Teenage boys at the wheel: State and local governments and undocumented residents

As states and localities have begun to thrust themselves into the newfound opening of local power on immigration matters, we see the type of scene that would occur when teenage drivers first take the wheel: launching hateful, reckless ideas, veering to the right because they don’t have a sense of the road, and getting drunk and running into people.

Recently we've seen a series of laws passed that take away human rights. An Arizona law allows harassment by police and local detention, an Alabama law excludes children from schools and revokes any modicum of fair work standards from adults, and laws in several states prohibit undocumented youth from attending public colleges. 

 We find this adolescent understanding of undocumented immigrants in this logic:

1)   We have ‘illegals’ invading!

2)   ‘Illegals’ are criminals!

3)   We should eliminate them however we can! Yee haw!

This unstudied approach neglects to consider things that are outside of their immediate purview.

1)   Governments, at the behest of big business, have carefully nurtured the roots of undocumented immigration in their transnational and international business and military dealings. 

2)   Undocumented immigrants are people, with families, and who possess human rights.

3)   Undocumented immigrants tend to have jobs that most native-born Americans shun. In the words of Stephen Colbert in his Congressional testimony, “Because apparently, even the invisible hand doesn’t want to pick beans.”

4)   The legal immigration system to the United States is a rusty bike with a chain that shrieks and jumps off the rungs every turn of the pedal. You get on again and again and make no progress towards your destination. It doesn’t allow you to go anywhere, despite everyone just telling you to jump on and go. 

5)   Many undocumented residents have lived in a place for a very long time, have carried their responsibilities of raising their families (with far fewer resources than other residents), have paid their taxes.

6)   Undocumented residents have much lower rates of crime than other residents. They are careful to be good neighbors lest it result in their deportation.

Alabama passed and implemented parts of the most inhumane and exclusionary of the recently passed laws recently.  Their policies stand in stark opposition to the recommendations of the Police Foundation, an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit foundation that researched local interventions. Today, the New York Times editorial board rightly denounced the“disgrace” of Alabama’s “xenophobia”.

Their car is speeding down Main Street at rush hour. Beware. 

Who Do We Think We Are?

This morning I woke up and read a motivating op-ed in the New York Times by Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Carola Suárez-Orozco on how terrible deportations are on the American-born children left behind.  I highly recommend it, not just if you’re into issues of immigration but also if you are interested in crafting a more benevolent country for you and your children.

Here’s my (first) letter to the editor:

Re: “Deporting Parents Hurts Kids” (Opinion, April 21, 2012):

Since the beginning of humanity, when meeting basic needs has proved difficult, families have migrated.

How our national government responds to this age-old affair symbolizes our sense of hospitality. With little regard for American-initiated engagements in foreign countries that spark migration, our system of authorizing entry creates the very categories of people that are unauthorized.

Then the same politicians that praise “family values” do little to protect the lawful American-born children. Only Somalia and the US have refused to ratify the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Like the authors’ work, my research with undocumented youth in Paris and New York shows how crippling status is for kids that have grown up dreaming of giving back to their families and community.

Obama must forcefully restructure the agencies under his aegis to respond in a humane way to the millions of American families with at least one undocumented member.

Stephen Ruszczyk

And my second, I got carried away:

Re: “Deporting Parents Hurts Kids” (Opinion, April 21, 2012):

The authors write how deportation of parents needlessly places American children in danger. Why we have come to such desperation in the US as to need to tear apart families, leaving children without mothers and teenagers without fathers?

Obama’s immigration policy relies on the legitimacy of massive deportations. While this may respond to a perceived political need, being tough on the border, what it really does is pacify interest groups with nativist convictions. These groups are aligned with the Republican Party, whose support he needs to find a legislative compromise.  

But there is no compromise! And the coarse culture of meeting deportation quotas sweeps asunder the apparent good news of Obama’s new discretionary policy for deportation, supposedly based on immigrants’ security risk. The security risk seems to come from separating families, not from them living together.

We need to re-think solutions.  

Stephen Ruszczyk

Education Not Deportation

At UCLA, student protestors claim their right to be educated in the place where they have lived and live.

A Cauldron of Dreams Bubbling

The political activism of undocumented youth has started to gain the ear of American media. This week, an Atlantic writer who did a good job portraying the way status really drags people off their heretofore path as they finish high school. The Connecticut kids find themselves especially blocked. New York City kids actually have the advantage of a formidable, if chronically frustrating, public transportation system. I, for one, am a documented person that does not have a car. The car is often a key resource when looking for a job, or looking for a romantic partner. I still remember a woman I worked with at Marshall's in Buffalo who had to take three buses to get to work, and I remember her crying when she was fired for being late to work, when it took her an hour and a half to get there. But a driver's license is still the norm to buy alcohol or cigarettes in New York City.

The Huffington Post also has a blog series by 12 young writer-activists that tells personal stories and shows the resolve of young people in gaining their shot at the American Dream. The organization of activists seems strongest in California, where 10 of the 12 writers live (the other two seem to live in Florida according to the site). Illinois also has a strong organizational base. If these regional strengths were extended, and the moral standing of kids growing up without papers was deepened in local communities, we might finally start to see political shift. If they could talk more openly about their status, if schools addressed their needs straight-forwardly, and if church and other religious groups spoke out on the universal aspects of being a person, people who living, instead of fighting out battles on sexual practices, if, if, if...

Some Dream Act Protesters

What can you do? You can search out a local organization that helps undocumented immigrants or organizes protests. You can subscribe to groups on Facebook that keep you updated on stories: New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road, New York State Youth Leadership Council, National Immigrant Youth Alliance, MALDEF, Define American and more. When you read the stories of how the US is treating kids, there is no other choice but to start to act. You can write a message about it on your Facebook, you can write your Senator, your Representatives, you can participate in marches, you can start an online petition, you can talk to your friends about it, you can write a letter to the Editor. Those things won't solve all the problems but will at least start to organize New York so it acts as a leader on undocumented issues like Los Angeles and Chicago do today. And when the kids who face the biggest risk can protest, so can we.

The proof I WENT ON A VACATION?

My fiancée’s niece walked to point out the secret door Marie Antoinette had used to escape from the Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789.   The woman next to me jutted out her arm with a ‘STOP’ so her friend could take a photo of her in front of the Queen’s bed. 10 year old Brianna jumped back and apologized. When she finally pointed out the side door to me, the two picture-taking friends were busy shooting portraits from a different angle on my left. 

These women’s need to take a photo of themselves in the luxurious background of an 18^th century French queen’s bedchamber was matched by scores of tourists snapping shot after shot of themselves in front of a gilded molding or a molded guild. They were not alone. (And you can take pics of them and post them here.) 

WHY ARE TOURISTS TAKING SO MANY PICTURES OF THEMSELVES?!?!

I reminisced about the days of film canisters and focus eyeholes. Yes, the zero additional cost of snapping an extra photo in the digital camera age is part of it. After purchasing your phone or camera, the only cost is your time. Time to unload and sort through your overly-snappy (clicky?) hand doesn’t seem so burdensome as you barrel from room to room from one ‘branded’ tourist site to the next. 

Modern vacation goers

Nearly everyone with a phone has a digital camera attached to it. And the number of international tourists is up. Will I ever get to look at the Mona Lisa without being pushed out of the way? [And not just the Mona Lisa but every single painting in the room as cameras scurry to blink in front of every worthy work!]

In the next room, a young woman entered the door with her camera already outstretched, snapping away like a trigger-happy video game soldier. She didn’t look at the furnishings, the garden view from the window, the Temptation of Darius painting on the wall, or read the description.

In a certain way, I get it. Most of the camera holders had traveled far to a city that was expensive, from the hotel to the bourgeois restaurants. But the shots gave them a chance to show family, friends, and facebook friends. They wanted to show that they were a little bit more fancy and more cultured than when they spent all that money. And if a picture of manicured trees and a gold-embossed painting frame looks nice by itself, the message registers with an image of your relaxed self next to the 17^th century seascape. And taking pics is free!

 

This set of New Yorker photos of people being tourists starts to get at that idea.  When people tell others they vacationed in Paris, they expect a certain cachet, and a shot in the gold and mirrors reflects a moment when you rose to a respectability you might not feel at your daily rounds. Or maybe it is just proof that you are not stuck at work that week.

That’s not all it is, however. We are developing a need to share everything before experiencing it, I think at the risk of not absorbing it deeply first.  As I went to a Los Van Van concert and people snapped away their future visual memories of the Cuban salsa-son band, and the man in front of me videoed the entire last song, I wished for a audience of people so enveloped in the present they would not think of the camera phone in their pocket. And so I could see the musicians on stage!

Imprimaturs and Making Science More Useful

Imprimaturs are important. Who will emboss my article with the seal of an official publication?

If you want a grant from a national agency or an article in a top journal, you usually need to fit the (systematic, rigorous) exploration of knowledge into a 'scientific' formation: what the field already knows about the question, hypotheses to be tested, possible outcomes. But not all scientific knowledge works like that!

I really liked Clark & Primo's op-ed in the New York Times advocating a broader vision of what social science is trying to achieve. They cite Ronald Giere, saying "the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere."

How well do our ways of organizing our studies match what we are trying to get out of them?

In education, we are often advocating practices without looking at the whole system. What happens in a school is so complex, and is enormously influenced by broader inequalities and people's and communities' access to cultural and social resources. So teaching different kinds of students can't follow a cookie-cutter pattern.

[SIDEBAR: **The tough part of analyzing education comes from expecting the same outcome for students (e.g. mastering trigonometry or attending a four-year college) when they come with different bundles of skills and are actually headed down different paths. When do we allow expectations to change ("if you want to do that career, then you should..."), and how much do we force students to stay locked in to a given career track? How can we promise all kids growth and satisfaction? **]

When we talk about studies on healthy lifestyles, we often say, "Oh, carbs are bad for you" or "Coffee is bad for you" but those things really depend on your lifestyle. If you are a marathoner, you should probably eat bread and more bread. If you are a more sedentary person, you should probably eat more fruits and vegetables! What if there are few grocery stores near my house, or the price is too expensive compared to Chef Boyardee Raviolis? To get at the individual takeaways and the structural takeaways, we need longitudinal surveys and some exploratory ethnography!

Is It True Trees Live to Be Less Than One Year Old?

Studies, and the articles that report them, often say doing x leads to y. Like, marriage makes men live longer or having children as a teenager means you won’t graduate from college. 

These studies are definitely helpful for certain things. But the next step of applying the knowledge to people’s lives is often bungled and abuses the science of connecting the dots, connecting the causes to the effects.  These often assume it is useful to know what the average is, and how far people may stray from the average.  Married men may live longer than single men in general, but what if the man I’m marrying is an alcoholic trapeze artist with a history of depression?  How might those factors work in concert with other factors to produce what we might think of as a path?  Will he fall off the trapeze drunk, or will he lose his job and start drinking himself to death?

When we gossip about people, we often talk about going down paths.  “He’s going down the wrong path.” “That could turn into something bad very fast.” “She’s on a path to success.” In my work I take this kind of approach, producing different kinds of conclusions than studies that talk about averages.  

One part of my work with undocumented youth is the development of their identity, and how it is impacted by their legal status. So I hang out with them and listen to their stories and try to represent their lives as a multi-layered path. 

This of course means I make my own simplifications, and have my own assumptions. For example, I try to take a messy relationship and put a label on it.

What I am most interested in is how the various layers work together. The different layers I think about are family, neighborhood (from friends to organizations), romantic relationship (and maybe having kids), work (part and full-time), school (relationships with teachers, school activities, grades), and outside organizational and political commitments.

Sometimes people have aspirations on all of these points; sometimes they don’t. Usually youth say they feel more mature, more adult when they are able to juggle several of these at once. Some make decisions to concentrate on certain layers and come back to others later. Some feel that certain layers are not possible or are uninteresting to them. 

For example, Tiger mom Amy Chua raised her daughters obsessing on grades and school activities.  Only!  Some kids have to take care of their parents and ignore most life outside the family. Others are swallowed up by the neighborhood level, and become gang members. Then there is the person who goes from relationship to relationship but doesn’t develop lasting friendships. Others only have friends and don’t develop romantic relationships, like Sydney Fife in I Love You, Man. So I look for these patterns and give them names: Caretaker; Gang member; Serial monogamist; Celibate friend.

A lot of the immigrant youth I talk with tell me how much more important family is to them than ‘Americans’.  But this one “layer” can play out in different ways, can connect to other factors in different ways. While one person says they will stave off having kids until after they have finished an education, all to be able to meet family expectations, another person will forgo education to help support parents or their own newborn.

Bristle Cone Pine

This perspective provides a needed focus on the context of people’s lives that shape their paths, the forest around the tree if you will. The average life of a tree is less than a year.  Of trees that make it past that threshold, some trees grow ever so slowly but for thousands of years, like the Bristle Cone Pine; others like the Southern Red Cedar tend to die out when they hit their twenties.  The different species live in different forests and have different relationships with other plants around.  Sometimes you want to check if Southern Cedars are dying earlier; other times you want to talk more specifically about how Southern Cedars work in one type of forest. 

Southern Red Cedar

Certain types of teenage moms seem to do pretty well continuing their education. What could other similar teenagers learn from them about how to balance several things? When is hanging out with friends a problem, and when is it an important support network? When does working in high school help youth, and when does it hurt them? 

Public (recognition)

Around the corner from my apartment in east Paris 50 years ago, 9 people were killed, scores injured and hundreds traumatized for life. A recent night, organized by the Human Rights League, some 150 protesters, community members, and writers met to mark the anniversary with a showing of the documentary, To Die at Metro Charonne, Why?  The answer is they were protesting the Secret Army Organization (OAS), an extreme right group that supported a continued French presence in Algeria, and that assassinated people that were against them.

To hear the voices of the white-haired tremble as they described how the police beat on their heads and blocked their passage, to the point where children and fathers and sisters were killed, was quite moving and provokes a respect of having lived through struggle.

Witnesses described billowing chaos that makes it difficult to trace the exact way the police contributed to the massacre. They cut off roads, beat those who tried to breach their lines, and forced people down stairwells where they were trampled by other fleeing protesters. 

It is in the hideous melee that the suffocated victims perished.

The police refused to release their confidential documents on the tragedy. The documents that remain will surely not be the most incriminating.  Police who tried to speak about what happened received death threats. In the end, people still don’t know what happened exactly, the accounts can clash, frustrating people’s need for closure.

Why does the Paris police still fail to recognize any wrongdoing?

Maybe the answer has to do with 1) a recognition of their dominance, that it would take an enormous amount of public pressure to force them to come clean, 2) the support of the external war regime within the country would be more controversial today, and 3) it would blemish the prestige of heroic figures like De Gaulle that okayed the reprisal. All of these could potentially reduce the power of the French state.

How can citizens fight against these dominant technologies of the state, of the police, weapons, communications, and outright refusals to provide information?

Who has the right to public recognition has everything to do with how the machinations of power clench on the bodies of its citizens.

Note:  While this event was in my neighborhood, on the other side of Paris, police murdered hundreds of peacefully protesting Algerians, known as the October 17 massacre. Police threw the bodies into the Seine, which were found downriver for weeks. This event barely made the papers.   

An Algerian flag commemorates the bodies of protesters thrown in the Seine river.

Patiently Waiting?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in lines recently. Not lines at stores but in lines and waiting rooms accompanying young adults trying to help them bureaucratically argue why they should be regularized.

Inside a Prefecture

You look at the time on your cell phone; put it away. You slouch on the hard bench; you stare at television news that repeats every five minutes. You look at the time on your cell phone; put it away. You look at the other people in the room until they return your glance. The waiting-order numbers screen was rolling for a minute there but now hasn’t blinked in more than five minutes. You look at the time on your cell phone; put it away. The swelling stress of the administrative encounter leaves you less and less prepared to actually articulate what you are doing there.

I felt a bit relieved to see a paper about why standing in line drives you mad. Being anxious makes waits feel longer. Being alone makes them worse than being with someone. Not knowing how long you have to wait makes them seem longer.  But the more valuable the service, the longer people are willing to wait.  [Not on this list is being forced to wait in terrible conditions! This morning asylum-seekers waited outside in the sub-zero gusts as the police barked directions in French. Outside of Paris people sleep outside in order to be received the following day.]

Outside the Prefecture of Bobigny

So for immigrant kids in high school or solo adult workers in need of official paperwork, they are willing to stay anxiety-ridden awaiting the verdict on their future in administrative Prefectures around the country. People double and triple check their photocopies of photocopies that they already checked before leaving their apartment. You might miss your turn if you decide to go to the bathroom, better hold it.

Will you be one of the selected? You’re not so sure after the counter clerk barked a command at you and whispered under her breath.  They call out your name…

In France, some 30,000 people a year (since 2005) come out at the other end of the tunnel with French residence cards.

In the US, the undocumented stay waiting. And the waiting room is impatiently filling up. 

MLK Day Prize: Education Without Borders Network

I just got back from the national meeting of the Education Without Borders Network in pretty Amiens, France (most famous for its marvelous cathedral). The marvel is really the existence of the network and the work it does protecting undocumented students and their families. These citizens would make Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proud. (Happy birthday, MLK!)

Their logo above explains a lot of how they see things. The police are taking children out of classrooms, putting them in handcuffs, and deporting them. Legal protection of children is taken seriously here, and deportation evokes World War II trains heading to concentration camps to the east. So, when Sarkozy took over as Minister of the Interior in 2004 (again) and introduced new overzealous immigration measures, a mass of teachers, parents, unions,and other organizations came together to form the Network.

Who can imagine a classmate shackled and led to a plane while the other students in the class recite the national motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?

So the network came together by 2004, and a most quintessential action took place in the neighborhood where I do my field work, in the spring of 2007. Three police cars arrive to take away a grandfather who was waiting for his grandson to come out of elementary school (this was a policy put in place with Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior). As you can see in the video, a crowd crystallizes instantly, and forms a barrier to prevent the police from leaving with the grandpa. They have whistles, and even lay out in the street to prevent the police cars from taking off. There are a few videocameras filming and you can watch the episode here and here.  The resistance to the police tactics is effective in the end, and the grandpa is released.     

An Undocumented Youth= A Stolen Youth

Teachers and parents of the network are active in schools, give advice to kids and their families. They 'godparent' students and families in the municipal halls. Entire schools mobilize to support a single undocumented student! They travel together to the courtroom or to the police headquarters in an extraordinary show of solidarity. And this apprenticeship into citizenship is didactic, providing real-life experiences of how democracy works. On a more personal level, I also hear from kids about how they feel included, how the stigma recedes, and how they are inspired to become French.   

Who’s to say to these kids they are not integrated, when they have the community in the streets on their behalf? 

Thanks to Amiens for having us and to the Lukowskis for the hospitality! 

13th century Cathedral of Amiens

A Better Life

Vacation is over, retour au boulot! On the flight back to Paris I willed my eyelids open and watched the opening of a movie called A Better Life. It said it was about a gardener in East LA. Sounded good to fall asleep to.


From almost the opening credits, the story pulled me in with its completely believable, if romanticized, depiction of immigrant family life. A Better Life is really about a father-son relationship. The father, Carlos Galindo (played by Demian Bichir), works long hours as a landscaper in rich seaside mansions. He makes enough to support him and his son, 14 year old Luis (Jose Julian) though as an undocumented worker, Carlos has no job protection. This precariousness makes it more difficult to raise his son how he'd like to. When his need to provide for his son faces this vulnerability, the movie takes off.

The acting is not terrible, though the real gem is to see all the ways not having legal status degrades your ability to make good on family obligations, how the sacrifice of parents is heightened, how the children seek to redeem this sacrifice, and how the US system does not support families with US citizen children. I won't give away the ending! Out on DVD now. Tell me what moral lessons you get from it after you watch!


Trailer


Who should have rights in the US? And how does it affect us when some people among us don't?