 8:06 AM

Last month, my column was an end-of-the-year top 5 list of hypocrisies that poison our current discussions about the migrant crisis at the southern border [bit.ly/3RLgE6s]. I think I got more emails about that column than about any other I’ve written for the past three years.

Many people who wrote expressed their frustration with how muddled the public discourse on immigration is right now, and how hard it is to know what’s true and what’s not, what’s unprecedented and what’s not, what’s urgent and what’s not — and who is actually trying to solve the problem vs. who is taking advantage of the political opportunities it presents.

These were the five hypocrisies that I identified in that column:

1. People and drugs are smuggled from Mexico into the U.S., but dirty money and guns are smuggled in the opposite direction. People in both countries are victimized by people in both countries.

2. We are outraged when some migrants break American law by crossing the border illegally, but we ask the U.S. government to disregard its own laws and deport people right away without giving them the possibility to apply for asylum.

3. Millions of undocumented immigrants did not cross the border illegally, but rather overstayed their visas. People who get visas to come to the U.S. in the first place tend to be from rich countries. As a result, many undocumented immigrants come from the Global North, are white and are educated. But we only obsess over the brown and black immigrants at the southern border.

4. When many Americans’ ancestors came to America through Ellis Island, they needed no passports or visas and were not asked whether they fled oppression, poverty or their in-laws. The immigrants haven’t changed; America has. “My great-grandfather came here legally and so should you” is a silly argument built on historical ignorance.

5. Listening to the politicians talk, you’d think the migrants at the southern border are about to overrun America and destroy the country as we know it. But when it comes to actually funding an updated system that both secures the border and processes asylum-seekers efficiently and fairly, all those politicians invariably discover that other societal problems are way more urgent than the immigration crisis.

At the beginning of the new year, I have another list, with another three hypocrisies. Not because I want more mail, but because we unfortunately do not lack for such moral incongruencies when it comes to the prickly subject of immigration. Here they are:

1. Undocumented immigrants crossing the border illegally do not constitute an “invasion.” For their infraction to move from “trespassing” to “invasion,” they would have to be plotting the armed takeover of government and other crucial institutions. Evidence of the government of Texas being in danger of succumbing to immigrant insurgents exists only in the imaginations of those hooked on post-apocalyptic fiction.

But you know what did qualify as an invasion of American territory? The colonialism to which many present-day Americans owe their existence in this country. That was literally a case of men with guns crossing borders at will and seeking to overthrow local authorities.

2. American employers are almost universally happy to hire undocumented immigrants, especially for the agriculture and construction jobs that citizens do not want to take. People running from poverty who manage to cross the border surreptitiously are almost guaranteed a job somewhere in the United States.

That is a powerful incentive. To eliminate it, politicians keep pushing E-Verify, an online system that allows employers to check whether the people they want to hire are authorized to work in the U.S. Various jurisdictions, including entire states, have passed laws making E-Verify checks mandatory.

But employers, the larger of whom are often major campaign contributors, find countless ways to avoid scrutinizing their employees’ identities. Everybody knows it, and they’re all OK with it: the immigrants get jobs, the employers get workers, Americans get cheap food, and the politicians get to pretend they’re anti-undocumented immigration while ensuring that companies using undocumented labor aren’t truly affected by ICE raids and fines.

3. We love capitalism and libertarianism, except when they interfere with our xenophobia. We want capital, services and products to move freely across borders, but not workers. That’s the one element in the capitalist production chain that is not welcome in our country. We tell the seamstress in Bangladesh or the factory worker in Mexico, “We want your labor, but not you.”

We have large tracts of unoccupied and undeveloped land, and countless dying towns (in the Midwest and elsewhere) that are desperate for families and workers. But we can’t change our immigration system in a way that would allow in more immigrants and would also incentivize them to go live in the places that need them.

True capitalists would be delighted at the happy meeting of demand and supply, and true libertarians would rejoice in America’s role in the continuous expansion of freedom and possibility for humankind. Not xenophobes, though.

You can respect people who have different opinions than yours, and you can (and should) engage in a mutually productive dialogue with them. But if the principles one’s opinions are based on fluctuate wildly depending on the dictates of self-interest or prejudice, that dialogue is dead before it even began.

Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration and incarceration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu.