I was coming back from an academic conference
in Edmonton. I had only been in Canada a
few days. It was a short stay, but a welcome
relief from life south of the 49th parallel nonetheless. As we inched through the endlessly snaking queue
I regretted not staying longer.
My regret was amplified by being sandwiched
among a bunch of returning cruise ship passengers. Saddled with mounds of luggage, handbags,
shopping bags, backpacks, and gaudily wrapped boxes of all sorts, fumbling with
their passports and declaration forms, they were miserable company. To make matters worse, the overfed, loudly
dressed, loudmouthed couple behind me would not stop fuming about how they were being inconvenienced and
lamenting why they should have to
wait on line and jump through so many hoops to get back into their own
country.
I bit the tip of my tongue to keep from
asking them to please be quiet, that we were all in the same boat and should
just deal with it…but deep down, I couldn’t help agreeing with them. Travel to
and from the United States, post-9/11, has become an ordeal. It’s particularly galling when the
“international” travel is to one of our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico.
I began mulling over the idea a few months
ago when, attending another conference in San Diego, I took a day trip to
Tijuana. I hadn’t been there for several
years. Friends warned me about the drug
gang violence on the border they’d heard about, urged me not to go, the risk
wasn’t worth it.
They needn’t have worried. I had a pleasant and relaxing afternoon in
TJ. Feeling pretty good about life and
the world in general, I headed back toward the border. As I neared the pedestrian crossing at San
Ysidro, my heart sank. Even though it
was ten o’clock on a weekday evening, the line to the border station was over
four blocks long and stagnant. After a spell,
a young man offered to help me jump the line for ten bucks. My impatience getting the better of my sense
of fair play, I followed the guy. He
came through and got me a spot in line about fifty feet from the entrance.
Even then, it took 45 minutes just to get in
the door and another twenty to get to the Customs and Border Protection post
inside. Having a lot of time to study
the posters on the corridor walls, I noticed one depicting a CBP officer of deliberately
indeterminate ethnicity, her head tilted slightly upward, gazing meaningfully
into the distance. The poster was captioned,
“We Are the Face of Our Nation.”
The face of our nation was not particularly welcoming
that night. In fact, it verged on the outright
hostile. Watching a clutch of CBP
officers hustle several dazed, handcuffed men past our line made me
uncomfortable enough. Arriving near the
head of the line did little to allay my worries. The officers at the windows barked orders at
people to come forward, stay put, present identification, declare goods,
etc. I felt badly for the fellow in
front of me who made the mistake of putting his toes a few inches over the red
line we had to wait behind to be called: “Sir…SIR!!! Get BACK behind the LINE!!!”
I was somewhat more fortunate. The officer I ended up speaking with was curt
and peremptory, gimlet-eyed, suspicious.
He looked at me, at my ID, and at me again.
“Are you bringing anything back from
Mexico?”
“No, just myself,” I said with a forced
smile. The officer glared at me,
unimpressed with my feeble attempt at humor.
He jerked his head grudgingly toward the exit door. I had been granted dispensation to go
home.
While the American CBP officer I encountered
on my return from Canada was a little more courteous than the one I faced at
San Ysidro, I still couldn’t help but feel as if I was somehow a suspect. I contrast this with my experience with the
Canadian border official when I arrived.
Her questions were direct and to the point, but civil—What was the
purpose of my visit? How long was I
staying? Absent was the ever-present undercurrent
of suspicion I always seem to encounter when dealing with our own border
officers.
Yes, yes, I know the reasons why. We’re at war, illegal immigration is a threat
to honest native-born working people and a drain on the public purse, we have a
right to control our borders. However,
our attitude toward borders and immigration is a reflection of our national
character beyond the immediate issue. In
other words, our pervasive feeling of being threatened has led us to create and
support the xenophobic policies that give rise to violations that heighten our
sense of insecurity…a vicious circle born of self-fulfilling prophecies, if you
will.
Emma Lazarus to the contrary, we have not
been welcoming of immigrants other than those from Western Europe. This
hostility is partly based in fear of the immigrant as Other. But in equal measure it’s an extension of our
acquisitiveness and cupidity, of our ideological hyperindividualism, of a
culture that is at its base rude and angry, its belligerence barely concealed
behind a blandly smiling façade. The antipathy
against immigrants surfaces daily, in venues high and low—as we can see in
Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s just-announced
decision concerning Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070, in which he wrote of
the “evil effects” of undocumented immigration.
I hope I’m not alone in thinking Scalia is
overstating the case just a tad. If I
was a descendant of a once-marginalized immigrant minority, I would rethink
using such loaded terms as “evil” to describe more recent arrivals. Considering Scalia’s stated admiration of the
nation’s founders, he would do well to remember that few if any signers
of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were of non-English
ancestry.[1] Then again, maybe it’s a matter of who got
here earlier. After all, we stole this
country fair and square. Why share with
the latecomers?
Fortunately, I don’t believe time is on Scalia’s
side, or Jan Brewer’s, or the Arizona legislature’s, or the Minutemen’s, or on that
of any other opponents of immigration from south of the border. Down in Aztlán, a cultural ferment has been underway
for a long time. Not the reconquista, as some fear, but the
emergence of a vibrant amalgam of Anglo and Latino cultures. Border regions always produce cultural
fusion; border walls, increased patrols, and discriminatory laws will do
nothing to stop it. Consider the
emergent culture the outcome of an evolutionary process, its vitality the
product of hybrid vigor. Slowly, inexorably,
albeit unnoticed by the whitest of white-bread Anglos, the new way of life is
suffusing the old. I don’t just mean
salsa outselling ketchup or norteamericanos
learning to appreciate Mexican cuisine that doesn’t come from a drive-thru
window. I mean lasting shifts in our
national identity and worldview, ones that may actually be for the better in
this age of globalization.
The seeds for this transformation were
planted before Anglo Americans arrived in the West. From California to Texas, the Latin influence
is evident in place names, culinary practices, architecture, and even the law. (Community property laws, which are prevalent
in the western U.S., are a carryover from Mexican legal codes.) Subsequent waves of migration have enriched the cultural soil. More are rolling in. By the middle of the century, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that “Hispanics” (its
term; a bit dated) will comprise a quarter of the population and
non-Hispanic whites will be in the minority.
Perhaps by then crossing the border will be a
little easier…
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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