On the change
that needs to occur—not for political reasons, but for American ones.
I’ve written
before, pretty
recently in fact, about the ways in which—despite my earnest desire to keep
from connecting my Chinese
Exclusion Act book to any one political argument in the present—a more
accurate knowledge of the histories of American immigration and immigration law
seems clearly to lead to particular positions on those contemporary policy
debates. Or, at the very least, I would argue—and indeed do in the book’s most
present-minded section, the Conclusion—that many of our most prominent
immigration policies, today and for the last few decades, reflect a profound
gap between those histories and our understandings of immigration in America.
Chief among those (to my mind) misguided present policies are the federal
government’s ongoing and even increasing deportation
efforts and the equally amplified militarization
of the southern border, both of which, whatever arguments might be made for
them in the present, are strikingly out of step with the long arc of American
immigration and legal history.
Again, I don’t
want to use this space to advocate for any one position—as I wrote in that
above-linked post, it’s undeniably the case that for much of American history
our borders and immigration policies have been entirely open, but of course that
isn’t necessarily an argument for any present or future policies—so much as to
insist that we need, collectively and socially as well as politically, to rethink
both our narratives of immigration and our general approach to the issue. Far
too often, not only in informal conversation and debate but at the highest
levels of our government, from town halls and state legislatures to Congress
and the Supreme Court, immigration policy is framed as a war, as a problem in
desperate need of solving, as a broken system in a state of crisis—and while
those latter definitions might make sense if we were talking about the millions
of immigrant Americans forced to live in horrific and destructive poverty, with
no possibility of changing or bettering their situation, we’re most definitely
not doing so, unless we’re actively characterizing them as the enemy in the
war, the problem that needs redress, the “illegals” who need deportation.
So
AmericanStudies Elves, my second wish this year is for immigration reform—not just
of our policies, but also and even more fundamentally of our narratives and
perspectives. If we start to recognize more accurately and with more complexity
the longstanding histories of immigration and law and diversity, and if we
start concurrently to think about what are the real current problems (as
opposed to those created by the misunderstandings and inaccurate narratives and
false perspectives on our history and community), we’ll be doing more than just
setting the stage for policy reform. We’ll also be changing, for the better,
the ways we talk about one of the most defining American communities and
stories, now as well as throughout our past.
Next wish
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this wish? Wishes you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment