Abhayvir Singh
Response 5 of 5
“Families for Freedom Against Deportation and Delegalization”
By Subash Kateel and Aarti Shahani
This piece presents a view long internalized by immigrants and to see it on print, is reassuring. While every sentence is dense and carries innate meaning, the following excerpt best summarizes the concept introduced. “Today, the United States cannot write race into the letter of law…But as migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa have replaced European flows, immigration status has been used as code for race” (258). It’s not as if illegal immigration has just begun in modern times. It has always existed, and there was always a path to citizenship or at least a path to a stable living. This all changed as European immigrants got replaced with immigrants of color. Deportations and detentions have emerged as the new form of targeting of colored people. Just the fact that deportation cases aren’t allowed a fair hearing, trial by jury and appropriate defense is astonishing. Personally, I had always thought that much of the anti-immigration sentiment arose post-9/11. However, 1996 marked the year where being an immigrant became dangerous and that too under Clinton, a democratic president. Obama, too and contrary to stereotypical public opinion, is known as the ‘deporter-in-chief.’ Perhaps this is an issue for another study but it seems as if democratic presidents, while representing a party of immigrants, have this hidden scheming in the background. Today, however, due to the initial outrage against Trump, the deportations have been making headlines unlike seen before, although Obama still carried out more deportation per year. Green-card holding doctors and loved community members are seen being deported for just filing wrong papers. It makes headlines as more anti-Trump than anti-immigration policy of the last twenty odd years.
A critical point of this piece was the authors mentioning how immigrants themselves, “good” ones, justify deportations of the “bad” people in order solidify their own status and give a reason for their own presence. Maybe it’s not their fault that they do that. Times are tough for us new immigrants and everyone just wants to survive and make it for their families and children. The first anecdote given in this chapter is of the detention and deportation experiences of Aarti Shahani’s uncle and father. They were taken in as the “bad” immigrants and their crime was not properly reporting to the Internal Revenue Service their sales to foreigners. This statement is fairly vague in that it can represent either a minor innocent mistake or major deliberate crime. Nonetheless, it’s not as if every legal citizen in this country reports the truth on their taxes, or even files them to begin with. Cases like that of Aarti Shahani’s father and uncle are of a dilemma to the immigrants themselves. If it was a minor crime, it still perceived as unlawfulness by the “general public” and the entire people are labeled as lawless savages. Thus, this issue of a good immigrant and a bad immigrant goes beyond policy and shows how a minority feels the need to self-suppress and it becomes survival of the fittest. The cleaner case is of Richard Rust, who had paid the price for something he had done ages ago, but was still detained. It is cases like this that glaringly read detention and deportation is a policy based on discrimination rather than law. The policy fails to recognize that immigrants of color are, just like their European predecessors, here for a better life. Sarah Bishop’s research “Undocumented immigrant media makers and the search for connection online,” shows how the young immigrants are the social media platform to highlight their own intersectionality. They bring to light the new immigrant experience and policy must reflect that. They also use a vital platform to fight the homogenization of the undocumented, especially by the media. All they ask for a voice and the internet provides them that. In today’s world, it suffices to say that the threat of terrorism is real, no one argues against that. But what do people like Richard Rust have against society? The chapter ends with the work of the FFF, or Families for Freedom and how unites families facing similar situations with a common goal to work for and lobbies for congressional support. Everlasting change would be legislation that allows for a judge and jury for these deportation cases, especially since they are based on a crime. Overall, this piece was refreshing in that it included anecdote along with fact, increasing its reading audience. Since the writers are immigrants themselves, they provide a perspective that only they can provide.
-Do you think present day immigrants provide a critical, inside narrative in the discussion on immigration policy and current immigrant experience?
-Why do you think that deportations have spiked so intensely post-1995?
