Hispanic Fanatic

As I’ve mentioned before, my family emigrated from El Salvador. But I have never set foot in that country.

The nearest I have come to this familial motherland was when I was fourteen, and my mother took me to Nicaragua. As part of the trip, we climbed to the edge of a volcano (yes, my mom took me cool places when I was a child). On the climb down, my mother pulled me aside and pointed to some verdant mountains in the distance.

“That is El Salvador,” she said.

This glimpse is the extent of my first-hand experience with my family’s birthplace.

A natural question is, why did my mother and I stop at Nicaragua? Why didn’t we keep going into El Salvador?

The answer is simple: We didn’t want to die.

At the time, (circa 1985), my mother was on a Salvadoran government hit list. If she exited a plane there, she would be shot. Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating doesn’t realize how ruthless and bloodthirsty the junta running El Salvador was at that time. My mother was a rabble-rouser in the United States, and she spoke out against the Salvadoran government (see my previous post on this). This got her noticed in her homeland. They certainly weren’t going to send some international assassination squad after her in the Midwest (it’s not a Bruckheimer movie for damn sakes), but my mother found out through her friends in El Salvador that she was on the small list of Americans who would be quickly picked up if she ever returned. Two of her siblings had already been murdered (see my previous post on this as well), so this was no joke.

For this excellent logistical reason, we were not going to El Salvador any time soon. The war has since ended, of course, and my mother has returned a few times. But I haven’t yet made the trip.

Time, money, and the myriad responsibilities of adulthood have prevented me from packing a suitcase and yelling, “Next stop, the tiny village of San Vicente.”  In fact, although I’ve lived in several cities and seen more of America than most people have, my international jaunts are limited. Besides that journey to Nicaragua, I’ve been to Mexico (which will be the subject of a future post) and traveled about nine feet into Canada once. I finally made it to Europe a few years ago, where my wife and I hit London and Paris. And that’s it.

But with all the dream destinations in the world that I have yet to conquer – drinking wine in Italy, diving off the coast of Australia, trekking to the North Pole – why am I hung up on visiting a tiny country best known for warfare and which my family abandoned a generation ago?  

After all, few people go to El Salvador unless they have family there. I suppose there are those mega-travelers who hit every nation no matter how small or impoverished. But aside from that, people generally don’t get any closer to the place than the rainforests of Costa Rica or the beaches of Belize.

However, for those of us who are first-generation, there is always the pull of a land that we have never seen, the place where our parents come from. Their memories and stories have not been decayed by time, and we feel irrational nostalgia for a place barely removed from us. We ponder how we would have turned out if we were born and raised there (I have since found out that this is metaphysically impossible… but that’s another post or maybe even a different blog altogether).

This yearning for a lost homeland is not shared by most Americans. For example, my wife is descended from German immigrants who came over so long ago that she has no idea when they arrived or what their names were. Her desire to visit Berlin is roughly equal to her interest in roadtripping to Delaware. In contrast, one of my best friends is first-generation Serbian, and his life was incomplete until he walked through Sarajevo.

Similarly, I want to see the place where my mother and aunt grew up, and the nation where several of my cousins were born, and the focal point of so much joy and misery in the history of my family.

And of course, I have more incentive to see El Salvador ever since Cousin #8 moved back there (this will be the subject of a future post).

So I hope to someday go beyond the fleeting image of that landscape I viewed from a distant vantage point when I was a teenager. For all I know, it might be decades from now, when I’m an old man doing some kind of crazy circle-of-life final journey. But I will stand on top of that lush mountain that I saw long ago and say, “Damn, I finally made it.”

Leave it the Onion to point out the irony of constructing a fence along the Mexican border. The Department of Homeland Security is using its authority to waive environmental and land-management laws to build this wall, which leads to the Onion’s punch line of “Hey, sometimes you’ve got to break the rules to do what you know is right—unless that involves crossing a border, of course.”

Yes, massive government agencies can ignore laws at their whim. But desperate people in Mexico must stay poverty-stricken because they haven’t gone through proper channels. If you’re keeping track, we’re breaking laws to prevent people from breaking laws. But we insist that if these people only followed the law, we wouldn’t have to waive other laws to stop them – exactly.

I find this all the more hilarious because one of the top arguments in the vilification of the undocumented is that “they’re breaking the law,” which is designed to end the debate before it begins. This point of view would have more validity if we weren’t a nation of speeders who cheat on our taxes and steal office supplies from our jobs.

But let’s assume that all the people who take this position – that the law is sacrosanct with zero tolerance for violations – have never broken any rules themselves, even for such minor justifications as, say, the very economic survival of their families.

Why then does all the preaching about the sanctity of the law suddenly get tossed aside when the rules are inconvenient to our government? If we’re standing up for the rule of law, why is admirable to kick regulations to the curb when they get in the way of what we want to do? How is this much different from an illegal who jumps a fence to do what he feels he has to do in order to survive, regardless of the law?

For the record, I’m not opposed to the building of a fence because I think it’s unfriendly to Mexico, or somehow rude to illegals. Those arguments are irrelevant.

I’m opposed because it’s a massive waste of money that isn’t going to work. People who are determined enough will dig under a wall or hop over it or go around it or find some way to teleport through it, David Copperfield-style.

But now I can add the charge of hypocrisy to my objections. 

As promised, I will now respond to the comments for my post from a few days ago, which addressed illegal immigration. Charles had some sympathetic words for the undocumented, while Rogerg believed illegal aliens hurt American workers.

But it was Zeezil who really went to town on this subject. In fact, I suspect that s/he has cut and pasted this rant many times across the internet, because I refuse to believe this particular manifesto was typed up exclusively for the Fanatic.

In any case, Zeezil’s dizzying array of stats, quotes, and accusations are simply too numerous to analyze on a point-by-point basis. If you like, see his book-length comment for yourself. I will react to only a select few of Zeezil’s ideas that captured my attention.

S/he is correct that it is not inherently “racist, bigoted or xenophobic” to want to stem the tide of illegal immigration. No doubt, most of the advocates for a closed-door policy have none of these toxic attributes. People who do have these traits, of course, have an easy straw man in the illegal immigrant, but that is beside the point.

So we’ll give Zeezil that fairly non-controversial point. But I was struck by his/her exclamation that “illegal aliens, their facilitators and benefactors” are the true bigots. I don’t know what definition of “racist” Zeezil is using, but it’s bizarre to claim that anyone who proposes a path to citizenship for an illegal is being xenophobic. If so, it is the best reverse psychology ever. Similarly mystifying is the assertion that “political power is the real reason” some people are less inclined to kick out every undocumented worker. I find it hard to imagine a less influential political force than a ragtag coalition of bleeding-heart liberals and poverty-stricken individuals who can’t even vote. This is not exactly a major lobbying force.

In addition, Zeezil refers to the “children of illegals” costing us a lot of money. Regardless of whether or not this is true, we must parse that phrase for its more complicated meaning. The “children of illegals” can, in many cases, be called something else: citizens. This is because, of course, anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen, regardless of parentage. There are movements underway to change this, and I’ll have something to say about that in a future post. But for the foreseeable future, it is the law of the land, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, no less.

Speaking of kids, Zeezil also brings up the tragedy in Minnesota, where an illegal immigrant crashed into a school bus and killed several children. This is undeniably horrifying. It is, however, also irrelevant to the main debate, unless no children have ever died in car accidents caused by U.S. citizens.

This anecdotal evidence, along with a casual mixing of percentage and whole-number stats (apples to oranges, as it were) is designed to show that illegals are to blame for, well, just about everything. This demonization is part of the problem I bemoaned in my original post.

The funny thing is that I’m not violently opposed to some of Zeezil’s points. I say as much in my initial post that immigration is a brutally complex problem that defies easy solution, and we will likely have to adopt a mixture of conservative and liberal ideas to resolve it. However, fear-mongering and questionable evidence are not going to help the situation. So I hope we can move the debate to a higher, more logic-based level.

I’ve gotten a number of responses to my previous post, which was about the immigration problem. While I would love to attack or congratulate each person who commented, I can’t squeeze in the time right now. You see, I’m having that most American of crises (car trouble) and have to concentrate on maintaining the wheels. Let me point out, however, that Ruben Navarrette has just written about the contradictions inherent in any discussion about illegal immigration. His points will have to suffice until I can devote the attention that the subject deserves. So stay tuned, because I’ll post a reply this week (and I’ll later post about my damn car… really, it’s kind of a funny story and it all relates).

Here’s an update on my last post. This Marine finally got his citizenship, and just days after I wrote about it. I assume that the timing is not a coincidence. Well, CNN’s coverage may have helped too…

Anyway, since I started writing about immigration, I might as well go all out today. I figure, hey, why not talk it? After all, this barely examined topic has never been the subject of much discussion. So I guess it’s up to me. Here goes:

When it comes to immigration, I’m for it.

That simple sentence is adequate to provoke death threats in certain parts of the country, and I could just leave my thoughts at that. However, I have a reason for taunting a squadron of Minutemen vigilantes to show up at my front door.

No, it’s not that we’re going to solve the immigration problem within the confines of this blog (although that would be most cool). Rather, I’m hoping for basic acknowledgement of the complexity of this issue, which I admit might be a bit much to ask in a political atmosphere where everybody is either a gun-toting racist or a freeloading parasite, according to whom you listen to.

As I understand it, people who take a hard line claim that illegal immigration is unfair to those who applied legally. Now, I’m sure that it’s frustrating on the principle of the thing, but has anyone ever been denied citizenship because a Mexican got here first?

I’ve also heard that that undocumented workers cost taxpayers too much and drive up crime.  But in actuality, many studies say these workers have a net positive impact on the economy, and I’ve never seen a convincing statistic on skyrocketing crime rates among illegals that wasn’t eventually refuted on Snopes.com.

Finally, we’ve heard that a path to citizenship for undocumented workers only encourages others to come here illegally, or that such an approach is amnesty. But my understanding is that amnesty means a clean slate; every proposal I’ve seen involves paying a hefty fine. And do these individuals really need any more encouragement? They’re already leaving their families, ditching their homeland, and risking death for a shot at a job at Wal-Mart.

Again, people who are concerned about illegal immigration are not all redneck jingoists. No doubt, most are sincere and principled individuals.

But a Hispanic has to ask, would some of these people feel as passionately about this issue if the undocumented were illegal whites? And then there is the hypocrisy of those well-off Americans who advocate for the removal of every illegal. They must recognize that these same workers “make their masters-of-the-universe lifestyles possible” (in the words of Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz).

To be fair, people who push for a more open immigration policy have their own issues to confront. While it’s true that we can’t deport every undocumented worker, does this logically follow that we just stop trying to police the border? And while it’s also true that undocumented workers tend to do jobs other Americans won’t take, are they driving down wages and therefore, undercutting a decent wage for citizens?

We’ve heard that it would be an economic disaster to kick out every illegal, and that the cultural impact of recent immigrants is vital. Yes, but does that mean we just let in anyone at any time?

You see the contradictions and issues between these polarizing stances. But few people can even acknowledge that this bedevils simplistic answers. Perhaps it’s because, as so many have noted, illegal immigrants are a very effective boogyman, especially in an election year. Maybe accepting the fact that no solution is perfect, and none is likely to be implemented any time soon, is the first step toward resolving this mess.

I’ll be upfront about my bias. I was fortunate enough to be born in America. This is not an accomplishment, which is what too many people think. Rather, it is just good luck.

Like many Americans, I have relatives who emigrated here within the past generation. Most of them came here legally. Some of them did not. In subsequent posts, I’ll talk more about them and how they have contributed to this country.

As pointed out here, the first U.S. service member killed in the Iraq War was an immigrant from Guatemala.

The Marine profiled in this news story is from my mother’s home country of El Salvador, and he is not a U.S. citizen.

There are more than 20,000 “green-card warriors” in the U.S. military, and many of them are getting shot at in the Middle East. They fight under the U.S. flag, even as millions of citizens back home debate the best way to kick them out of the country.

It may surprise some people that non-citizens are allowed to fight in the U.S. military. But we have always embraced immigrants when they are convenient – when they can mow the lawn or take care of the babies or step up to be cannon fodder. After they have served their purpose, we give long speeches about how the sanctity of the nation demands that they be banished, and quickly before they take over.

Now, should a non-citizen die in combat, he or she receives automatic (albeit posthumous) citizenship. This has happened several times during this war. Nobody has protested this policy, because of course, a deceased Mexican-American will never move in next door to citizens and make them nervous. It seems to be our country’s way of saying, “Some of you have to die before we’ll agree that you’re fit to live among us. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Personally, I think anybody willing to face death in the service of America should get immediate citizenship upon induction, no paperwork needed. I have other ideas about the citizenship process, but that will have to wait for a future post.

Also, at some point I will go into detail about my personal stake in this story: My cousin was on his second deployment to Iraq before his citizenship papers came through. Again, I’ll talk more about him and his adventures in a future post.