by Jorge Ramos
All waves of migration are generated by two factors: one, something is pushing people out of their home nation; and two, something is attracting them to a new destination. Impoverished and underdeveloped conditions in Mexico and the rest of Latin America were the main forces driving millions of people to pack their bags and head north. But the United States is also responsible for this wave of immigration.
The undocumented immigrants are because of us.
We are all complicit.
Do you like fruit? You might be wondering what this has to do with what we’re talking about. A lot, as it turns out. We wouldn’t have fruit available at reasonable prices if it weren’t for the work of thousands of undocumented immigrants. The strawberries, apples, and grapes that you like so much made their way from field to table thanks to the invisible work of people who do not have permission to work here.
Agriculture—as well as the service industry, from hotels to restaurants—depends on unauthorized workers. The next time you go to a restaurant, take a peek into the kitchen. Chances are that it’s full of undocumented workers, regardless of the cuisine being served. You can claim that you don’t condone the presence of people who arrived in this country illegally, but every time you buy a piece of fruit, dine at a restaurant, or check into a hotel, you’re indirectly supporting them with your wallet.
Nothing has done more to encourage Mexicans and other Latin Americans to come to the United States than the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was inspired by the words of President John F. Kennedy. This law ended the system of national quotas—which gave an advantage to European immigrants—and instead emphasized bringing in talented people and unifying families.
In an effort to end official discrimination, Kennedy proposed changing immigration laws in an address to Congress on July 23, 1963. The purpose of this bill was to develop an immigration law “that serves the national interest and reflects in every detail the principles of equality and human dignity to which our nation subscribes.” Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 of that same year, but his ideas lived on, and the new law was passed in 1965.
The results of this change have been clear. Most of the immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other European nations. But since 1965, roughly half of all new immigrants have come from Latin America, while a quarter stem from Asia. And as a result, the United States has undergone a demographic transformation.
This explains the Mexican wave. But that wave has already crested. In 2013, for example, immigrants from China (147,000) and India (129,000) outnumbered immigrants from Mexico (125,000), according to a Wall Street Journal report.
This is what Trump doesn’t understand. He wants a wall—an absurd and expensive wall—to halt an invasion that exists only in his imagination. But such a wall would become Trump’s white elephant: a massive construction, highly visible and yet totally useless.
A Useless Wall
Let’s look at the geography of stupidity.
Mexico and the United States share a border 1,954 miles long. Some sort of wall or fencing already exists along roughly 700 miles of it. Theoretically, these physical barriers would have to be extended at least another 1,200 miles, which would be a stratospheric waste of time and money.
Donald Trump loves to remind us that he is very intelligent and that he is a great businessman. But if that is true, then why build an incredibly expensive structure that will not stop the flow of either immigrants or drugs?
According to a Pew Research Center study, about 45 percent of all undocumented immigrants in the United States arrive by plane and then overstay their visas. In other words, no matter how long or how high the wall is, it will have no effect on nearly half of immigrants, who will remain here illegally.
Supposedly, the wall would protect U.S. cities along the border with Mexico. But it turns out that these communities are already some of the safest in the entire country. An investigation conducted by The Texas Tribune, published on February 23, 2016, found that “border communities have lower crime rates.”
In 2014, border towns such as Laredo, Brownsville, and El Paso reported fewer than four hundred crimes per one hundred thousand people. “It’s much safer than say San Antonio, Houston or Dallas,” state senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa said in that same report. “It’s certainly much safer than Washington D.C. or Chicago.” For comparison’s sake, Houston and Dallas reported 991 and 665 crimes, respectively, per 100,000 people during that same period.
And the same thing is taking place in Arizona. In public testimony given on September 13, 2013, Sheriff Tony Estrada said that Santa Cruz County, which borders Nogales, Mexico, “is a very safe, very secure area.” And this is despite the fact that at least one hundred tunnels for smuggling drugs and undocumented workers had been discovered connecting Nogales, Arizona (located in Santa Cruz County), with Nogales, Mexico.
Nor will the wall stop drugs from flowing into the United States.
This is something that many Americans may not want to hear, but it has to be said nonetheless. As long as millions of them are using drugs, there will be drug traffickers in Mexico and the rest of Latin America ready to manufacture them and ship them north. When the demand is this high, no wall will stop the drug dealers, who are always looking for ever more creative ways to get narcotics across the border.
Here are the disturbing facts: In 2013, 24.6 million Americans admitted to having used some type of drug during the previous month, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
As long as there are customers to support it, narcotrafficking will continue to be an unstoppable force. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the word’s most prolific smuggler, is now in a New York prison. But he is already being replaced by a new generation of drug lords. When one tree is chopped down, others will sprout up in its place.
And if we were somehow wrong and Trump’s multibillion-dollar wall could stop the flow of immigrants and drugs, traffickers would find new covert routes by sea, as Cuban refugees with their makeshift boats have skillfully and courageously demonstrated for years now. Yes, all nations have the right to clear and secure borders. But in the case of the border between Mexico and the United States—a “scar,” as the writer Carlos Fuentes once described it—the solution isn’t a wall, but rather a multinational relationship that manages, protects, and stimulates legal immigration. If Latin America has workers and the United States needs them to fill in for an aging population, why not create a system of migration that works not only for North America but also for the rest of the continent?
Nobody wants illegal immigration, not even undocumented immigrants. We can all agree on this. It is dangerous, unmanageable, and controlled by people outside of the two respective governments. This is why we have to look for safe and effective alternatives.
Creating an insurmountable wall is an extremely foolhardy idea for solving a complex international problem. This one will require a much more creative solution. Let’s be frank here: extending the existing wall between Mexico and the United States is impractical—especially considering the daunting engineering challenges and the cumbersome issues of land and water rights—and its proposal has created some of the sharpest clashes in decades between two friendly nations.
Plus, it’s impossibly expensive.
And Mexico is not going to pay for it.
Let’s say you want to build a fence around your yard, and suddenly you have the idea that you can force your neighbor to pay for it. I know, it sounds ridiculous. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump wants Mexico to do.
When Trump announced this outlandish idea back in the summer of 2015, the Mexican government should have stated outright that it would not contribute one cent to constructing the wall. But it didn’t.
In the wake of the Mexican government’s complicit silence, only former president Vicente Fox was willing to speak up. “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall,” he told me in a Febr
uary 2016 interview. “He should pay for it.”
In August of that same year, at a fateful press conference in Mexico City, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto had the chance to tell Trump “no” to his face. But he didn’t dare. Be that as it may, Trump’s wall will end up being paid for by Americans, not Mexicans.
Many estimates have been made. One, by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, put the cost at somewhere between $12 billion and $15 billion, maybe more. But worst of all, it won’t do anything.
If Trump truly understood the demographic changes the United States is experiencing, he would be looking east instead of south. Because after the Latino wave comes the Asian wave.
Despite Trump’s xenophobic efforts, immigrants will continue to arrive on these shores. Not so many from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, but more from Asian nations going forward.
The tide has always been rising.
Accepting foreigners has always been an American tradition.
As the late John F. Kennedy reminds us in A Nation of Immigrants, in 1820 there were barely 150,000 immigrants in the United States. But by 1840 that number had jumped to 1.7 million; by 1880 it reached 5.2 million; and in 1910 the total reached 8.8 million. The influx of immigrants has never stopped.
According to a visionary study by the Pew Research Center, over the past fifty years—from 1965 to 2015—the number of foreigners living in the United States has increased from 9.6 million to 45 million. And in the next fifty years, that figure is expected to increase to 78 million. To put it another way, foreigners in the United States will be increasing from 14 percent to nearly 18 percent of the total population.
The year 2055 will mark the beginning of the Asian era in the United States. That year, immigrants from Asian countries—China, India, Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines among them—will surpass those from Latin American nations.
It’s going to be a real demographic tsunami.
And it will require huge amounts of tolerance and cooperation. Just as Donald Trump is attacking Latin American immigrants today, I would not be surprised if a future presidential candidate decided to attack Asian immigrants to win votes.
Of course, you can’t block off China with a wall, as Trump is proposing to do with Mexico, but terrible examples from history could resurface. For example, in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was designed to prevent Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, particularly California, and allowed people to openly discriminate against those who were already here. This injustice was not corrected until 1943.
More Asian immigrants will be appearing on the horizon.
The fact of the matter is that during the next half century, we will be adding roughly six hundred thousand immigrants per year. That is why it is so urgent to have a new immigration system in place, so that we can process the immigrants who are already here, along with the millions who have yet to come.
There are no excuses. We have been warned, and we must be prepared. The Asian wave is coming. Meanwhile, Trump is banging his head against his wall.
No One Is Illegal
“Illegals.”
That’s what they call them.
As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel once said, “No human being is illegal.” A person may commit an illegal act, but nobody can be illegal in and of himself.
This term has become so widespread in the United States that even some of the more liberal politicians and members of the media are using it. Democrats I have interviewed are generally confused and apologetic when they use the word “illegal” to refer to an undocumented immigrant, and they correct themselves. But almost every Republican I have spoken with uses the term without any sense of regret or consequence.
The term “illegal” has come to refer almost exclusively to immigrants from Latin America. As Roberto Suro, a researcher and professor at the University of Southern California, wrote in his extraordinary book Strangers Among Us, “No immigrant group has carried the stigma of illegality that now attaches itself to many Latinos.” Why? Because “no industrialized nation has ever faced such a vast migration across a land border with the virtual certainty that it will continue to challenge the government’s ability to control that border for years to come.”
“Illegal” is used to refer to people who don’t have their papers in order, but it is never applied to the people or companies who hire them. Never have I heard someone say, “This is an illegal enterprise by the simple fact that it employs undocumented people.” It’s a complete double standard.
This is doubtless seen as a triumph for those who insist on dehumanizing the undocumented. It is much easier to attack, detain, abuse, and deport someone you consider “illegal” than it is a person whose face you recognize, whose name you know, and who resides in this country legally.
To call someone “illegal” is to strip that person of humanity and establish different degrees of false superiority among equal human beings. There are many other ways of doing this.
Throughout my career, I have spoken with dozens of people who have experienced the deportation of a family member. This is a devastating experience for them. Out of nowhere, an ICE agent appears at an undocumented immigrant’s home or place of work, and within a matter of minutes, that person is arrested, booked, and on the way to being deported. When this sort of thing happens in plain view of children or other minors, it can have a traumatic impact and leave permanent psychological scars.
Video footage of these arrests almost always includes scenes of desperate children crying, “What are they doing to my mom?” or, “Where are they taking my dad?” They have no way to understand why someone who has spent his or her entire life working for the well-being of the family would suddenly end up detained and subjected to deportation proceedings.
When something like this happens, cruel comments on social networks can be surprising, even going so far as to suggest that undocumented immigrants deserve this sort of treatment because they came to the United States illegally and put their children and families in this situation. These sorts of criticisms can be made much more easily when the incumbent president and his administration are constantly reinforcing the narrative that undocumented immigrants are criminals and “illegals.”
Being “illegal” is much, much harder than being a stranger.
I recently traveled to Los Angeles to meet Fátima, an American-born fourteen-year-old with three American sisters. One morning in early 2017, Fátima’s father, Rómulo Avélica, was taking her to school. But shortly before they arrived, he was detained by ICE agents. Rómulo is from the Mexican state of Nayarit and illegally immigrated to the United States over twenty years ago.
The agents forced him out of his car and arrested him right in front of Fátima’s eyes…and in front of her cell phone. The video, complete with her cries and pleas, went viral on social media.
“He’s not a criminal,” Fátima told me. “He’s just a dad.”
During our interview, she took me to the exact spot where her father was arrested, just a few blocks away from her school. Clearly, the ICE agents had been following them. Fátima couldn’t stay there long, for memories of her father’s arrest soon brought tears to her eyes. It was clear that she was carrying a deep sense of anguish and grief inside her.
Rómulo had previously been arrested for a traffic violation and driving under the influence. He was also under a pending deportation order, but he never expected to be arrested with his daughter in the car on the way to school.
The life of Rómulo’s wife and four daughters had taken an unexpected turn. In addition to the emotional trauma, they lost their family’s primary source of income and had to take on numerous extra expenses to pay for Rómulo’s legal defense while he was detained in a facility two hours away.
The arrest of a single undocumented immigrant can destroy an entire family’s life. And Fátima’s family isn’t the only one.
Guadalupe García de Rayos
is considered to be the first undocumented immigrant to be deported during Trump’s presidency. That’s impossible to confirm, but the pain is not.
Guadalupe was brought here by her parents from Guanajuato, Mexico, when she was just fourteen years old. Her husband also came, without documents, when he was a child. He said to me, “We, my wife and I, did not make the decision to come to this country. We were minors. This is where we met. This is where we got married. This is where we go to church on Sundays. We live a normal life. Just like any Anglo-Saxon person with his papers in order. Documents don’t define what kind of a person you are.”
Nevertheless, Guadalupe was deported for lacking them.
She was arrested in a raid during the fearsome era of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, and charged with using a false Social Security number. When I interviewed her, she explained that she didn’t steal it from anyone; she simply made it up so that she could work.
During the administration of President Barack Obama, Guadalupe would not have been a deportation priority. At that time, the fundamental intent was to deport people who had committed serious crimes, who had just recently entered the United States, or who had attempted to enter illegally on many occasions. Guadalupe lived her life without any major setbacks. Once a year she had to go to an ICE office in Phoenix and prove that she hadn’t been in any trouble with the law. She did this for eight years.
One morning in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, Guadalupe went to her annual interview with ICE. But this time, things changed. After her interview, she was arrested and informed that she would be deported back to Mexico, a country where she hadn’t lived for twenty-two years.