Extract from Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Toward a Humanistic Paradigm, author Alvaro Huerta; photographs by Antonio Turok
We Need Humane Immigration Reform
The time has arrived for President Obama and Congress to take immediate action on comprehensive, humane immigration reform.
By immigration reform, I am not talking about militarizing our borders, empowering employers to behave as immigration enforcement officials and imposing fines and back taxes on aspiring citizens. Instead, I am talking about allowing labor to cross our borders as transnational capital does, preventing employers from exploiting immigrant laborers and lowering application costs for future citizens.
Too often, when Democratic and Republican leaders speak about comprehensive immigration reform, their message mainly centers on enforcement-dominated policies. For instance, while Obama spoke eloquently about immigrants in his second inaugural address, his administration has deported more immigrants than that of his predecessor, President Bush, during the same time period.
As the Obama administration continues to separate hardworking immigrants from their families and friends, I find it hard to believe the president when he says, "Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity."
I don't find the deportation of more than 1.6 million undocumented immigrants during Obama's first term in office as "welcoming."
Moreover, given that Republican leaders remain hostile and pay only lip service to Latinos and immigrants in this country, it's incumbent on Obama and Democratic leaders to invest the necessary political capital for the benefit of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.
Instead of dehumanizing and blaming recent immigrants for America's financial woes like the GOP, Obama and Democratic leaders should demand that Latino immigrants be treated with dignity, respect and tolerance.
More specifically, Democratic leaders should educate and convince the public about the pivotal role undocumented immigrants play in America's social and economic prosperity, highlighting key characteristics like their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their families, a strong work ethic and an entrepreneurial bent.
In developing a humane immigration reform policy, both Democrats and Republicans should learn from past immigrant policies with progressive elements. This includes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, where immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa benefited from family reunification components of the law. This also includes the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, where almost 3 million immigrants qualified for amnesty. Republican leaders should learn from their iconic figure, President Reagan, who signed this legislation into law.
Instead of doing what's right in both moral and economic terms by proposing another amnesty plan, a recent bipartisan group of senators, also known as the Senate "Gang of Eight," introduced a regressive, comprehensive immigration reform proposal. It includes a so-called pathway to citizenship for qualified undocumented immigrants.
But it mainly focuses on punitive measures, such as a “secured border” prerequisite before granting citizenship, imposing fines and back taxes, deputizing employers to become more effective immigration enforcement officials and creating an exploitable labor pool of guest workers, like the Bracero Program of the mid-20th century—a program that my father, Salomon Huerta Sr., participated in under inhumane working conditions.
In short, there's only one humane and simple plan for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country: amnesty.
Let's get over the hostility to the term, and welcome the people who have been working in the shadows.
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| "El Bordo," Tijuana, Mexico |
My Mexican Immigrant Parents Died Due to Lack of Health Care
The American government, in my opinion, contributed to the deaths of my parents by not providing universal health care.
In every other advanced industrial nation, they would have received quality health care as a right.
Here they did not.
My father, Salomon Chavez Huerta Sr., first came to this country as an agricultural worker from Mexico during the Bracero Program, and he and my mother, Carmen Mejia Huerta, settled in the United States legally, with work permits, in the late 1960s.
He later worked dead-end jobs in different factories while my mother labored as a domestic worker—cleaning the homes of countless middle-class Americans—for more than 40 years.
Neither of them accumulated enough wealth to afford a home of their own for my siblings and me, much less afford private health care.
My father died in 1996 after a prolonged battle with prostate cancer. My mother died earlier this year after a major stroke left her bedridden for many months.
If only my father and mother had access to government-supported health care before the symptoms of prostate cancer and heart problems reached a critical stage, they might have lived many years longer.
Most doctors will tell a patient, for example, that with regular checkups, proper diet, medications and exercise, severe medical conditions such as prostate cancer and heart complications can be treatable. But they couldn’t afford the regular checkups that could have extended their lives.
We need universal health care in this country or at the very least a public option that will cover the 47 million Americans without coverage today.
Isn’t it hypocritical that the conservatives in Congress who ferociously attack the public option themselves benefit from a public option? As taxpayers, we not only pay their salaries but we also provide them with a health care insurance plan they can access. And if they are seniors or veterans, they’re already covered by a public option that works well: Medicare or Veterans Affairs.
It makes no sense for President Obama and Democrats in Congress to reach a bipartisan agreement with a conservative party that is beholden to special interests—the existing private health care industry—and that is diametrically opposed to domestic government programs that benefit the public.
At the end of the day, any bill that excludes a public option would represent just another case of corporate power prevailing over the public interest, of Wall Street conquering Main Street.
Once again, the less fortunate would lose out to people of privilege, who could afford the skyrocketing costs of premiums, co-pays and deductibles.
It was just these costs that my parents couldn’t cover—and they paid with their lives.
Now, my 10-year-old son, Joaquin, has no paternal grandparents. He misses them. So does my wife, Antonia. And so do I.
Seeing How the Other Half Lives: the Working Poor and Immigrants
In times of financial turmoil and massive corporate bailouts, we shouldn’t forget one simple fact: The working poor in this country have historically been marginalized and blamed for their impoverished status. This has been especially true for racial minorities and immigrants in the nation’s ghettoes and barrios since as long as the 19thcentury.
Immigrants and the working poor are no strangers to housing instability, high job loss and unemployment, tight credit markets, lack of health coverage and other social and economic ills currently plaguing millions of Americans. Why is it that only when economic downturns hit the middle and upper classes that America finds itself in desperate need of trillion-dollar federal interventions?
Throughout its history, America has blamed the working poor and its most recent wave of immigrants for their low socio-economic status. If only they learned the virtues of the so-called Protestant work ethic, the logic goes, “those people” would succeed in America, the famed land of opportunity. If only “those immigrants” learned to speak proper English and adopt America’s cultural norms of individualism, hard work and self-motivation, goes the xenophobic argument, they would become productive members of society.
This is not to say that government intervention hasn’t addressed the needs of the working poor. FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs provided the working poor with vital monetary aid and services in employment, healthcare and education. Despite the good intentions behind many liberal government programs and services, however, mainstream and conservative voices have stigmatized anti-poverty programs and services as handouts for “lazy, undeserving individuals” who represent, in economists’ terms, free riders.
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| Echo Park, Los Angeles |
As someone who grew up in East L.A. housing projects on welfare, food stamps, free school meals and medical services, I’m all too familiar with the social stigma associated with these government benefits. Although most of my childhood friends in the Ramona Gardens housing project also received food stamps, using them at the local store typically made us feel like drug addicts buying heroine in a dark alley.
The stigma of being poor was another source of exasperation for many of us when we participated in a mandatory busing program to a majority-white school, Mt. Gleason Jr. High, in Sunland Tujunga in the late 1970s. Despite the obvious fact that we “dressed poor” and received free school meals compared to the mostly affluent white students, I never heard anyone from our barrio admit to being poor or on welfare. For us, this would have been tantamount to admitting to a heinous crime such as, say, waterboarding.
This stigma continued through my undergraduate years at UCLA in the mid-1980s. When filling out my financial aid application, for example, my household income consisted of a meager $8,000. This for a family of eight, not to mention the fact that welfare doesn’t technically count as income—it’s government aid after all. But I kept this simple fact a secret from my UCLA peers, who came mostly from stable, middle-class backgrounds.
In fact, it wasn’t until I studied U.S. history that I learned I had nothing to be ashamed of and that the working poor has contributed greatly to making America the most wealthy and powerful country in the world. Yet, in contrast to anti-poverty policies, government programs and services aimed at boosting the middle and upper classes, such as the G.I. Bill, mortgage-interest tax deductions for homeowners and the recent Bush administration tax cuts for the rich, have hardly received the same stigma and public scorn.
And while it’s true that many government intervention programs and subsidies, together with access to higher education, home ownership and tax breaks, have helped create a significant middle class, whites have been the main beneficiaries of these policies as they fled from inner cities to the suburbs.
In short, there seems to be a double standard in government interventions aimed at helping Americans. Whereas government aid to the working poor is pregnant with social stigmas and attacks by conservatives, aid that addresses the needs of the higher classes, including victims of financial fallouts, is perceived as perfectly normal.
While recessions impact all people, not all people suffer equally. For the majority of the working poor, a bad economy is one more crisis to deal with on a daily basis, while the upper classes get a taste of what it feels like to live at the bottom: insecurity, anxiety and a pervasive sense of gloom.
But if every crisis has a silver lining, my hope is that this time around, privileged Americans and government officials alike will have more compassion for the less fortunate instead of scapegoating them for the nation’s ills.
Amnesty for Immigrants(co-written with Antonia Montes)
Before the end of the year, presidents often consider grants of pardon and amnesty. This year, 2012, Pres. Obama should grant amnesty to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in America, excluding those guilty of heinous crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery and child abuse.
Undocumented immigrants work hard, make great sacrifices, save their earnings and rely primarily on themselves and their personal networks to survive in this country.
They take jobs commonly discarded by average Americans due to low pay and low social status.
From washing dishes to parking cars, from cleaning toilets to changing diapers (both for children and some elderly), from picking tomatoes to mowing lawns, immigrants toil daily in these so-called dirty jobs.
Yet, Republican leaders, conservative activists and right-wing talk-show hosts assail immigrants for allegedly taking American jobs and burdening our social welfare programs.
But undocumented immigrants don’t qualify for many state and federally funded safety-net programs, thanks to former President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform act of 1996 and other measures.
Also, while many undocumented immigrants incur payroll deductions and pay into the Social Security system, they aren’t able to receive economic or medical benefits once they reach retirement age, such as Social Security or Medicare.
Essentially, these hard-working individuals put more into the system than they receive or consume — the exact opposite of their “free rider” depiction that conservatives so often use.
Moreover, by working for low wages (and, often times, receiving below the federal minimum wage), immigrants generate labor cost savings for employers, who then sell their goods and services at lower prices to American consumers.
For instance, how much would a house salad cost at a local restaurant if employers hired non-immigrant laborers to pick, package, deliver, prepare and serve the lettuce and everything else that goes with it?
While it’s easy for Republicans and their supporters to blame Latino immigrants for America’s economic crises, it’s hard for them to live without this important workforce and the services that immigrants provide on a daily basis to American consumers. It’s almost impossible for the average American to go a day without experiencing the benefit of immigrant labor at the local dry cleaner, grocery market, restaurant, car wash, office building or hotel.
Instead of recognizing immigrants for their hard work by passing legislation that allows for these immigrants and their families to fix their legal status via amnesty, Republican leaders continue to balk at any just and humane reform that would offer a pathway to citizenship.
Given the obstinacy of the Republicans, Pres. Obama should take matters into his own hands and solve this problem once and for all.
He should issue a blanket amnesty to all undocumented immigrants who have not committed violent crimes.
It would be in keeping with this season of charity, and it would let 11 million hardworking people come out of the shadows.
Alvaro Huerta, son of Mexican immigrants from a small rancho in Michoacán, was raised in East Los Angeles’ Ramona Gardens housing project (better known as the Big Hazard projects). A Visiting Scholar at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, he has published widely in such fields as urban planning, social network analysis, immigration, social movements, Chicana/o history, Latina/o politics and the informal economy. Completed in the fall of 2011, his dissertation focuses on Mexican immigrants and their social networks in Los Angeles' informal economy.
Antonio Turok, born in Mexico City in 1955, is an internationally known documentary photographer who has worked in Central America, Mexico, and the United States for the past 35 years. Antonio has received several grants including the Maine Photographic Workshop Book Award, 1994 Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Award, and the U.S.A.-Mexico Fund for Culture Rockefeller/Bancomer Award. He has published two books, Imágenes de Nicaragua (Casa de Las Imágenes, 1988) and Chiapas: End of Silence (Aperture, 1998). He lives and teaches in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Toward a Humanistic Paradigm is available from San Diego University Press and the regular retail and online sources or just click on Alvaro's website: http://sites.google.com/site/
Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Toward a Humanistic Paradigm is available from San Diego University Press and the regular retail and online sources or just click on Alvaro's website: http://sites.google.com/site/