Steve Burns: "Illegal" vs. "Undocumented"

Last Friday, the UW College Republicans invited Michelle Malkin, an extreme anti-immigrant bigot, to speak at the Madison campus. I had made up some flyers highlighting the fact that Ms. Malkin had written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, and that she had frequently claimed that there exists a secret plan to reconquer the southwest US for Mexico though immigration.

On the flyers, I made the point that Ms. Malkin's views aren't just rhetoric - views like hers have had real consequences for real people, and as an example, I cited the case of Tope Awe, a third-year UW pharmacy student who had been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement only the week before, and is now threatened with deportation to Nigeria, a country she hasn't seen since she was three years old.

Most of the students accepted the flyers without comment, but one older man wanted to argue with me, specifically about Tope Awe. "But she's illegal, right?" he said. "Her parents came here, overstayed their visa, so they've been breaking the law. Don't you think we should follow the law?” I pointed out that Ms. Awe is an honor student and campus leader, her parents have been working and paying taxes, Tope's brother, Benga, is also threatened with deportation, despite being married to a US citizen and having an eighteen-month-old son, and Tope's father is seriously ill, is undergoing kidney dialysis, and may very well die if deported to Nigeria. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “The law is the law, and if we start breaking the law for emotional reasons, then the law doesn't mean anything.”

And that's the problem with seeing the immigration issue through the lens of “legal” vs. “illegal.” Once we decide that the defining characteristic of the Awe family or any other immigrants living here without proper documentation is their “illegality”, what options do we have? After all, the law must be obeyed, right?

Viewing immigration as a question of “legal” vs. “illegal” is a choice we make. We could make another choice. We could choose to face the messy reality of our situation: we are a relatively rich country located next to many relatively poor countries, we have pursued economic policies that have created vast poverty and misery south of our border and elsewhere in the world, and now millions of people are in our country without papers, working, doing no harm to anyone, and contributing much that is good. We could face this messy reality and ask this question: How can we best deal with this situation in a way that is humane, recognizes our own responsibility for the impoverishment that drives immigration, and does the least harm and produces the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people?

“Illegal” is simply a dead end. It stops the questions that would lead us to search for a solution and forecloses our options – and that is surely the intention of at least some who use the word.

So I prefer “undocumented.” But I have problems with that word too, because, more often than not, my use of it leads the conversation away from real people, and on to the words we use to describe them. Words have power, and that's why people argue about them, but I hope as we continue this conversation we can go beyond the question of “what words should we use?” to all the other questions that face us.

Life, generally speaking, doesn't present us with stark choices between right and wrong; more often it's a matter of messy compromise, of getting by, of doing the best we can, of doing the most good – or at least some good – while doing the least harm. Some day our country will come to the point of messy compromise on the issue of immigration, and “legal” will become whatever those in power decide to make it. When that happens, “legal” won't mean “just” or “right”, it will simply mean “legal” - the product of bargaining between interest groups and politicians, some of the least perfect people on this planet. Before the bargains get made, we can all help tip the balance of that eventual compromise in the direction of compassion, of generosity, and of humanity. I hope you'll join us in that struggle.

Steve Burns is Program Coordinator of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice