Half of all informal immigrants that are living and working in the United States in an undocumented fashion did not cross a desert or swim a river, they came in through an airport or another official boarder crossing. They filled out their visitor paper work and got a visa. It is only when the visa expired and they did not leave for home that they became "illegal".
This has been the way things work in the nation for generations. I have had Irish cousins come for a few weeks and stay for more than a year. Hell, the matriarch of our sprawling Irish clan did it when she was a girl. She came and worked as a house servant in the Detroit area with two of her cousins. The cousins got caught and sent home, but Herself (as she is called) managed to hear about the raid and stay away.
In New York City there are an estimated 30,000 Irish who are here without proper documentation. They are the majority of undocumented Irish in the nation, but you can find stone workers from Belfast on up scale construction projects in Atlanta. If you look around in kitchens from Bangor to San Francisco you will find dishwashers with a brogue. They are no less workers in the shadow economy than the fellows who hang around the Home Depot looking for a day of low wage back breaking work.
So the question becomes what happens to if some dark haired, dark eyed, but pale skinned son of Erin is in Arizona. Does anyone here think that he would really be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as say a person (whether they are a U.S citizen or not) of Aztec ancestry? Me neither.
There is a reason that the folks from FAIR did not try to pass this kind of law in New York. The fear of the other that many white folks feel about the permanently tanned informal immigrants won't play there. Why is that? Because the Northern European informal immigrants don't register on the radar of people like the founder of FAIR John Tanton.
Mr. Tanton is rather infamous (and becoming more so all the time thanks to the work of the Rachel Maddow Show and the Southern Poverty Law Center) for having said:
I have come to the point of view that for European American society and culture to continue to persist requires a European American majority, and a clear one at that.
If you are looking for a European American majority, then informal immigrants from Ireland and other Europeans nations is not a problem. It is only those scary brown people that you want to be sure to keep out.
Now I know that most everyone reading this is going to be saying "duh, its racist on the face of it" but the fact is that it is not just Republicans who subscribe to this point of view. There are plenty of Democrats who feel like we should be taking stronger and stronger measures to find and punish those here without permission.
The things is, if we are to really address the issue of the shadow economy informal and undocumented immigration creates; if we are to try to break up the smuggling cartels and other organized crime entities that benefit from this situation, we can not go at it in a manner that based on race baiting. In Arizona there is a climate where people who have an accent and dark skin are looked on with suspicion. This new law means that regardless of their actual status they can be singled out and be required to provide proof of their status.
It is the obvious problem with uneven enforcement that makes this law so pernicious. Who does an immigrant look like? I am of the first generation of my family, on my mothers side, to be born in this country. I am white and have brown hair and blue eyes, do I look like I might be an informal immigrant? I should, I look a hell of a lot like my cousins who overstayed their visas to earn some money with under the table work, just like our Grandmother did.
The "Papers Please" law is problematic for a lot of reasons, but the worst is that it continues to stoke racism by its very nature. This is not what my mothers family wanted form their adoptive nation, it is not what anyone should be willing to be put up with in America in the 21st Century.
The floor is yours. |
