Monday, June 25, 2012

Borders

Standing in the U.S. immigration and customs line at Vancouver International Airport waiting to board a flight to San Francisco, I felt a twinge of mingled anxiety and resentment.

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





[1] William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, may have been of Italian extraction.

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