This is a worthy sentiment, but I want everyone to face up to the fact that asking for papers, ripping families apart, and secret prisons have been here for literally decades. My entire body of work for the past 12 years is about exactly this. It actually is normal for the US.
Border activists called President Obama “the Deporter-in-Chief.” Reagan gambled with border controls in return for one-time amnesty for those already in the country, only nobody knew it was one-time.
Hundreds of environmental laws were waived in order to build the wall we already have, decimating local wildlife in 2008. Border agents (and randoms) have always slashed water bottles volunteers leave in the desert.
If you go back to the birth of the US’s immigration laws as they are today, you will find the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which was written and pushed into policy by the KKK.
Back in the 19th century, there was a big debate over what breed Mexicans were. This is not an exaggeration. Mexicans, coined "La Raza Cosmica" by Jose Vasconcelos in 1925 because they contain "all races in the world," thus transcending ethnicity, were subjects of much discussion
Back to the Chinese Exclusion Act for a second though. The Border Patrol as we know it was formed to keep Asian people out of the United States. They were popularly known as "Chinese-catchers." Echoes of this appeared in the way the U.S. treated Japanese Americans in WW2.
Chinese people (many of whom had fled their native land to find work in the US) were subjected to much suspicion and derision. It was thought that the men were especially seductive: they were exotic and brought drugs in to the country
The women were thought of as little more than prostitutes who brought in diseases with them. But the drugs were the real concern listed as reasons to raid homes and deport families. But of course they weren't ever homes, they were always "opium dens" (sound familiar?)
There's a big Chinese community in Mexicali, just over the border from Calexico in California, because of this. I learned a lot about this doing research there. Cantonese people came to find work and were hired only to be run out of town once the railroads were built.
(Chinese were preferable to the Irish because they didn't drink and had reputations for being punctual and responsible, according to the accounts I've read from back then. I guess after the work was done they went back to being seductive drug dealers.)
Anyway, back to Mexicans. One of the most shocking things I think I read during the course of sifting through primary sources was a debate over whether Mexicans had enough white blood in them to overcome their "Indian savagery." There was literally a public discussion about this.
You can read more about that here. There was a strong pro-eugenics contingent in Congress at the time. timeline.com/when-american-…
Oh yeah, so suddenly being not-white was literally criminal; they were about to be rounded up and expelled en masse (and many were anyway) but for an intervention from, wait for it, Big Ag. They needed laborers and Mexicans were thought to be especially docile and hardworking.
So as you can see, this twilight area for DACA recipients and Dreamers is nothing new. Although they are not all Mexican, you see that many are Latinx or Chicanx. That is because undocumented people from Mexico in particular exist in a peculiar legal twilight area...
No soy de aquí ni soy de alla. This, I have come to believe, is absolutely intentional. Refusing to invest in a particular segment of the population even as you exploit that segment for cheap labor saves a lot of money for the United States.
People of Asian descent became regarded, after decades of mistrust and exclusion, as so-called "model minorities" in the late 1960s. Around the same time, they became almost neutered in the way they were depicted in pop culture - sexless nerds and submissive women
So what happened in the late 1960s to change the perception of them? The civil rights movement. washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It's so much worse once you dig more. But, you know. See my pinned tweet for more context. And now that you know how awful it has been this whole time, what will you do - what will we all do - to change it once and for all?
Further reading: pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/cha…
