Hispanic Fanatic

First thing this morning, I noticed this intimidating fellow staring at me from my computer screen:

Of course, it’s the infamous “illegal alien” costume that got many immigrant-rights groups up in arms. For those who didn’t get enough of the strained attempt at humor, there’s also this version:

Yes, they’re undeniably offensive, and Hispanic groups are correct to call out the merchants on selling them. I doubt anything similarly offensive to Africa Americans would pass the gatekeepers at Target, Walgreens, or Amazon, all of whom briefly sold the items.

Still, let’s leave the backlash over the costumes at a firm but diplomatic rebuke. The costume makers were clearly attempting a play on words rather than making an outright derogatory political statement. And those words, “illegal alien,” actually went out around the time that Genesis recorded that cheesy song (what was that all about, by the way?). These days, “illegal immigrant” is used more often, or “undocumented worker” if you prefer to be sensitive, or any number of racial slurs if you prefer not to be.

In fact, getting apocalyptic about such things only gives ammunition to minutemen wannabes. Those are the guys who scream about everybody being hypersensitive and that freedom of speech is being suppressed and that, while we’re at it, nobody speaks English anymore. Let them look foolish, rather than indulging in an argument over something so trivial.

In fact, we can consider this a brief skirmish that’s already been won. Merchants have realized that it’s unwise to needlessly piss off potential customers just to appeal to a bunch of xenophobic frat boys. Perhaps this is another example of the growing power of Latinos to exercise some economic and political muscle. And maybe it shows that the establishment is ready to acknowledge that Hispanics are, you know, human beings, more or less.

With that settled, let’s put the controversy behind us and try to recapture the spirit of Halloween. Let’s stick with outfits that are completely appropriate for the holiday and that we can all agree form the basis of good wholesome fun.

That’s right – slutty nurse costumes for everybody!

Let me shout out “thanks” to Pipil DC and Christina for their comments on my last post.

Here’s another quick article about a news story you have missed. It seems that in Arizona, the “Toughest Sheriff in America” has overstepped his bounds.

The man with this unimaginative nickname (one that seems self-generated) is Joe Arpaio, who is the law in Maricopa County – and don’t you forget it. The sheriff has earned some attention for himself by going after illegal immigrants.

Arpaio had been working with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce federal immigration laws. Unfortunately, it seems that the sheriff wasn’t just detaining illegals. He was allegedly rounding up Latinos in general. As such, Homeland Security is trying to limit his power to arrest people for the crime of being brown.

The sheriff denies that he’s profiling. He says, “We do not go on street corners and grab people that look like they’re from another country.”

But the ACLU counters that “He’s unconstitutionally acted to racially profile many persons in the community, persons who appear or are Latino” so that he can “appeal to his anti-immigration base.”

Now, we all know (because I’ve heard it on talk radio) that the ACLU won’t rest until illegal immigrants are given the keys to our houses and allowed to sleep with our wives. So maybe the sheriff is just being hounded by liberal atheist flag-burners?

But then there is the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian group that has denounced the sheriff’s actions and said that his department “falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission.” The Goldwater Institute, not exactly known for being a hangout for hippies, says that Arpaio has “diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration.”

It’s at times like this that I’m grateful for old-school conservatives, who are still likely to get peeved when civil liberties are trampled. Social conservatives and neocons, of course, are different, in that they are first people to dismiss Constitutional rights as too cumbersome for our modern world. The contradiction between these definitions of “conservative” is far too complicated and depressing to address in this post.

Suffice to say, when you’re in Arizona, keep an eye out for Sheriff Joe. He may be arresting people based on the color of their skin. He may be ignoring real crime and sidestepping the law. And he may be shirking his duty in order to get cozy with xenophobic nuts.

But he’s a tough guy, you know.

As we know, President Obama has announced that immigration reform will have to take its place in line behind a sputtering economy and a faltering war.

At the risk of showing off, or lapsing into complete egomania, I will now quote myself. Months ago, I wrote that, in the near future “not much will come of the new president’s apparently sincere desire to make this country a better place for immigrants. There simply isn’t the bandwidth.”

I would like to think that this means that I am smarter, or at the very least, display psychic abilities. In truth, it just means that I made an educated lucky guess, or I’m just more cynical than other commentators.

But let’s not beat up on the president too much over his reprioritization. He still has three years in which to help right-wingers morph into irrational fear mongers with bulging carotid arteries who lash out at anyone who disagrees with them. Of course, when immigration reform happens, it will make the healthcare melee look like a junior high debate.

Once more, here’s a short post to keep you up to date while I pack furiously for my move to California.

My friends at TC Daily (which carries my posts) had an interesting article about the continuing healthcare crisis among Latinos.

We all know that Hispanics are far more likely to get diabetes. But genetic predispositions are only part of the story. According to the article, Latinos have less access to healthcare in general (and certainly less than the old white people losing their minds about the “socialized medicine” boogeyman). As such, we’re looking at a major public-health disaster down the line.

Granted, the article is more about immigrants than Hispanics in general (and as we all know, the groups are not synonymous). However, its conclusion, which is that “society will have a high price to pay if access to medical and behavioral health care isn’t provided to immigrants regardless of their resident status,” is timely… and more than a little scary.

I’m going with another brief update today. But it’s good news. With all the chaos about the economy and healthcare dominating the news, you may have missed this little morsel: Apparently, the whole debate over immigration is over.

According to “Newsweek,” a study has proven that immigrants, even illegal ones, add more to the economy than they take.

According to the study, done by the right-leaning Cato Institute, “The net impact on U.S. households from tighter border enforcement is unambiguously negative.” The article says that “even low-skilled immigrants expand the economic pie and create jobs farther up the ladder.” In fact, the Cato Institute says that tightening the border could cost America up to $250 billion.

So that’s settled….

Except, why do I have this nagging suspicion that the argument isn’t over?

I’m continuing my recent trend of highlighting news stories that haven’t gotten enough publicity.

So let me tell you about the Mira family of Minnesota, who come from my family’s homeland of El Salvador. They crossed into America illegally to flee MS-13, which is a homicidal gang of heavily tattooed thugs who run wild in that nation.

The Miras say that deporting them is a death sentence, because MS-13 members will kill them upon arrival. So they’ve applied for political asylum. The case has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Any ruling could have a major effect upon immigration law.

Now, we can argue whether their plight rises to the level of granting political asylum. I think it does, but perhaps a lawyer or sane conservative would like to educate me why it doesn’t.

However, I imagine the common rejoinder is “They came here illegally, so it doesn’t matter if we send them back and they get killed.” That argument, often made by people who consider themselves pro-life, only showcases the level of hostility and irrationality that the immigration debate brings out.

In any case, maybe it will work out for the Miras. Or maybe we’ll just send them packing because we can.

As I mentioned earlier, my move to California is taking up a lot of my time, forcing me to concentrate on short posts and quick observations – rather than the lengthy, behemoth-like diatribes that I prefer. Also, my schedule for posts will also be irregular, at least for the time being.

But this lifestyle upheaval is better than my previous excuse for neglecting the blog, which was that eye surgery left me afflicted with double-vision (that’s finally cleared up, by the way).

In any case, I see this as an opportunity to direct you to news stories that I may have otherwise overlooked in my mad rush to publicize, well, myself.

So I draw your attention to the plight of Daniel Guadron, a teenager from New Jersey. He was a straight-A student in high school, where he was also a popular athlete.

Then about a year ago, U.S. immigration found out that his parents were in the country illegally. So they arrested him, although he had legal permission to work and study in America.

He was stuck in detention for seven months. He finally got out, after being charged with no crime, and managed to graduate with his high school class.

The kid has tenacity, obviously, but the issue goes beyond one unjustly persecuted Latino. Locking up Guadron for over half a year did nothing to make our borders more secure or save a citizen’s job or discourage illegals or advance any of the myriad rationales given for zero-tolerance policies on immigration.

In the end, nobody won, except maybe one determined Hispanic teenager who now has a hell of a story for his college-application essay.

And I say, good for him.

As some commentators have noted, the election of Barack Obama has forced Europe to address one of its uncomfortable contradictions. This most progressive of continents has a reputation for being more enlightened than America. Indeed, their health-care policies, attitude toward gays, and work-life balance far exceed our stumbling, nineteenth-century approaches. In comparison to them, we look – and often feel – like beer-swilling cretins who fire shotguns at random while cursing out fancy book learnin’.

But there is one area where Europe can only gaze upon us in wonder. Believe it or not, we do a better job at integrating immigrants, promoting assimilation, and addressing racism than they do. Yes, even with all the screaming about Mexicans taking our jobs and Laotians refusing to learn English and Somalis creating their own ethnic enclaves and what have you, we’re far ahead of our European counterparts.

For starters, we have just elected a new leader who happens to be a biracial man whose father was an immigrant. I don’t see anything similar happening soon in Great Britain or Denmark. In fact, xenophobia is on the rise in Europe.

Or look at France’s National Assembly, which is the rough equivalent of our U.S. House of Representatives. Of its 577 members, only one is a minority. In contrast, of our 535 members of Congress, 75 are minorities (and 27 of those are Hispanics, thank you very much).

That’s just looking at the political breakdown of our leadership. There are other ways in which it is better to be a dark hue in America than it is in Austria, even though it’s clear that we have acres of room for improvement. Still, we’re farther along the path than many other nations are, and one factor for this headstart may be because of our view of immigration.

The writer Naomi Wolf points out several reasons why immigrants strive for a U.S. address, and why they tend to like it better here than in Europe.

First, Wolf points out that our national story is different. With the exception of Native Americans, we all came from somewhere else. To quote “Stripes” and the esteemed philosopher Bill Murray, our ancestors were “kicked out of every decent country in the world” (Ms. Wolf does not employ this reference).

Also, the values of immigration are admired – or at least the initiative and ambition of old-time Ellis Island immigrants are – while in Europe, immigrants are viewed with almost universal disdain. In addition, everyone gets to be hyphenated once he or she gets here (e.g., African American, Italian American, Asian American). See if you can find someone who considers himself a “Turkish German.”

Wolf also points that we emphasize values that everyone (in theory) can share, instead of focusing on a lineage of great kings or the specifics of a tiny geographical area, like they do in Europe. Finally, she stresses how the separation of church and state is vital to preventing a xenophobic culture, which is a point I’ve made several times in these posts.

Obviously, there are also geographical reasons why so many people from Latin America come here. There will never be an influx of Hondurans to, say, Belgium. But I imagine that if most of those Guatemalans who risk it all to emigrate could chose any nation on Earth, they would still look north first.

Despite the enormous obstacles that newcomers face here – some legal and necessary, others cultural and ugly – it’s better to be an immigrant in America than anywhere else. And it’s not just because we’re, you know, America – where everyone has nine iPods and drives hot cars and watches 188 channels of pornography and indulges in freedoms that terrorists apparently hate.

Really, you can have a good quality of life in Spain or Greece. But it would suck to start at the bottom in any of those countries, because that’s where you, your children, and probably your grandchildren will remain. That is often the case here, of course. But we at least offer the hope of progress, and as I can vouch from first-hand experience, one successful immigrant can create a situation where an entire family can thrive.

Is essence, perhaps the main reason America has always been a nation of immigrants is simple.

American is not race or an ethnicity. It is a nationality. More than that, it’s an idea.

Many Americans take great satisfaction, sometimes bordering on maniacal pride, in claiming that their European ancestors came here and learned English quickly. According to some, these immigrants’ boots were still wet from the spray of the Atlantic when they ditched German, Swedish, or Dutch. The thinking is that European immigrants rapidly mastered English in a sink-or-swim environment that demanded that they leave their mother tongues behind. The follow-up to this assertion is inevitably, “Why can’t Latin American immigrants do the same and learn English quickly?”

It’s a fair question. There’s just one problem. The central thesis – that European immigrants swiftly adopted English – may be wrong.

Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have published a study showing that America has a long history of (dare I say it?) multiculturalism. The researchers are Joseph Salmons, a German professor, and Miranda Wilkerson, a Ph.D. graduate in German.

Their study shows that until the late nineteenth century, and even into the early twentieth century, many German immigrants to that fine state still had not mastered English.

Germans made up that era’s largest immigration wave to Wisconsin, which is the chief reason that the researchers focused on them. The researchers add, however, that another factor for this emphasis was because the Germans “really fit this classic view of the ‘good old immigrants’ of the nineteenth century.”

The researchers plowed through census data, court information, school records, newspapers, and all the other minutia that academics salivate over. When they were done, they had a linguistic record of German immigration to Wisconsin from the 1830s to the 1930s.

Their conclusion was that many immigrants felt no need to learn English at all, much less quickly, and that some of them, in the words of the researchers, “appeared to live and thrive for decades while speaking exclusively German.”

In fact, as late as 1910 – decades after the initial wave of European immigration – German speakers still accounted for more than 20% of the population in several Wisconsin counties. Some second- and even third-generation residents (yes, even many born and raised in the United States) still spoke only German as adults.

The researchers point out that “after fifty or more years of living in the United States, many speakers in some communities remained monolingual.” The researchers added that “this finding provides striking counterevidence to the claim that early immigrants learned English quickly.”

So apparently, whole swaths of America’s heartland were overrun by people speaking devil languages (i.e., all languages except English) for decades. This is not exactly the instantaneous assimilation that we have been led to believe took place.

By the way, my lovely wife is descended from German immigrants, so I’m not exhibiting anti-Prussian bias or indulging in Bavarian bashing. My point is that Hispanic immigrants are constantly told that they’re not as bright or as determined as European immigrants who mastered English in a week, tops. The additional implication is that speaking Spanish is – if not illegal – certainly an affront to American values.

The irony is certainly powerful. Right wingers claim that their ancestors needed to learn English quickly to survive, and that modern immigrants have been coddled and refuse to adapt. However, the reverse may actually be true: European immigrants could keep speaking their original languages with few negative effects, but contemporary immigrants are economically screwed if they don’t pick up the local dialect as soon as possible.

According to the researchers, many of those hard-working Gunthers and Schultzes of the past were “committed Americans. They participated in politics, in the economy, and were leaders in their churches and their schools. They just happened not to conduct much of their life in English…. There was no huge pressure to change.” Speaking only German “did not act as a barrier to opportunity in the work force.”

It’s a different story today. People who come to America and don’t learn English are doomed to perpetual lower-class status. Certainly, every effort should be made to ensure that residents get a grasp of English as soon as possible. I would argue, however, that insulting contemporary immigrants, indulging in fear mongering by claiming they won’t learn, and mythologizing a past that may not have existed are not the most effective ways to do this.

By the way, if it worries you that a church in your neighborhood has occasional services in Spanish, take another look at Salmons and Wilkins’ study. There, you can find out about the Lutheran Church in Wisconsin that, after much debate, added services in English.

They did it in1929.

I’m still in a good mood from achieving post number one hundred (see my previous article). So here’s a positive, uplifting story… no, I really mean it. This isn’t some cynical trick, although I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking I would pull such a thing.

This feel-good tale has been covered in other places, but it can’t get too much publicity. Basically, years ago, a guy named Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa jumped a fence and entered America illegally. He became one of the numerous Mexicans who wound up toiling in the fields. But he strived to do more with his life.

So today, he is, quite literally, a brain surgeon.

Go ahead and check out this article if you don’t believe me. I’m waiting for the movie treatment on this, ala “The Pursuit of Happyness.” But since we have a dearth of Latino movie stars, I have no idea who would play Quiñones-Hinojosa. Maybe it will be Johnny Depp after a few tanning-booth sessions.

Now, I’ve seen objections in the blogosphere to this most uplifting of tales. Some people are so filled with rage at anything Hispanic that they will twist even inspirational tales to fit a xenophobic agenda. It’s a knee-jerk emotional reaction, which I’m sure Quiñones-Hinojosa could tell you is controlled by the amygdale portion of your brain.

My favorite comment was “One brain surgeon does not legitimize millions of illegals.” No, I guess mathematically it does not.

Still, how about we celebrate this guy’s tremendous achievement rather than taking another shot at immigration? What is Quiñones-Hinojosa’s story but the American Dream come true, which is what we’re all supposed to be encouraging? He worked hard against enormous obstacles, embraced education, and is contributing a rare and crucial skill to American society.

I mean, damn, that’s most cool.

To be fair, I’m sure being a brain surgeon has its own set of problems. For starters, the guy is probably sick of people dismissing his accomplishments with “Well, you’re no rocket scientist.”