In the Country We Love

by Diane Guerrero

  People who flee to America customarily accept the most backbreaking work as janitors, housepainters, and, of course, farmers. Our nation doesn’t just gain from the cheap labor of agricultural workers; it would absolutely suffer without it. “If we deported a substantial number of undocumented farm workers,” labor economist James S. Holt once told Congress, “there would be a tremendous labor shortage.” That’s because more than half of America’s 2.5 million farmhands are undocumented, some picking grapes and blueberries and apples for as little as four dollars an hour; their paltry earnings are what keep your food prices low. They are literally doing America’s dirty work while living well below the poverty line. That’s why many have to string together two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. That’s what my parents had to do.

  Exploitation of these workers is rampant. In my father’s factory job, the conditions were deplorable, his supervisors abusive. His boss at times humiliated and threatened him. On the weeks when he was paid on time, he considered himself lucky, and on a few occasions his earnings were altogether withheld. Many business owners, particularly those who employ low-skilled workers, know they won’t be held accountable for their abuses. They have the unchecked power to dole out cruelties on the powerless—those who often don’t speak English and who are terrified of deportation. In the worst cases, the exploitation is coldhearted and downright shameful.

  The mistreatment has been widely documented in the press. As part of a 2015 series entitled Unvarnished, the New York Times shone a light on the abuse of manicurists, many of whom are undocumented immigrants. In interviewing 150 nail salon workers and owners, the paper’s reporters found that an overwhelming number of employees were paid below minimum wage; many weren’t paid at all. The indignities were constant: Manicurists’ tips were docked for the slightest errors. They were berated and cursed at. Owners secretly monitored their every move.

  In one salon on Manhattan’s tony Upper West Side, the Times learned, workers were paid just $10 a day, all while massaging the hands of the city’s wealthiest. At a salon in East Northport, New York, manicurists filed a lawsuit claiming they’d been paid $1.50 an hour for a sixty-six-hour workweek. In a chain of Long Island salons, workers said they were kicked when they made mistakes. And don’t get me started on the health hazards: Some of the chemicals and fumes found in nail products (and inhaled daily by these workers) have been connected to cancer, birth defects, and miscarriages. This issue is much larger than an occasional eye roll by a grumpy boss. It is barbaric and prevalent mistreatment that puts people’s lives in danger. And it should not be tolerated by anyone with a conscience.

  The Los Angeles Times brought attention to the plight of Josue Melquisedec Diaz, an unauthorized contract worker hired following Hurricane Gustav. Diaz and eleven other workers were brought in to clean up a community ravaged by floodwaters, reported the paper in 2011; while nearby American workers were provided with gloves, masks, and boots to protect against infection, Diaz’s group was not. “We were made to work with bare hands, picking up dead animals,” he said to the LA Times. “We were working in contaminated water.” Later, Diaz told Congress that he and the others had asked for safety equipment. In response, the supervisor cut their pay in half, at which point they went on strike. Police and immigration officers then showed up to throw Diaz and his counterparts in jail, and they were later transferred to federal immigration detention.

  Do our country’s laws protect construction workers like Diaz? Yes, but those laws are meaningless because employees know they can ignore them. It’s pretty unlikely that an undocumented worker will fight back as Diaz did. Employers know they can get away with putting their employees’ lives and health at risk—and so they do.

  The abuse of detainees is equally inhumane. When my parents were arrested and carted off to detention centers, neither had a chance at a fair hearing with a good lawyer, since, of course, they didn’t have enough money to hire one. Every day, at least thirty-four thousand immigrants—that’s the minimum quota of detainees who must be kept in detention at all times, as mandated by Congress—are forced to dispute their cases while isolated and imprisoned. Due process protections for these inmates? Forget it. In the criminal justice system, people are provided a pro bono attorney if they cannot afford one, but that same right does not exist in deportation proceedings. According to the ILRC, 84 percent of those detained go totally unrepresented, as my mother and father did. Thousands may qualify to stay here legally but are sent away because they can’t get legal representation. A disproportionate number of those arrested and detained are brown or black, and that’s not a coincidence. Our immigration system, just like the criminal justice system, routinely targets people of color through over-policing, racial profiling, and incarceration.

  Deportation can be a double punishment. Someone who has previously been convicted of a crime and who has already paid his or her debt to society can still be transferred to ICE and deported. If, for instance, an undocumented worker is pulled over by police for a traffic violation, that driver would be required to pay the fines involved, and then he or she would be turned over for deportation and permanent banishment from the United States; oftentimes, such a person is sent back to a violent country where his or her life is immediately in jeopardy. And even if someone is arrested and detained for missteps that occurred decades earlier—and they’ve since become totally rehabilitated—that does not matter in immigration courts.

  My work on Orange has taught me this: Human beings are not categorically bad because of their mistakes. They can learn from their errors and get back on track. No one should be forever written off because of one part of his or her history. Nor should anyone be held in our prisons in the name of making a buck. Legal permanent residents with long-standing family ties, torture survivors, and victims of human trafficking are among those detained for months or even years, worsening any mental health problems associated with their past traumas. The prison industry is a multibillion-dollar operation in which corporations literally earn money on the backs of society’s most broken. And this is flat-out wrong.

  My mother and father tried as hard as they could to work here legally. They did so using the only immigration system available to them, which is our broken and outdated one. Very few options exist for people to come to the United States lawfully, and many have no path to legal status. That’s right—none. They’re often directed to “get in the back of the line.” Let’s get clear on one thing: There is no back of the line. In fact, there is no line, period. We’re long past the years when newcomers queued up at Ellis Island to be screened for eligibility and possible entry. And even if such a line existed, it would stretch from coast to coast and back again; anyone in that line could wait for decades to get to the front.

  If, for instance, a US citizen files the paperwork to sponsor his or her sibling from Mexico, the wait to have that application processed would likely be twenty years or longer. And those here with a citizen child or spouse who can sponsor them are out of luck. A series of restrictions forces most already in the States to wait for ten years outside of the country before a green card application can be filed and considered. That’s about as unreasonable and nonsensical as someone suggesting that we round up all undocumented workers and send them back to their respective countries. Logistically, how do you track down, detain, and deport eleven million people, and who on earth would foot the bill?

  The American Forum, a right-of-center policy institute, did the math on the potential cost of mass deportation. Their research shows that we’d spend between $400 billion and $600 billion—and with that blow to our workforce, the nation’s real GDP would plummet by more than $1.5 trillion. That is obscenely expensive, not to mention impractical and time-consuming. (The American Forum estimates that the deportation process, if it can even be implemented, could take as long as two decades.) When we’re trying to come up with solutions, we should keep it real. And we should do what’s most intelligent—like putting reforms in p
lace that will make our economy boom rather than falter.

  Another idea that’s thrown around a lot: building a wall or fence along America’s borders. I’m here to tell you that it won’t work. Nearly half of the people who settle in this country arrive on planes and overstay their visas. My mother and father had no wall to climb over, no fence to navigate. A 1,954-mile physical barrier between the United States and Mexico would’ve done nothing to keep my Colombian mother and father out. And the obstacles to finishing the existing border fencing and walls and replacing them with something even bigger and stronger, as some conservatives have proposed, are numerous: Ranchers who live along the border will continue fighting to keep their land; the wall would have to cut through Native American reservations; and the terrain in, for instance, the Arizona desert and New Mexico mountains, not to mention the lakes and rivers along the border, would make constructing a wall a major challenge, if not an impossibility.

  Even if a wall was constructed, it’s not a cure-all. When any human being is facing starvation and unimaginable violence, he or she will do nearly anything to survive—including scaling a wall or crossing an ocean, as we’ve witnessed among the throngs of Syrian refugees escaping to Europe. If a wall is the only thing that stands between near-certain death and the possibility of life, you and I would risk everything to climb over it, because the risk of staying put is far greater than the fear of being caught. “Show me a fifty-foot wall,” former secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once said, “and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.” The Berlin Wall should serve as proof to all of humanity that walls do not work. Building bridges that foster communication between countries does.

  “People who enter America without their papers are breaking the laws,” some argue. “It’s not fair.” It also wasn’t “fair” for our ancestors to roll up and take land from the Native Americans, but I don’t hear too many folks complaining about the benefits we enjoy because they did. Neither was it fair for our forefathers to import slaves to toil in their cotton fields; plantation owners built this nation’s wealth by degrading blacks, a group once declared only three-fifths human by Congress. So-called fairness has seldom been this country’s primary compass in determining the best action to take. So instead of arguing about whether immigrants should be here, let’s focus on creating a plan that actually moves us forward: immigration reform.

  The Senate passed a commonsense immigration bill, but the House—led by anti-immigrants—blocked immigration reform. Congress’s abdication of its duty led President Obama to use his executive authority in November 2014, the week that I met him for the first time. The president extended a lifeline by creating DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) and expanding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). For anyone who got lost in that alphabet soup of acronyms, here’s the least you should know: The president’s executive action provided relief for as many as five million undocumented community members. (At the time of this writing, those benefits are on hold, pending review by the US Supreme Court.) It was a step in the right direction. Our future depends on electing leaders who’ll keep this issue on the front burner, because make no mistake: You don’t have to be the relative, the friend, or the employer of an undocumented worker to be financially impacted. Every single one of us is affected, simply because we live here.

  If you’re in favor of a commonsense immigration system that gives people an opportunity to work here legally, you’ve got company. Gallup reports that 87 percent of us would like to offer a citizenship path to undocumented immigrants, a lot of whom have been paying taxes here for years. And, according to a Gallup poll, Americans’ general support for immigration is on the rise, with 75 percent of US citizens viewing others’ relocation to our nation as positive. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees. He has called immigration reform “the biggest civil rights issue of our time” and is speaking up on behalf of the powerless.

  We need your voice too. There’s one simple, yet powerful, action every American can take: We can vote. Many once sacrificed their lives to give us that privilege, and we should use it to its fullest extent. If you’re as horrified as I am by some of the 2016 presidential candidates’ proposals—ideas such as amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship—you can do more than sit around and debate about it. You can take action by registering to vote, if you’re not signed up already. Voter information is available at MiFamiliaVota.org. Then, vote on November 8, 2016, and urge your friends and family to turn up and cast their votes as well. I stand with actress America Ferrera, who penned an open letter to Donald Trump that ran in the Huffington Post: “Thank you for reminding us to not sit complacently at home on election day, but to run to the polls and proclaim that there is no place for your brand of racial politicking in our government,” she wrote. “Thank you for sending out the rallying cry.” Amen. In the 2016 presidential election and in all those to follow, let’s make sure our opinions get counted.

  Voting is the first step—but it’s not the only one you can take. We can keep the pressure on Congress to do what’s right and pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill; until that’s completed, our efforts must continue. You don’t have to be a policy bigwig to get involved. You can call and write to your elected officials. And yes, your input matters. “Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said. “In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” I’m fighting for the most expansive relief possible, which would grant millions the right to reside here lawfully, continue contributing to our country’s financial well-being, and keep their families intact. Not another mother or father should be torn away from their loved ones—nor should a child be left trembling beneath a bed.

  * * *

  My story represents all that should be celebrated about America. Only here could the daughter of immigrants grow up to succeed in the competitive and exciting world of acting. And only here could a girl like me be invited to have a conversation with the president. I will always cherish those opportunities.

  And yet my experience in this country also reflects a reality that’s still tough for me to face. In a nation that values keeping families together and safeguarding children, I was invisible. Either the immigration officials didn’t see me or they chose to turn their heads. I’ll never know which. But I do know that as Americans, we can do better than that. We can extend greater compassion. And we can push our leaders to protect the most vulnerable among us. It’s one way we can help people who desperately need it.

  Service to others—I believe that’s the purpose every person on the planet shares. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it another way: “Everyone has the power for greatness, not for fame, but for greatness, because greatness is determined by service … You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace.” We may be divided over how to bring about reform, but let’s unite in our desire to leave our planet better than we found it.

  My desire to be of service to others is not limited to immigration reform. I have come to realize the power of my vote, and that each one of us has that power. I want to remind all voters—and especially young new voters—that we have the power to change policies. Through our votes, we also can ensure the rights of women to earn wages that are equal to those of men; we can speak out about our reproductive rights; we can ensure that our public health policies include better gun safety laws; and yes, we can work toward leaving our planet more environmentally safe than we found it. So don’t be surprised if you hear me advocating on behalf of a broader range of rights. Dignity for immigrants is just the beginning.

  I still don’t comprehend all the reasons my life has turned out the way it has, but that’s no longer the central question for me. What matters mo
re is how I can turn the trauma of my experience into some kind of meaningful change for myself and others. There’s no point in going through anything difficult if, on the other side of it, very little shifts. That’s as true for me personally as it is for us collectively. Does pain have a purpose? I’m not sure. But it can if we give it one—and I’ve chosen to view my ordeal as an opportunity to be a voice for millions. For the sake of all those who come to our shores, I hope you’ll join me in that cause.

  * * *

  Want to learn more about the immigration reform debate and get involved? A few resources:

  • Immigrant Legal Resource Center (www.ilrc.org)

  • Mi Familia Vota (www.mifamiliavota.org)

  • Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) (www.endisolation.org)

  • Detention Watch Network (www.detentionwatchnetwork.org)

  * * *