Americans forgetting lessons from immigration history
Every spring, before the summer sizzles and drips with the humidity of South Texas, I take a pilgrimage to San Antonio.
The last time, I took in the missions and was reminded how each is different: San Francisco de la Espada with its rugged simplicity; the brilliant whitewashed walls of San Juan Capistrano; and the expansive, graceful grounds of San Jose. I read the placards at that last one, learning that these limestone walls were laid nearly 300 years ago by the hands of both Native Americans and the people who journeyed north from Nuevo Leon, my mother’s native land. Most of the names are lost to history, all testimony to the impermanence of individuals but the relentless movement of people.
Of course, Texas and the country are bracing for another long, hot summer with a president in Washington who spends each summer declaring his personal war on immigrants of all kinds, but mostly those still traveling those same roads north. When he ran for president four years ago he belittled Mexicans as rapists. Last year he separated Central American children from families. This summer he is institutionalizing internment camps, with horrific conditions. It remains to be seen if he will actually try to deport “millions,” as he has recently promised. Regardless, the sheer cruelty of the threat is perhaps enough to satisfy him.
As someone proud of his Mexican heritage, I no longer find myself outraged. I find myself, instead, despondent at this cycle of my country’s — America’s — history. I know full well that freedom isn’t free and that we haven’t always, or even often, lived up to being the nation that we have billed ourselves to be.
Yet still we tried. Until now. And it isn’t just a president who seems to have no moral compass, let alone a constitutional bearing. There are plenty of Americans, about 40 percent, who join in or sometimes just accept his fullthroated cry for cruelty toward migrants even though as policy it is an abject, utter failure.
In the short term, still more people have come from Central America, driven from their homes by violence, corruption and the collapse of coffee prices. But our society’s divorce from history and the empathy that is derived from it seems quite complete now. In this regard, Trump
has succeeded brilliantly.
My country, America, seems to remember nothing of its past: the racist exclusion of all Asian immigrants; encouraging Mexican labor and military recruits during two world wars, then ejecting them when it was economically convenient.
My great uncle Daniel left Nuevo Leon to join the U.S. Navy during World War II and was never seen again. Of course, had he survived the war, he might have been swept up by Operation Wetback, which ejected more than 1 million Mexicans. Along with them went some estimated 100,000 American citizens. The parallels to today are nearly exact: Children who are U.S. citizens now live in fear of leaving the house only to return to no parents.
Of course, Mexicans and other Latinos have borne this history for the last 100 years — but they were hardly alone. African-Americans endured far worse. Asians did, too. Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II. So were Germans and Italians and their American offspring, for no crime other than seeming foreign. In Texas, only the internment camp names have changed from Seagoville, Kenedy and Crystal City to Dilley, El Paso, Karnes, and 23 other places in Texas, including Houston.
The other day, my 82-year-old mother misplaced her passport, and a panic came over her. She has been a proud naturalized U.S. citizen for decades. But the idea that her Mexican-sounding voice might still quaver if asked for identification didn’t outrage me; it saddened me. Like many immigrants she came here for practical reasons but also for principled ones, too, namely the rule of law. The reality that we imprison migrants in filthy conditions, where they knot ropes to hang themselves or spend days in 100-degree desert heat in a place called the “dog pound,” sickens me.
Trump has cleverly carved out two Americas: one that really doesn’t care about the rule of law, about the ideals of America, or human decency. And the one that cares and, for it, is ignored with, at most, the hand-wringing acquiescence of the Senate. This will be the hallmark of his re-election campaign: war on people who just don’t look white enough. Most distressing, it will last long past his reality show presidency. This is Trump’s legacy, the poisoned fruit of hate.
I, for one, can no longer muster outrage. Nor can I muster patience for those who offer the tenderest of justifications. We don’t hate immigrants, they say, we just don’t like illegal immigrants. Well, you can’t deport 10.5 million people without killing some large number of them. Without needing to raise the specter of the Holocaust — to which there is no comparison — just ask the 10 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II. At least a half million of them died.
At 55, I am on the backside of life but never thought that I would witness a government of terror in my own country. Bigger than Trump, this is American democracy’s flirtation with fascism and strong-man politics. He may not follow through with his wild threats this time, again. Yet his bumbling, failing results matter far less than the fear he instills each time. The fear is a feature, not a bug.
Back at the mission, I tried to draw my consciousness to the cool shade of the live oak tree, the polite park ranger asking me not to sit on the limestone wall, please, the tourists ambling about. I wonder how many of them know of all the walls, churches and homes my mother’s people — and those from farther south — have built in the ensuing centuries. Of all the lives that have moved forth and north along these same roads borne ceaselessly by time.
For a moment it gives me a kind of stubborn hope. But only for a moment. For my mother’s people and all those who have followed, I mourn. Yet for my country, I weep.