It’s unfortunate that this post is now in circulation because I was mostly just venting to my small handful of followers about my annoyance with diaspora politics and so I ended up being a bit flippant and produced something that ripped out of its proper context makes it look like I’m just smearing the plight of immigrants. This needs to be read as a post against the homogenization of immigrant narratives and the bad takes produced by diaspora kids about conditions in their homelands. As a disclaimer, I’m the child of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union and I know the struggles that my parents and others in the community had to go through upon arriving to America. This post should not in any way be read as dismissal of immigrants. That being said, let’s get to the nitty gritty. I will be replying to both this post and zanabism’s other post.
The category of ‘immigrant’ is a fraught one, it’s a term that encompasses many different kinds of people, from wealthy expats to the exploited masses that zanabism refers to. From those who arrive legally with the support of the state to people who arrive on tourist visas and who must then eke out an existence in extreme precarity while getting paid under the counter (my mother got here this way). The context in which I was venting presumed the former category.
As for zanabism’s example of Chinese laborers in the 19th century, it should be noted that I was speaking specifically about contemporary immigrants, this like comparing apples to oranges. A distinction must be made between the waves of immigration of the past, when Canada and the US had relatively porous borders because they needed large quantities of cheap manual labor to build up their industrial capacity to the situation today, when immigrants from (mostly) non-white countries have to jump through hoops and demonstrate advanced skills to get into the country ‘legally’. It was not even a question of assimilating these people into the national body, they were expected to perform backbreaking labor for 12 hours a day, stay here for a few years earning subpar wages, and go back to their country. A similar system is found today in the Gulf countries (look up kafala if you’re unaware of the situation, it’s horrifying.)
To immigrate to the US today, one must demonstrate that their family will not be a ‘burden’ to the state. The process of getting a green card is grueling, you will get grilled on just about every facet of your life, you’re expected to account for yourself and your entire family, show that you’re open to ‘American values’ (itself a nebulous idea, as if there aren’t millions of citizens who hold violent views wrt women, LGBT people etc. who never get hassled by the state). To pass this process, you’re going to need to have an advanced education, something that’s not readily available in many parts of the world unless you’re part of an urban middle class. The child of sustenance farming peasants is unlikely to have the opportunities to immigrate via this route, so they mostly do not fall under this category.
For this category of immigrants, you have a relatively straightforward course of action. Arrive, find a job, pay your taxes, speak good English, stay clear of the law, then when that’s all done, when you’ve shown yourself capable of being a model citizen for about a decade, you may apply for citizenship and receive the rights associated with that. In practice this is much harder than it sounds, but it’s still a cakewalk compared to the other route.
The other route, as I mentioned, involves getting into the country on a tourist visa and staying past the period when you’re allowed to be there legally. These are the people who are unlikely to have a support network, they don’t have the education to do anything but the most undesirable jobs, and they are the most vulnerable, the ones with the least rights, those who are unable to speak up for themselves even when they know that they are being extralegally exploited. They’re also held to much more stringent standards. Because of their situation, they are also the least likely to have their voices heard in discourses on immigrants.
Discourses on immigrants are overwhelmingly dominated by the former category. They’re the good ones, they celebrate the Fourth of July, they speak English to their children, they love our ‘democracy’, they waited for their turn to come here legally. They are the loudest ones, the ones whose voices are most magnified in our society because they’re educated and they know what Americans want to hear. When you hear an immigrant talking about their rags to riches story, how they came here with nothing but the clothes on their back and a desire to improve their lot, and through sheer force of will they were able to make a small business, these are the ones that you’ll generally hear. They will discount the privileges that they had, scoff at the presumption that their success could be attributed to anything other than hard work, as if the nannies and farm workers who bust their asses without rest and who have nothing to show for it are just lazy.
My point? These people are speaking from a certain class position, and their narratives will reflect that. For every one of them you will find several others who structurally never even had a chance of success. Their children will most likely be raised with this point of view, and they will then peddle their parents’ ideas of what the home country is like as well. So most Americans end up having a very two-dimensional view of what any given country is like, because these voices are the ones whom you’re most likely to hear.
I’d also like to talk a little bit about ‘choice’ but frankly I’m tired and I need to get to bed soon. But briefly, ‘choice’ when it comes to immigration is confined to only the most well-off immigrants. Most people do not want to leave behind their homes and come to an unfamiliar land where they know they’ll probably be looked down upon, they come because the consequences of imperialism live on, because their countries are meddled with and prevented from industrializing so that we may get raw resources and consumer goods cheaply. Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is an excellent look at this.
Please add on if you feel that I’ve missed something.
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