Deportations and Protests

From a career covering Mexican immigration ...

I envy people who know how they feel about immigration, particularly illegal immigration from Mexico.

Long before I wrote two books about our nation’s drug-addiction epidemic, I lived in Mexico for a decade (1994-2004) and wrote mostly about Mexican immigration, probably more than any other American journalist at the time. Spent a ton of time in Michoacan, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and other immigrant-sending states.

This was the subject of my entire second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.

Covering immigration was thrilling. Every immigrant’s story is an opera and reminded me over and over why I loved being a journalist.

But I can say that I changed my mind on the topic almost hourly. I will in this post, as well.

To begin, I note Matt Walsh, prominent conservative pundit, finds the Statue of Liberty’s “huddled masses” quote to be a “stupid poem.” He apparently wants to welcome only rich people. To me, that quote is America’s sublime message to the world: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

He appears to misunderstand why America is prosperous. We are prosperous because we attracted the world’s “huddled masses,” and not its royalty. America gave them the chance their home countries had denied then, and this ignited the great energies of those “huddled masses.”

They repaid the offer over and over. By and large, they built productive lives and revved our economy in the process, making it the most robust and innovative the world has ever seen. Classic Adam Smith.

Their raw material is more important than any fossil fuel. Comfortably monied elites don’t have it. Only those ‘huddled masses’ know how to bring it.

[Full disclosure: Like so many of you, I’m the descendent of a member of the huddled masses. My Spanish grandfather was the illegitimate son of a father he never knew and a mother who abandoned him. He came to eastern Pennsylvania in 1920, worked in a brewery, married, had three children, and his second son, my father, was among the poorest kids to attend Northwestern University when he arrived as a freshman in 1953. He obtained a PhD from Harvard in comparative literature and spent 40 years as a professor.]

Over the years writing about immigration, I concluded that what Mexico has lost in the constant drain of its most energized blood far exceeds any amount of money the departed would later send back. People risked death to leave Mexico, like those who tried to flee the Soviet Union.

This constant bloodletting is one reason why, despite more than 70 years of migration north, legal and illegal, and hundreds of billions of dollars sent home, Mexico remains a developing country: It expelled its huddled masses.

Meanwhile, I keep in mind the equally enormous costs to working-class Americans of the presence of millions of people illegally in their country.

I remember a conversation I had with two Mexican-American mothers in west San Bernardino years ago. Their great-grandparents arrived in the early 1900s fleeing the Mexican Revolution and found work on the railroads. The women had no connection to Mexico, nor wanted one.

I was there to speak with them about another topic. However, they detoured me for more than half an hour during that conversation to talk about the grave threat to their families and their fraying neighborhood by the arrival of so many illegal Mexican immigrants.

These men, the mother told me, didn’t speak English, they lived six or eight to an apartment, driving rents higher. Most important to these mothers, these guys took “the jobs our boys should have.” Car washes, restaurants, some others.

I keep these mothers in mind always.

I was reminded of how Cesar Chavez fought against illegal immigration. He viewed them as scabs undercutting the wages his farmworker union members – who were Mexican-Americans.

Today, too, I think about the results of November’s election, the Hispanic vote shifting to Trump, something Democratic leaders believed could never happen. [A year before the election, when President Biden was still a candidate, a Democratic poll showed this was most certainly happening.]

After the election, I thought again about those mothers. How they would have been outraged by something like, say, sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary cities formed in response to Central American civil wars and refugee asylum petitions. But in time, they grew to reflect immigration defenders’ rigidity.

Sanctuary cities often declined federal requests to detain deportable immigrants in their custody. This included, at times, immigrants with felony records (here and here).

When immigrants went on to be arrested for major crimes, the response was at times to insist that crime is lower in immigrant neighborhoods than elsewhere. This ignored the point: That a person without authorization to be here was committing a crime of any kind. Not surprisingly, this rationalization served to outrage and galvanize Americans who couldn’t see how this was logical or right.

President Obama’s administration removed 3 million people who had illegally crossed the border and were in the country – more than any other administration. It did this without raids on schools, restaurants, parks, and without masked, armed federal agents tearing parents from kids, or accosting people based on their ethnic appearance, etc.

No reality TV show. Just government that understood that deporting illegal immigrants was one of its many jobs.

It was in no way without human cost. I saw this first hand in Tijuana where I spent a lot of time reporting in 2015. The city was filling with these deportees, most of whom had been deported after an arrest in the U.S. for some crime or another -- most often, it seemed, for driving under the influence. Tijuana soup lines were long, shelters full. Many of these guys were shellshocked, struggling to adapt to a country they didn’t much know while they earned in a day what they once earned in an hour.

Yet using the kind of raids we’ve seen recently, Trump’s administration will likely not come close to deporting the number he promised during the campaign. There are efficient, less contentious ways of going about it that rely less on picking on people who are actually working, people whom we might fast-track to citizenship if we could ever get our immigration system figured out.

So I’m not alone in the impression that the point of these raids is inflaming outrage.

President Trump seems to be banking on the far left, which never seems to miss a chance to play the role he has selected for it.

Thus: burned Waymos, looted businesses, graffiti, F-bombs, and masked youths lecturing cops on the depth of their class betrayal – all of which must be borne by a city already cutting budgets for services, many of which are aimed at poor and working-class people. [Days later, The LA Times reported that the protests cost the city $20 million in police and city repairs.]

The flying of Mexican flags is particularly mystifying in protests of deportations to Mexico.

In an era of Tik-Tok and Instagram, it doesn’t matter that vandals are in the protesting minority. They may well be. They remain social media’s delicious main course.

What’s more, they distract from the bigger picture. …

In the last fifteen years, we’ve had several jobs done on our house. The contractors were U.S. citizens of various ethnic extractions. Their workers were from Mexico or Central America, legal and illegal, I suspect.

I spoke often with them. They had come here in their teens – hidden in the trunks of cars – with no skills other than how to milk cows. This country gave them an education they never received back home.

They did what any “huddled masses” do when offered a real new deal: They repaid the offer over and over. In tile, plumbing, roofing, carpentry, masonry they were now wizards — no other word for it.

Twenty years after they crossed, their work reflected a repertoire of skills that any country would – should – be eager to retain.

No AI nor any robot will ever do what they can.

I hope today’s “No Kings” protests will be as dignified as these fellows’ skilled labor.

I find the protests’ title compelling. We live in a time when the rich get richer in spite of themselves, and it is so difficult to be poor and working class. In a roundabout way, that’s exactly what my last books have been about: Dreamland and The Least of Us.

In such a time, for example, a significant “royalty tax” would seem a healthy thing for a country: a dynastic prophylactic, of sorts.

Instead, Congress proposes a bill that will cut health care for the working classes and increase the amount of non-taxed inheritance money a couple may bequeath to its children: from $27 million to $30 million.

In the years I’ve written about immigration, the issue has grown more complex, more hardened. [Though I wonder where we’d be today had Donald Trump not killed the bi-partisan immigration bill that Congress forged in the months before the election.]

Through the last few days, I’ve read the Substack posts of Peter Coyote -- actor, narrator and Zen Buddhist priest -- and find him wise. He counsels going to protests dressed as if for church. Marching in silence. No rocks, no spray paint, no lectures on class war.

“No Kings” is an issue too important to our times to be marred this way.

As the “No Kings” protests get going, here's a bit of what Coyote had to say:

“There are no purely good or bad guys. To believe that we are good and our opponents are evil Relies on assuming that our nature is fixed, static, and permanent. If that were so, we could never change.

To believe that we are good and others are bad, means we haven’t taken responsibility for our own faults— Jealousy, anger,, envy,— negative characteristics all humans possess. When we ignore them or won’t admit those parts of ourselves, we project them onto other people and name them enemies. …

Once we realize that we all share the same nature, then we have to learn how to communicate with one another. This is why I wrote “no one accepts an invitation when they’re being screamed at. “

The cops are not necessarily our enemies. Like most of us, they usually signed on to do something good, but they are under the authority of others. To some degree we are all under the authority of those we work for. We may even regret the products we make or use, but are constrained by our need to have jobs. When we scream at them, and threaten them, they get anxious and they’ll respond with fear and rage.

When we behave that way, we are not representing our Democratic values, our desire for peace, or the kind of citizens we want to be. We are not behaving like people they could respect. We are venting because we’re upset and we’re frustrating our own best intentions. The American people see this too as they’re trying to figure out which side to be on. …”