Imagine if white vigilantes and ‘illegals’ united for a cause
The first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I interviewed a 78-year-old man who regularly patrolled his border-adjacent property in the rural California town of Boulevard, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an AR-10. “It is my duty to protect my country from people invading it,” Bob Maupin told me.
The retired mechanic and self-described “vigilante” was grieving his wife, who had died the previous summer. He choked up remembering her. “She was my life,” he said. He told me that if Trump hadn’t won in 2016, he was planning to take part in an insurrection. He wouldn’t share details except to say he’d risk everything. “I’m gonna die, and I don’t care how,” he said. “Except I’m not going to die a slobbering old man in a rest home pushing a walker. I’m going out in a firefight.”
He died (not in a firefight, but of cancer) a year before hundreds of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But I remembered him that day. I remembered how, ater the videographer stopped recording him, Maupin’s eyes had locked on mine as he deadpanned: “I might have to kill you.” I couldn’t reconcile his danger with my empathy for him: a man desperate for purpose in a conspiratorial underworld, not entirely unlike my father, a Mexican immigrant whose story I’ve documented. Maupin and I had more in common with each other than either of us would with Trump or any other tax-dodging billionaire who pits people against one another: white against Black against brown. Imagine Latina matriarchs and other guerreras teaming up with white vigilantes like Maupin in a common struggle. Such a class-based multiracial coalition would be unstoppable.
And strange as it might sound, the constituent groups’ main goals would be compatible. A bill introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-san Jose) to provide green cards for millions of undocumented people who’ve lived here for years is a critical step toward creating such a coalition. But it needs GOP support, which won’t happen without a takedown of the Trumpist fiction that frames “amnesty” as damaging to white and native-born workers.
The opposite is true. Green cards for undocumented people would allow them to demand higher wages and report employer abuses they might otherwise tolerate because they fear deportation. It would be a victory for labor, making it harder for employers to bust unions and exploit with impunity by invoking Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The more people can stand up for themselves and make sure that wages are not undercut, then the beter off anyone is,” Lofgren told me.
One central complaint of alienated white factions echoes that of undocumented workers: feeling, and being, shut out of the American dream. An empowered workforce would tear down elites’ walls to that dream.
“Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929,” or House Resolution 8433, would update existing law so people with “good moral character” who’ve been here at least seven years could apply for green cards. It would protect as many as 8 million people by updating what’s called the “registry date,” changed four times since the law was created. The last time the date was updated was in 1986, to 1971: If you arrived before then, you can register for a green card. But millions have come since. Many are “essential workers.” Many are parents of US citizens.
The bill is short and simple, creating a rolling seven-year window for green card registry, and should be passed during the lame-duck session of Congress ater the midterm elections. Meanwhile, our leaders must puncture divide-and-conquer mythologies dating back to the colonial era, when elites conspired to discourage poor white people from uniting with enslaved Black people.