The Immigrant Experience

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez is a series of articles and essays about adapting to a new culture and a new language after fleeing to the U.S.  to escape an imminent threat in the Dominican Republic which was then ruled by a dictatorship led by Rafael Trujillo.  As I wrote here before, I have long been a enthusiastic follower of Alvarez's writing. It has always seemed amazing to me that someone could arrive here as a child with only a rudimentary grasp of English and end up being recognized as one of the greats among contemporary authors writing in English.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a novel about the flight from horrific violence which has driven so many Mexicans to seek refuge in the United States.  The author spent four years researching and writing the story of how a mother and her young son traverse the length of Mexico overland while under constant threat from cartel gangsters and the often corrupt and equally violent police. Much of the vertiginous journey is on top of railcars of north-bound trains referred to as La Bestia. The final leg is under the guidance of human traffickers through the unforgiving Sonoran Desert which has claimed countless migrant lives.

Dreaming of Home by Cristina Jimenez tells the story of being brought to the U.S. as a child by her parents who were fleeing violence and a chaotic economy in Ecuador.  Jimenez recounts the trauma of growing up in a country in which she felt unwanted and in constant fear of deportation due to a lack of documentation.  Eventually, fellow students and teachers helped her toward the courage to speak out about the fundamental human rights due to her and her generation of young immigrants.  She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of  United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, and she is currently a Distinguished Lecturer with the City College of New York’s Colin Powell School and a co-instructor with Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. Jimenez was instrumental in United We Dream’s successful campaign for President Obama to sign Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) into law.

Something to Declare

An online search failed to turn up anything interesting to read, so I started poking around in my book shelves.  I found a copy of Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez that I had somehow never read.  That was a surprise because she is one of my favorites and I have read most of what she has written.

The book is a collection of short articles and essays written over a period of years about the author's experiences as an immigrant to the U.S.  She recounts her early childhood in the Dominican Republic within a large and prosperous family, including her three sisters. Her father was a doctor and her beloved grandfather a cultural affairs delegate to the United Nations. What soon became obvious was that status and wealth were no barriers to the scrutiny of the dictator Trujillo's secret police.

The family's vulnerability was increased by the fact that Alvarez's father owned a prohibited firearm and he was a participant in the clandestine resistance to the dictatorship. When a secret police vehicle started blocking their driveway at night it was clear that the time had come to escape the island.  

Permission to travel to the United States was narrowly obtained on the pretext of advanced surgical studies by the father.  The family's wealth and connections allowed them to fly to New York where they found asylum, and thus began Julia's challenge of learning to navigate a new culture and a new language. Her long list of well-received books in her adopted language is a testament to her arduous but successful journey.  

The Elephant in the Room

... and the probability of detection.

Trump's justification for imposing tariffs on Canada is to force reduction of cross-border ingress of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants.  The contribution  of Canada to both of those unauthorized imports is 1%.  So, even if Trump's initiative in regard to Canada was 100% effective, the impact would affect 1% of the purported problem.  In exchange for the unlikely achievement of that outcome both countries will probably see catastrophic inflation and job losses.  But that is not the elephant.

The real elephant (driver) in the case of fentanyl, of course, is demand.  The real questions worth exploring are why the demand for illicit drugs is so high in the U.S. and what would be required to effectively reduce that demand.  Better support for behavioral health services seems a much more plausible way to attack the substance abuse issue.  What do you suppose  the chances are that such a policy will be supported by Trump and RFK Jr. ?

See:

What is motivating Trump’s reckless trade war?
Robert Reich

Immigration Reform for Dummies

 I don't know if there is that title in the works, but it seems like there is a large potential market.

Some possible chapter headings:

• Immigrants - documented and undocumented  - have significantly lower rates of criminal offenses than U.S. citizens.
• Most illegal drugs are brought into the country by citizens through normal ports of entry.
• Undocumented immigrants make up a large percentage of agricultural workers who are vital to the U. S. economy.
• People seeking asylum are driven by life-threatening circumstances which supercede any other threats including the possibility of rejection or expulsion at the border.
• Intolerable living conditions in Central and South America are attributable in a large part to centuries of U.S. foreign policy which has undermined democracy and favored corporate monoculture and mining interests.
• The billions proposed to deport immigrants would be better spent on supporting economic development in the immigrants' countries of origin.

 * * *

Trump’s neofascism is here now. Here are 10 things you can do to resist
- Robert Reich

Wikipedia

The Last Chapter

In the last post I left Lévi-Strauss stranded in the Brazilian jungle.  In fact, he did not end his book there, but allowed himself a diversion in the last chapter to talking about the state of relations between France and its southern and eastern colonies in the mid-1950s.  He lamented the fact that French culture had not perceived the opportune moment for a thorough self-examination that might avert the looming international disasters of those times.  The suggestion made by Lévi-Strauss was that France should offer full, unrestricted citizenship to the 25 million people living under colonial administration.  To support his argument he cited the brave example of the U.S. which had opened its borders a century earlier to permit the entry of millions of the poorest, often uneducated masses of immigrants; and he pointed to the great benefits which such a decision had yielded.

With the wisdom of hindsight we can now look back to see that Lévi-Strauss' hopes were far too late in their expression.  By the mid-'50s there was no turning back possible in the face of the independence movements in Algeria and Vietnam.  Sadly, we can also now see clearly how the political leadership in the U.S. would show itself to be just as blind to the dangers as the French, abandoning its post-war recovery to pursue a disasterous rerun of the French colonial experience in Vietnam.  And, then, unbelievably, to go on to another decade of the same thing in Iraq.

And, now, Europe and the U.S. are again shutting their borders and ensuring more and bigger violent confrontations that some attention to history might have avoided.  No one can say we haven't been warned.