curated citations to news sources
It has never been easy to be an immigrant to the United States – for most economic, linguistic, and cultural barriers make life here a struggle, even if they were escaping a worse life elsewhere. The utterly evil bill that just squeaked through in Congress, among other harms, aims to make many immigrants’ lives go from difficult to terrifying nightmare. It gives ICE a truly outrageous amount of money, and we’ve already seen ICE turn since January into a faceless, unaccountable Gestapo grabbing workers, nursing mothers, sick children off the streets, out of their cars, from their homes, indifferent to what their legal status is, sometimes sweeping up citizens in their frenzy, sending the captives to domestic concentration camps or to gulags overseas or deporting them to countries they’ve never visited or left decades ago. Many people are simply disappearing, their friends, family, employers, coworkers simply unable to find out where they’ve been taken. Thousands have been directly impacted; tens of millions are indirectly impacted as they find themselves living in fear of these fates, and it is ravaging both mental health and the ability to continue to participate in everyday life and earn a living. Many are, with good reason, afraid to leave their homes.
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There’s a racist/white supremacist fantasy that only a certain kind of white and descended from Europeans who got here in the seventeenth-to-early-twentieth centuries is a real American – a descendant of immigrants, but the right kind at the right time (until recently, Protestant was part of the criterion; Jews and Catholics were outsiders to these nativists). One idea driving the claims Joe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected in 2020 was that he was elected by city people and by women and Black and brown people, including naturalized immigrants and their children, while Trump got the majority of the white Protestant rural, suburban, and male vote, and some of the latter regarded themselves as “real Americans” and the rest of us as not so.
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We need to defend immigrants but also value them and respect their contributions, and we need a we in which there is no them, a we that does not divide us, a we as big as this country. And maybe we have it already: we the people. That opening line of the Constitution,does not break down by immigration status, race, gender or other criteria (though obviously it was a deeply discriminatory society, but this rhetoric transcended it for at least a few lines). The other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence begins with the we of its signatories, the we who hold these truths, but it is a proclamation that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That’s a we worth reclaiming and defending.
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