The Best Catch There Is

 “There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”

“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”

“What right did they have?”

“Catch-22.”

“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”

“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.

I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because 2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics.  Much of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or might potentially happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven spectacularly wrong.  Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption bring about a recession?  Inflation?  Experts are happy to weigh in for the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them?  Even though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly.  After all, eventually they'll be right.

The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police.  It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book.  There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances.  I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"?  That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure.  But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since.  I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does.  It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.

What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all.  It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing.  By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy.  Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals.  (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)

While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals.  The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction.  I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished.  If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement.  As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it.  If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation?  It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy.  It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in.  And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.

The Political Correctness of the Center

I hate-listened to The 1A on the road to northern Indiana this morning, which at least kept me alert during the three-hour drive.

Today being Friday, the program covered the week's news in summary, which may account for the rushed, breathless pace at which the commentators had to work.  As usual, today's commentators were from the corporate media and the Beltway.  They weren't stupid, but neither did they have anything to say that you wouldn't be able to hear on CNN or MSNBC.  (On the other hand, I heard that the historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's been correcting right-wing historical discussion to great effect on Twitter, appeared on The 1A earlier this week; I'll have to listen to that segment.)

The dominant topic during the domestic segment was immigration.  I don't intend to dissect the discussion in any detail.  It stayed well within the bounds of the mainstream, framing the issues in terms set by the Republicans: if you want to "decriminalize" crossing the border, for instance, you're in favor of "open borders."  The commentators were, I think, aware that this is a false dichotomy, but they didn't have time to explain why, so they just quoted it.  Noam Chomsky's strictures on concision were confirmed once again: if you aren't given time to explain complex issues, soundbytes and slogans are all the audience will get, and then you can dismiss the masses as brainwashed sheeple incapable of understanding, unworthy of having input.

I noticed that the people being held in our concentration camps were almost always referred to as "migrants."  One of the commentators called them "asylum-seekers" once, but returned to "migrants" after that.  I realize that journalists seeking the phantasm of objectivity have a difficult time with terminology, and I suppose that "migrants" is the best our corporate media can do.  It seems to have become the word of choice all over the media, from what I can tell, so it would be surprising if The 1A strayed from the consensus.

But "migrant" isn't the right word for people who are fleeing from intense economic and political misery.  True, many such people do migrate in search of work and/or safety; the first Mexicans I encountered in Indiana were migrant farm workers who came north in the summers and returned south, even back to Mexico, when the work was done.  (It's worth remembering that most Mexicans who came north returned home periodically until undocumented crossing was criminalized during the George W. Bush administration: that had the effect, not of keeping them out, but of keeping them in.)  There have also been American migrants, most famously the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s (see Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), and African Americans who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow to the north at around the same time.  Internal migrants, as both those precedents remind us, are not more welcome, or treated better, than refugees from abroad.

"Asylum-seekers" is more specific and accurate for the people who are crowding the US/Mexico border now, but "refugees" is also specific and accurate, and I don't believe it was used once today.  (Nor do I recall encountering it often in most respectable media coverage these days.)  "Refugee" has emotional connotations and might generate sympathy, so of course objective journalists shy away from it, but the disinclination to use it is also a choice -- what could and should be called the Political Correctness of the Center.

Once I noticed this, it was easier to notice that "migrant" was the word of choice by a different batch of commentators in today's international segment for refugees from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe.  I believe "refugee" was used more often for such people before, during the Obama administration; why "migrant" has replaced it, I don't know, but it does seem to have happened.

Among numerous other matters that annoyed me was the discussion of the power-sharing agreement that has just been reached in the Sudan between the military junta currently in charge there and the civilian opposition.  The main question for The 1A's team was whether it would last.  It's a pointless question, because no one can answer it -- certainly none of them really tried.  So why waste time on it?  Because it's the kind of question that such people love to chuckle over.

At that, The 1A wasn't as bad as a BBC segment I heard earlier this morning: the newscaster interviewed one of the civilian negotiators, and tried repeatedly to badger him into saying on the air that he didn't trust the military to hold up their end of the agreement.  The negotiator did his best to evade the question, but even to ask it was irresponsible; I could hear the smirk in the newscaster's voice as he pressed for the answer he wanted, which would have been a handy excuse for the military to accuse the civilians of bad faith, and even put the negotiator in danger.  We're talking here about a country struggling to emerge from decades of one-man rule, in which the military has killed over a hundred civilians recently to, um, "restore order" I think the term is.  Whatever happens, it won't happen to James Copnall.

Nostalgia Is Just Amnesia Turned Around

If only we had a President like this today: classy, compassionate, inclusive!  That is what a lot of diehard Obama cultists are still saying in social media, conveniently forgetting his actual record.

The quotation is authentic.  Also, "Obama said this year’s influx reflects 'the desperation and the violence that exists in some of these Central American countries.'"  That was true, as Obama knew well, for he had encouraged and supported the violence in some of those Central American countries - Honduras, for one, which suffered a military coup followed by state killings of dissidents.  But he has a history of smirking disdain for the suffering inflicted by the US and its proxies, to say nothing of his embrace of dictators around the world.

Even if the US had no share of responsibility for the violence and desperation these refugees are fleeing, we would still have an obligation to help them when they arrive.  Refugees are not illegal immigrants: under the law they have a right to seek asylum here.  And given the US' reluctance to honor that right, it's hardly surprising that many of them would try to bypass the official process -- especially since, as the ABC story admits, many of them have relatives here, including parents, who could take them in.  The whole aim of US immigration policy for the past several decades has been to make it more difficult for immigrants, or migrant workers, or refugees to cross the border safely.  That so many risk death anyway doesn't speak badly for them, it speaks badly for the US.

Comparisons to the Holocaust are distasteful to many, and aren't really necessary to condemn Obama and Trump, but it's worth remembering that many Jewish refugees found it difficult to escape Nazi Germany or occupied Europe, not only because the Nazis wouldn't let them out, but because other countries, including the US, wouldn't let them in.  That's as much a stain on our history as the internment of Japanese American citizens, though it's less remembered now.  It should be remembered: it's as relevant to current events as the concentration camps.

And Then a Step to the Right

The other day I saw one of those memes about Nazis and the "Big Lie," which typically and conveniently ignored the fact that the Nazis accused other people -- the Jews, the English -- of using the Big Lie; they of course claimed to be honest. (Hahaha.) So I was interested by this post by emptywheel on Brexit, answering someone who claimed (a Big Lie? a Little Lie? a Noble Lie?) that "we now live in a post-factual democracy." Emptywheel asked:

Still, what does it mean that we live in a post-factual democracy? I thought, at first, that the US is just ahead of its cousin, in that we’ve had WMD and birther lies for over a decade. But the UK had the very same WMD lies. Indeed, both countries have proudly lied about national security secrets for decades, centuries in England.

Plus, as I thought back in US history, I couldn’t get to a time when democracy didn’t depend on some key, big lies. Remarkably, they’re still some of the very same lies mobilized in the Brexit vote. You don’t get a United States, you don’t get a British Empire, without spewing a lot of lies about the inferiority of black (brown, beige, continental) men. You don’t get America, as it currently exists, without the myth of American exceptionalism, the unique national myth that has served to root an increasingly diverse former colony. You don’t get Britain without certain beliefs, traced back to Matthew Arnold and earlier, about the ennobling force of British culture.

Those myths are precisely what have driven the democracy of both countries for a long time. They were a way of imposing discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion such that less privileged members of those included in the myth would buy in and tolerate the other inequities without undue violence.

But then, you don't get any empire, any nation, any tribe, any family without lies to impose discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion.  One commenter replied:

What I think is the tipping point of a post-factual democracy is that there’s no fear of being held accountable for deliberate lies and for simply making things up on the fly. There’s an irony that in a day and age when every word a public figure says is recorded for playback, they no longer seem to care. In this post-factual democracy, the complex issues aren’t only being compressed into sound bites, they are being reduced to undetectable puffs of breath in speeches that nothing but crowd pleasing gibberish.

This is fantasy.  Was there ever really any "fear of being held accountable for deliberate lies and for simply making things up on the fly"?  I can't remember such a time.  Emptywheel had suggested that "[p]erhaps we’re moving closer to a fact-based democracy. Access to rebut sanctioned lies is more readily accessible," and I agree.  Contrary to the popular cliche that it's harder to verify quotations (and other information) in the age of the internet, it's actually much easier than it used to be.  Of course you have to apply critical thinking to your findings, and nobody likes that.

(By the way, I happened on this tweet today:

Tyson really should stick to astrophysics.  But look at that: five thousand retweets, ten thousand likes.  Someone like Donald Trump would probably get more, but still.  Tyson's popularity [notoriety] has litle to do with science, rationality, or evidence.)

But I divagate.  The right-wing reactions to Brexit have been as revealing as the liberal ones.  My Right Wing Acquaintances were pleased of course.  RWA1 linked to an article from National Review, and exulted that the "unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels" had been given notice.  RWA3 and others posted similar sentiments.  Which is funny, because as Etienne Balabar wrote a few days ago,

As we know, comparisons aren’t everything. But how could we fail to note that in the recent history of European politics national or multi-national referendum results have never been put into effect? Such was the case in 2005 and 2008 with the "European Constitution" and the Lisbon Treaty, and even more clearly in 2015 with the memorandum imposed on Greece. Very probably the same will be the case here, too. Above and beyond the personal conflicts that led to a difference of tactics, the British ruling class is manoeuvring to push back the deadlines and negotiate the terms of "exit" as best as possible.

RWA1, like most right-wingers (including the Democratic Party leadership) holds voters and accountability in contempt when they want the Wrong People to be accountable.  He's posted a lot of hostile material about Donald Trump, for instance, who like Brexit represents a lot of people who are hostile to "unaccountable bureaucrats" in Washington (a position RWA1 also holds as long as the Right People will be left in charge).  He has been eager to see the mutinous rabble of Venezuela and other Latin American countries crushed for daring to reject the dictatorships that had ruled them for the benefit of multinational corporations.  He seems to have been ambivalent about the 2015 Greek referendum, linking favorably to a National Review article that warned against "Greeks casting blame," attacking the "grand project of an increasingly centralized and integrated European super-state" and the "outrageous" "rhetoric of Greek's [sic] far-left leaders", quoting "Seyed Kamall, the British leader of the euroskeptic wing of the European Parliament" to the effect that Greece should "take advantage of devaluation and become a more attractive destination for investment and tourism." RWA3 doesn't have RWA1's intellectual pretensions, but she too celebrated the outcome as a victory for self-determination -- for the right white people, of course.  Self-determination for the Brits, but not for the Arabs and Pakis; they should go back where they came from, though we have to control their countries too because they're sitting on top of our oil.

RWA1's the guy, you may recall, who posted outside his store:

Nor should we listen to those who say, "The voice of the people is the voice of God," for the turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity

--Alcuin, ca. 800 A.D.

But when the turbulent mob vents its insanity in a direction he approves, it's fine with him.  Which is typical of both parties and probably most people: the wisdom of the People must not be denied -- until you don't like the candidate or question they voted for.

Racism wasn't the only factor driving the Leave vote, and I'm as disturbed by the liberals and leftists who could see only racism in it as I am by the racist conservatives who denied that it played any role at all.  The denial is usually couched in familar dog-whistle terms, that the Leave voters were just simple English country folk who don't recognize their country anymore because of all these immigrants, they just want to preserve the England they know -- i.e., racists.  Fussing about culture and language is nothing new for the English: they've been demonizing each other on grounds of accent, vocabulary, and class for centuries before all the Pakis and Poles arrived.

The vaunted right-wing concern about secure borders and immigration is probably funnier in the US than in the UK, but the US exists because Britannia scattered its sons and daughters across the sea.  Building an Empire also meant violating other countries' borders.  New immigration has always inspired nativist fury among the children of previous immigrants in the US, and not entirely without reason, because business interests push for more immigration to drive wages down.  Again, though, within the US there has been hostility to migration by Americans within our borders, encouraged by business to drive wages down, and the fury directed at African Americans and poor whites isn't that different from the fury directed at immigrants.  The same is true elsewhere: for example, the Taiwanese writer Pai Hsaio-Hung's Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants (Verso, 2012) tells the stories of people desperately looking for work in their own country; they could easily be the Okies of The Grapes of Wrath.

Anti-immigrant sentiment tends to confuse "legal" and "illegal" immigrants, as I've noted before.  A common line is "My grandparents came here legally!  They entered the country according to the rules!" and so on. This is open to question if we ask "'Legal' according to whom?"  At first the pre-Columbian peoples weren't opposed to the arrival of Europeans, but when it became clear that Those People Were Taking Over, as they pressed west and claimed ever more territory, driving the Indians off their land by violence, the Indians would no doubt have liked to close and secure their borders, but by then it was too late.  The immigration standards weren't set by the Indians but in Washington, D.C., by the same people who were stealing their land.  Imagine that Mexican Americans, descendants of the people whose land was stolen from them by the Anglos in the nineteenth century, set up their own immigration bureaus along the border and claimed the authority to decide who would come over.  It's certainly fair to ask how legitimate was Washington's claim to the land, and to flood it with more Europeans to further displace the indigenous people.

But that was then, this is now.  The immediate fuss over Brexit seems to be dying down, replaced by an attempt by right-wing Labour leadership to remove Jeremy Corbyn from his post as party leader -- a coup so laughably bungled as to discredit the rightists all over again -- and by more discussion and negotiation about what in fact is going to happen.  Another acquaintance of mine had a comment printed in today's newspaper, complaining that his investments had already suffered because of Brexit.  That's a fair complaint of course, since he's about my age and probably relies on those investments for much of his income.  But it's also fair to ask on whose backs his dividends are being earned.

What Illegal Looks Like

I was leaving a Latin dance party last night when a young Latina grabbed me and asked me why I was wearing that shirt.  Though I was sober, it was 3 a.m. and I wasn't at my sharpest.  On top of that, I had never really thought through why I wear this t-shirt: I just thought it was funny.  I'd seen a photo of a Latino-but-native-born-American baseball player wearing such a shirt, so I looked online, found a source, and ordered myself one.  So I told her that, and that I wear it out of solidarity with the undocumented, which is true enough, but not the whole story.

Why it's funny is obvious enough: I'm an old gabacho, so not many people would say I "look illegal."  From what I see and hear, I'd guess that if you asked most people what it means to "look illegal," they'd come up with a stereotyped Mexican: brown-skinned, black hair, brown eyes, maybe a mustache and a gold tooth, speaking little English and that with an accent.  But that would describe many legal immigrants.  (I've accompanied a few friends to immigration court over the past few years, and noticed that quite a few people who've run afoul of our immigration laws are not only not from Latin America, they could pass for white Americans on the street.  So, though not many people would agree that I "look illegal," there are probably undocumented immigrants who look like me, and many (most?) people who fit the stereotype I just sketched are not only legal, but citizens.

It's likely, I suppose, given the proximity of Mexico and the US, that the majority of undocumented immigrants in America today come from Latin America, and a good many of them "look Mexican" according to various stereotypes.  But as I've pointed out before, the real problem is that many American racists don't consider any immigrants to be legal.  They assume that anyone with brown skin, black hair, brown eyes, a Mayan nose, and so on is undocumented, which is not the case.  (Often the targets of their hysteria turn out to be native-born US citizens.)  I doubt that anyone has tried to find out just how many immigrants from Latin America have that indio look, but remember how the policy analyst Jason Richwine, possessor of a Ph.D. from Harvard, simply assumed that "Hispanics" are a distinct race.  In the US, Hispanics -- that is, Spanish-speakers -- include not only "Indian peasants from Yucatan and doctors from Mexico City (and Madrid)," as Jon Wiener put it, but black people from the Dominican Republican and elsewhere.  In Latin America, there are native Spanish and Portuguese speakers of East and South Asian descent.  The Nation published Wiener's article asking how Harvard could have granted a doctorate based on such "a discredited approach to race and IQ," but I think that question answers itself. Scientific racism is alive and well, and survives all attempts to discredit it. 

So that's why I think it's not only funny and cool for me to wear this t-shirt, it's also useful.  It challenges stereotypes of what illegal immigrants look like, stereotypes which are most malign when held by white American racists, but aren't limited to them -- as witness the young woman who buttonholed me last night.  Funny, cool, and useful: works for me.

The New Colossus, This Time with Improved DNA

“The basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores is central to our way of life ... It is in our DNA. We believe our diversity, our differences, makes us stronger by a common set of ideals.”
- President Obama

You know, that second sentence doesn't really make sense.  It appears that our eloquent president got lost somewhere between the beginning and end of his thought, very much as George W. Bush used to do.

But what riled me about this quotation in the first place was "It is in our DNA."  No, it's not in our DNA.  Even giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and supposing he was speaking metaphorically, he's wrong historically.  If anything, what is central to the American way of life is Europeans invading the continent and displacing, enslaving, and killing the people who already lived there.  And each wave of immigrants tries to turn away the next wave, vilifying its successors as dirty subhumans who are congenitally incapable of grasping our Anglo-Saxon heritage of freedom.  Even if "the basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores" could be encoded in one's DNA, American history shows abundantly that it's not encoded in Americans' DNA or (metaphorically speaking) in that of our government.

The Importance of Being an Earner

Today on Democracy Now! I heard again this snippet from President Obama's recent speech on immigration reform:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have to deal with the 11 million individuals who are here illegally. Now, we all agree that these men and women should have to earn their way to citizenship.

Oh, really?  And how did you "earn" your way to citizenship, Mr. President?  Right, you were born.  Me too.

These remarks reminded me of rhetoric I used to hear in the Sixties (though it's undoubtedly older) that The Negro Must Earn His Rights, or show that He deserves them.  Even as a teenager I noticed that all  whites had done to earn our rights was to be born white.

In the story and discussion that followed, I noticed that the Republican proposals for "reform" (a word that should always be put in quotes, it seems to me) include requiring an English proficiency test and a civics test to get a green card -- not citizenship, mind you, just legal residency.  That's not a blatantly unfair requirement, I suppose, just quietly and firmly unfair -- as co-host Juan Gonzalez said, those are presently requirements for citizenship -- but I'd want to know how rigorous the test would be.  Could most native-born Americans pass it?  I've seen the written test for citizenship, because some of my foreign-born coworkers studied for it, and while I could probably pass it, I feel sure that most of the white native-born anti-immigrant racists I know could not.  (I base this on conversations I've had with such people over the years, but also from what I see on Facebook: if they ever took a high-school civics class, they didn't learn anything.)

On the other hand, many of the undocumented foreigners in the US aren't looking to become citizens: they are here to work and earn money to send back home.   Most of them want to go back to their countries eventually, and they do.  Despite the fantasy that many Americans have, not everyone in the world wants to become an American, even if or especially after they've lived here.  Even those who become citizens and master English have to cope with white racism, and increasing numbers of legal immigrants are going back home.  The problem will be how to deal with the temporary immigrants -- call them migrants -- who aren't interested in earning US citizenship, just in earning money.  And they do earn it, working as most of them do in unrewarding service jobs for long hours.  Those on "guest visas," whose jobs may be more interesting, still have problems.  As Mae Ngai, one of the guests, remarked,

We have a lot of experience in this country with guest worker programs, and I think that it should really give us pause. The problem with temporary labor visas is that if the employer holds the visa, as in the case of the H1s, then the worker really has no rights at all. If you say, "You didn’t pay me" — and this is what happens a lot in the lower end of the H2 program — "I didn’t get paid. I was forced to do overtime, all these things," you’re just sent home. You have no rights, and you can’t quit, you know. And we all understand in this country that the quintessential thing of being a free labor—of free labor, is the right to quit, as well as the right to organize. And those are things that you can’t get with a temporary labor visa.

Ngai also said:

I’m reminded a lot of the difference between immigration at the turn of the last century and immigration at the turn of this century. In many ways, they’re similar: It’s a mass migration, it’s a labor migration, it contributed to a dynamic growth of the country’s economy and culture. The main difference, though, was, a hundred years ago, there were no numerical restrictions. So when people say, "My ancestors came legally; they didn’t break the law; they didn’t cut to the front of the line," well, there wasn’t any line. Ninety-eight percent of the people who showed up at Ellis Island got in. And that’s a big difference.

At first I was taken aback by Ngai's claim.  What about the anti-immigrant nativist movements of the American past, with their hostility even to "white" European immigrants?  The 1795 Naturalization Act limited the possibility of naturalized citizenship to "free white persons," extended to include persons of African descent in 1870 but excluding Asians -- a limitation that remained in force until the 1960s.  What about immigration quotas?  I did some looking, and found that the first US immigration quotas were passed in 1921.  The Page Act of 1875 blocked immigration by "undesirables," which in practice kept Asian women out of the country.  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 blocked all immigration by Chinese.  The Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to limit numbers of Eastern and Southern Europeans while excluding Asians and Middle Easterners altogether.  It's significant that Ngai refers to Ellis Island, which processed immigrants entering the US from Europe, but then immigrants weren't supposed to be coming from Asia anyhow.  The number of "illegal" immigrants from Europe or Asia was limited by the fact that few people were able to swim the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, but an unknown number of Chinese entered the US with forged documents, as "paper sons."  So, while Ngai was technically correct, I think she gave an oversimple and unrealistically positive picture of immigration in the past.

I'm not saying that immigration should be unrestricted, though I think there are better ways to address the issue than we've seen so far.   As this timeline shows, the amount of immigration is influenced if not determined by social conditions in the home countries and elsewhere: Jewish immigration in the late 1800s, for instance, was driven by pogroms and other persecution in Eastern Europe.  Mexican immigration now is affected by the state of the Mexican economy as well as by US business' demands for cheap, vulnerable labor.  (As Ngai points out, even legal immigrants with worker visas are vulnerable to the whims of their employers.)  Changes in policy are similarly affected: the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, during World War II, as a gesture to our Chinese allies against the Japanese enemy; the status of Filipinos came and went, ebbed and flowed.  White American racism remains a constant, though.

Which reminds me of something else: when Ngai mentioned "mass migration," I thought for a moment she was talking about internal migration, such as the movement of southern African-Americans to the northern states just before and during World War II, in search of better jobs and less Jim Crow.  Even migration within the US, by American citizens (albeit of the 'wrong' color), has been controversial in some circles.

Status Symbols

I had a dispiriting conversation yesterday with an old friend of mine, the law professor I mentioned a few posts back.  She'd posted a link on Facebook to a CNN op-ed piece, "Why 'illegal immigrant' is a slur," condemning use of the term "illegal immigrant", and seconded the writer's complaint: "And the CNN site admits it uses this inappropriate term, as does most of the media (following AP style)." If it fits the style book, it's not "inappropriate" in that context, though of course you can claim that the style book ought to be changed, as they periodically are. We got into a sort of debate in comments that I found disturbing because she was factually wrong on numerous points in her own field, as well as others that were dubious on larger grounds.

The CNN contributor, "Charles Garcia, who has served in the administrations of four presidents, of both parties, is the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a business focused on the Hispanic market. He was named in the book 'Hispanics in the USA: Making History' as one of 14 Hispanic role models for the nation."  He's not the sharpest pencil in the box, but that's why CNN would feature him. Try this tasty mouthful of word salad:

George Orwell's classic "Nineteen Eighty-Four" shows how even a free society is susceptible to manipulation by overdosing on worn-out prefabricated phrases that convert people into lifeless dummies, who become easy prey for the political class.

Maybe Garcia didn't mean to imply that Orwell's tightly-controlled and oppressive Oceania is a "free society," but that's what he wrote.  And of course anyone who gets to write for CNN, let alone serve as a White House Fellow under Ronald Reagan, is a member of the political class, a predator on the public.  That he's also a businessman adds another level of manipulation to the mix.  But on the other hand, it's precisely because of his qualifications that he's concerned with manipulating the discourse on immigration.  He knows how important framing and packaging are -- far more important than substance.

Given the level of discourse in our political media, then, I have to admit that terminology isn't a negligible tool.  The corporate media are very concerned with it, and will resist any attempts to change their stylistic preferences.  Gay activists spent years after Stonewall lobbying the New York Times to use "gay" instead of "homosexual," for example, and I'm of at least two minds about that.  It reminds me of the struggle I had in high school over my hair length.  "It's not such a big deal," my principal told me.  "Why won't you cut it?"  "If it's not such a big deal," I retorted, "why are you ready to throw me out of school if I don't?"  (In the end I did cut my hair, because it wasn't a life-and-death issue, but I always grew it as long as I could before cutting it after that, just to keep pushing the limits.  And it was the principal who ended up looking bad in most students' eyes, not me.)

I don't know why the AP elected "illegal immigrant" as a term of choice in their stylebook.  They claim it's "accurate and neutral," though "illegal" is a loaded term in any discourse, and the racist Right loves the word, though they don't care about legality in any other area.  Still, "illegal" is in many cases accurate, and I don't see that "undocumented" is an improvement: it still implies that the person is lacking something they should have.  If the Right adopted it, "undocumented" would be equally pejorative in a month at most.  What matters is not the word, but how it's used and by whom.  (I pointed out to my friend that "gay" went from a hard-won positive word to a schoolyard pejorative in less than a decade; she couldn't seem to grasp the signficance of that change, and indeed took a very strict linguistic-determinist line throughout our discussion.)

Garcia points to an increase in the use of "illegal immigrant" since the AP designated the term, which is hardly surprising: a term with institutional support will tend to be used in that institution.  And of course bigots love terms that are not negative in themselves, though they become so with practice; such terms are known as "dog whistles," because their overtones are audible only to those in the know, not to normal human ears.  But that's true of all language, and I contend that getting bogged down in squabbles over terminology can be a distraction from more substantive issues, a distraction that our opponents will welcome.

My friend insisted that "It's important to point out that we don't criminalize people or status, 'just' behavior. It mattered during the Red Scare, when some argued that being a Communist was criminal." In reality the distinction between "status" and behavior is as permeable as any other border.  People who behave in a certain way will be assumed to do so because of their nature, and acts can function as markers of "status."  In everyday speech and thought, a person who steals is a thief, a person who lies is a liar, depending on your view of the person in question: you may distinguish between her conduct and her being if you want to excuse her, or not if if you don't.  And this vagueness extends to elite legal discourse: in Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law, Justice White equated "consensual sodomy with 'homosexuality' per se, criminal activity, and all 'homosexual conduct'" (Marta T. Zingo, Sex/Gender Outsiders (Praeger, 1998).

In the case of membership in the Communist Party, there isn't even a status of "being a Communist" to distinguish: one "is" a Communist because one joined the Party and participates in its programs and activities.  My friend declared "Communism was criminalized, and that was struck down as unconstitutional precisely because status could not be criminalized."  And here, interestingly, my friend was completely wrong, though as a law professor she is in a position to know better.  The Communist Control Act against membership in the Party was never "struck down," and so is still on the books, mostly unenforced.  (This means it can be used again someday as expedient.)  I found two relevant court cases online: in Communist Party v. Catherwood (1961), the Supreme Court held that the Communist Control Act didn't bar the party from participating in New York's unemployment insurance system.  "In 1973 a federal district court in Arizona decided that the act was unconstitutional and Arizona could not keep the party off the ballot in the 1972 general election (Blawis v. Bolin)."  I took a look at the opinion in Blawis v. Bolin, and it was argued and decided on the basis of the First and Fourteenth Amendments; "status" seems not to have been involved.

It also occurs to me that in court, the argument doesn't involve the best, most rational arguments about the merits of a case, but the legislation and precedents that counsel thinks most likely to persuade the individual judge, based on his or her known biases; and decisions are often based on technicalities peripheral to real human interests.  Therefore, even if the Supreme Court had overturned the Communist Control Act on grounds of "status," it wasn't necessarily the most important issue involved.  I get the impression that my friend was trying to throw dust in the eyes of a layman; it might have worked if I were even twenty years younger.

My friend wanted to blame the Right for the blurring and distortion of the status/act difference, but I pointed out that the advocates for same-sex marriage do it all the time, by claiming homosexuality as a biologically determined, inborn status.  The Supreme Court of Canada based its ruling in favor of same-sex marriage partly on that claim, so it's not limited to thoughtless laypeople.  The best that can be said about the claim is that so far it's unsettled: we have no idea what shapes sexual orientation, and the research to date is fatally flawed.  To base a claim for equality on inconclusive science is to run the risk that the science may yet be concluded in a way that invalidates your claim -- and what will you do then?

But more important, the status claim is irrelevant.  When the Supreme Court overturned state laws against "interracial marriage" in 1967, it did not declare that Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving should be allowed to marry because they had a biologically determined 'racial orientation' that impelled them to marry only persons of the opposite race.  Insofar as "status" was relevant, it was the race of the bride and the groom, as in the case of same-sex marriage it would be their biological sex, not their "gender" or their sexual orientation.

Going back to immigration, then, to say that someone entered the US illegally is not to criminalize that person, though of course people do tend to essentialize people who've broken the law, if they find it convenient to do so.  Few Republican loyalists thought of Richard Nixon as a criminal, even though he indubitably was one, would have been removed from office for his crimes if he hadn't resigned preemptively, and should have faced criminal charges as well.  That's another problem.  Nixon was a criminal, but so was Martin Luther King, Jr., along with many other people who engaged in civil disobedience during the Civil Rights struggle.  (That's not insignificant: it was difficult for many respectable black people to face arrest and imprisonment, not only because it put them into the hands of abusive police, but because Nice People Didn't Break the Law and Go to Jail, only Trash.)  Jesus of Nazareth was a criminal, executed for insurrection by the Romans.  Many early Christians were criminals under Roman law, for refusing to offer due honor to the gods, including Caesar.  The leaders of the American Revolution would certainly have been hanged if their rebellion had failed.  Sometimes breaking the law is a positive good, when the law is in the wrong.  This is disturbing to contemplate for people whose attitude to the law is still that of a child.  An adult takes the law seriously, but doesn't see it as sacred.

I pointed out that the problem with "illegal immigrant" is less the "illegal" part than "immigrant."  Americans have always been ambivalent at best about the waves of immigrants that entered the country after them or their parents.  The more I watch the debate, the more obvious it is to me that, as I've suspected before, the most vehement opponents of "illegal immigration" consider all immigrants illegal.  Substituting "undocumented" for "illegal" won't change their attitude; they'll recognize it -- correctly, for what that's worth -- as a euphemism, a distraction from the issues; not that they are interested in the issues either.  Oddly, my friend conceded the point but then backtracked, because "language does matter."

Garcia makes a revealing comment himself:

Another misconception is that the vast majority of migrant workers currently out of status sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night. Actually, almost half enter the U.S. with a valid tourist or work visa and overstay their allotted time. Many go to school, find a job, get married and start a family. And some even join the Marine Corps, like Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, who was the first combat veteran to die in the Iraq War. While he was granted American citizenship posthumously, there are another 38,000 non-citizens in uniform, including undocumented immigrants, defending our country.

Suppose that the situation were otherwise, and that the vast majority of "migrant workers out of status" did "sneak across our southern border in the middle of the night."  Does Garcia agree that such sneaky invaders should be sent back pronto?  At least some of the poster kids for the DREAM Act were brought across the border by their parents in just that way.  Garcia's using "status" tactics here -- some immigrants are Sneaky Dirty Trash, but these are Clean, Upstanding Americans! -- and his resort to flag-waving and hiding behind the uniforms of Our Troops is beneath contempt.

Garcia concludes with a last appeal to St. George:

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell warned that one must be constantly on guard against a ready-made phrase that "anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain." But Orwell also wrote that "from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs" -- just like the U.S. Supreme Court did.

"Undocumented immigrant" or "migrant worker out of status" are also ready-made phrases intended to anaesthetize a portion of one's brain, however, and Garcia is a hard-working functionary in the Ministry of Truth, an Outer Party member using worn-out prefabricated phrases to prey on the public; he's just in a different faction.  Oddly, my friend declared to me that both "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant" are "slurs", though "the former has more serious implications."  She went on to declare that the Right is "ignorant," and she wasn't going to bother with them.  If "undocumented immigrant" is a slur, why are Robert Garcia and other immigrant advocates pressing for its use as the acceptable term?  "Left wing doesn't want to piss off 'documented' immigrants, who want to distinguish themselves."  That doesn't make a lot of sense -- and I have to recall that she was writing her end of the exchange on her smartphone, which kept cutting her postings short -- because if it's a slur, it would "piss off" the "documented."

Even if I concede -- which I don't -- that the rabble are too uneducated for rational discourse, and so must be manipulated by Newspeak generated by their educated superiors, where is the rational discourse going on, and for whom?  My friend (who's very upset about the dearth of "critical thinking" among Americans) is a highly educated person, presumably the kind of person who is competent to grapple with issues. Yet she had nothing to offer but slogans and overt misstatements of fact.  In this she appears to be all too typical of the educated American classes, and that -- not the ignorance of the rabble -- looks to me to be the real threat to the future of humanity: self-styled elitists who aren't as superior as they like to think.

And yet I have to admit that somewhere in me lurks a naive child who believe that people with college degrees, people with jobs that don't get their hands dirty, are not just smarter but nicer than people who haven't.  That's why I get even angrier at nice educated liberals who distort facts, blur important differences, and ignore logic than I do at blue-collar folk who do the same.  The nice educated liberals should know better, and they think they do, but they don't.  Not automatically, not by virtue of having a degree.

The Common Clay of the New West

I'm grateful to the Facebook friend who passed along this image today, for confirming what I'd long suspected: at least some, and probably many, of the vocal opponents of "illegal immigration" can't tell the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. In their eyes, all immigrants are illegal.

The giveaway was the part about "a tax free business for 7 yrs". According to Snopes.com, versions of this claim have been circulating in the US since at least the 1960s:

In Miami, it's Cubans who are said to be getting all these government goodies. In Detroit, it's recently arrived Arabs. And all over the U.S., Asians are rumored to be getting those tax breaks, free shoes, new cars, and interest-free loans.

All those groups are legal immigrants. Hostility toward Latin Americans, which long predates the rise of undocumented workers from south of the border, has more to do with their accents than their immigration status. (And it's not irrelevant that white Americans have treated Americans of African descent as undesirable aliens all along.) Snopes also reports that the same rumors circulate in Australia and England; I'd bet they turn up in non-English speaking countries too.

The part about driver's licenses is also false: only two states, Washington and New Mexico, issue driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. Nor are these free gifts: applicants must pass the normal test requirements to get a license; LA Police Chief Charlie Beck, who advocates licensing the undocumented in California, says as much, and that such licenses "should differ from those granted to citizens: 'It could be a provisional license, it could be a nonresident license.'" This also indicates that the real target is immigrants, regardless of their status.

I've quoted before this excerpt from Harvey A. Daniels. Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983):

In Chicago, during the Christmas season of 1978, twenty-six Spanish-speaking people were killed in a series of tragic fires. Many of them perished because they could not understand the instructions that firemen shouted in English. When the city promptly instituted a program to teach the firefighters a few emergency phrases in Spanish, a storm of protest arose. "This is America," proclaimed the head of the Chicago Firefighters Union, "let them speak English." A local newspaper columnist suggested, with presumably innocent irony: "Let's stop catering to the still-flickering nationalistic desires to perpetuate the Latin heritage." The city's top-rated television newscaster used his bylined editorial minute to inveigh against the Spanish-teaching program in the firehouses.

Americans living and working in other countries have no obligation to "learn the language", of course, because they're Americans. (Americans who are good at languages, and are interested in learning them, are widely regarded as freaks or traitors.)

I challenged my friend on this material, and she freely agreed: "How do you tell the difference, they look the same. Just catch them at the borders. Employers need to screen better." She added, "I could use some target practice." Notice that: you can't tell the difference between legal and illegal immigrants, they look the same. (But different from "real Americans," I guess.) As I just pointed out, even legal immigrants (and descendants of people brought here generations ago by force) will be the target of campaigns of lies, alleging that they get privileges that "real" Americans are denied.

There's a lot more wrong in that image, of course: the implication that the US should adopt North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan as our role models; the fact that people killed at those borders are not immigrants looking for work -- often they're suspect as spies or terrorists, which (contrary to the American racist propaganda) is not true of Mexicans coming north. (Just sticking with Korea, the North and South are still in a state of armed truce, unlike the US and Mexico; and they have a long history of mutual infiltration for sabotage and assassination.) And, of course, immigration, legal or illegal, has nothing to do with the American debt: that's more a product of our own penchant for illegally invading other countries to get their oil.

The crowning irony is that the United States wouldn't exist if not for immigrants, legal or otherwise. Much of our westward expansion involved white settlers who moved illegally onto land that belonged to Indians by treaty, and then demanded that the government ratify their theft. Texas was stolen from Mexico by American immigrants, which I guess is a good argument against letting Anglos onto any land anywhere. If my friend and other nativists really cared about legality, they wouldn't need to augment their complaints by spreading racist propaganda.