Immigration: A Difficult Love Story

It's been a difficult and tumultuous love affair. In good times, newcomers are instrumental to the construction of the New World. They are beckoned, needed, desired. In bad times, they are the cause of all social-economic woes. They are to be ostracized, demonized, deported.

The pendulum swings: we don't want them here; we can't live without them.

Sometimes this epic romance plays out on a very human scale. Take the story that involved Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona. Running for Congress in 2012, the sheriff was tough on undocumented immigration—but he had a secret: he was conducting a love affair with Jose Orozco, an immigrant whose legal status remains in question.

The romance went sour, alas, and the immigrant lover alleged that the sheriff threatened to deport him if he came out with their story. Babeu came out as gay but vehemently denied the deportation threat. Orozco promptly filed a lawsuit.

What struck me most about this story is the contradictory nature of the relationship and how emblematic it is of the larger American narrative. We seek and benefit from immigrants' cheap labor, but we don't want to acknowledge our relationship with them. We need them; we don't want to be associated with them. In the dark of night we crawl into bed with them, but in the morning we are still in denial.

Meg Whitman, the billionaire who ran for governor in California in 2010, announced that she wanted to "hold employers accountable for hiring only documented workers." But she apparently didn't include herself.

The year before Whitman's campaign, she had fired Nicky Diaz Santillan, who in a spectacular press conference revealed that she was undocumented. She had been taking care of the Whitman's household for nearly a decade.

Santillan later testified that when she asked Whitman for help finding an immigration attorney after she was fired, Whitman allegedly told her, "You don't know me, and I don't know you."

A father gazes across a border at a mother and child in this print by Favianna Rodriguez, titled 22% of Deportees Have U.S. Citizen Children. "The father is depicted as an alien, alluding to the way in which inhumane immigration policy dehumanizes people," Rodriguez writes.

Willful Ignorance and Cruel Contradictions

Most of us don't want to know about the tragedy of detention and deportation: the psychological and economic impact on tens of thousands of American-born children whose parents have been taken away by the authorities. Nor do we want to know about the abuses that take place in holding facilities or how inmates were shackled and paraded in pink underwear on the streets of Arizona. We don't want to hear about all the reported rape incidents that have still not been investigated, about the dangerous lack of health care in immigrant detention facilities where the suicide levels are alarming, or about deportees forced to take psychotropic drugs so they act docile in their long journeys back to their countries of origin.

None of these get on the news curve. Most Americans know that Kim Kardashian is pregnant but won't know that many imprisoned, undocumented pregnant women are shackled to their beds when they give birth.

We don't want to know but must know this: when a society hides behind the apparatus of draconian policies, allowing the authorities almost unchecked power to detain and deport, the only logical outcome is injustice and cruelty.

I'm no lawyer, but I know a little about the difference between de facto versus de jure. In the eye of the law (de jure), you are either guilty or not guilty. But in practice (de facto), the way society carries itself out is another matter altogether.

Children of the deported "have become a major voting block, and they are not going away," the author writes. Here, children march against family separation during a rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

A relative of mine, someone who was once a boat person but who...