Fixing a broken immigration system—Wait, which part?

How does the lagging economy and an aging population affect immigrant communities in Minnesota? How should these factors affect what immigrants we let in to the country in the future, and what should we do with immigrants who are already here? Where is the immigration system most broken and what can we do to fix it?

Now when you answer, choose your words wisely because they’ll say a lot about what you think and who got you to think that way—whether it was your education or political training, or your personal experience with the immigration system and/or with immigrants.

This was evident as more than 80 people discussed these questions in a series of six community conversations that the TC Daily Planet co-hosted with the Minnesota Literacy Council’s English Language Learning programs across the Twin Cities, the Resource Center of the Americas/La Conexión, the Wilder Foundation, and Grove Christian Center.

I facilitated all six conversations and was struck by how the tone and focus varied so greatly with each conversation and depended largely on whether the participants had worked with immigrant communities, were politically liberal or conservative, or were immigrants themselves.

In general, and I really am speaking generally here, the participants in our conversations who work directly with immigrants—immigration lawyers, small business owners, teachers, social workers, and health care providers—tended to talk broadly about integration and assimilation of immigrant communities. It’s worthwhile here to take a look at the language that came up during our conversation at the Wilder Foundation, where we had highly educated and generally liberal Minnesotans and immigrants.

Here are some of the words that came up repeatedly in our conversation at Wilder: “diversity, religious tolerance, improve Minnesota, citizen engagement, integration, access, defuse tension, tension, positive impact, and contribution.”

Here many participants were concerned with how to best maintain and improve social services and education, promote cultural tolerance and understanding between Minnesotans and immigrant communities, and foster economic prosperity within immigrant communities.

As Joel Gingery, an educator who attended our Wilder conversation put it; “How do we convince people that immigrants are a positive force in America? We need to build a vision of what people are doing in this country and what it means to be a citizen, and then we need to communicate that vision.”

Several U.S.-born Minnesotans with conservative political leanings also attended our meetings. This group tended to veer in conversation to discussion of undocumented immigrants, a large minority group within immigrants. When it came to undocumented immigrants, many people at our conversations had a lot of genuine curiosity and asked questions like, “do they [immigrants] pay for my social security?” and “how do they all steal two social security numbers?” Misinformation also prevailed with statements like, “there’s no difference between federal law and the Arizona law…the only difference is enforcement,” and “now we’re spending a majority of the state’s funding on immigrants.” 

Here was what was most interesting about the Minnesotans I encountered who advocated strong action against undocumented immigrants: They personally empathized with and had generally positive personal experiences with immigrants: Take, for instance, our conversation at Grove Christian Center, an evangelical church in Maple Grove whose pastor says the church is about one-third immigrants. At this conversation one man told me he had a daughter in-law from Poland that his son had met on the Internet; another had watched an undocumented neighbor from Mexico go to extreme lengths to get her husband to re-enter the U.S. legally; and another was an engineer at a company that employed many “extremely hard-working” immigrants. They showed how immigrants had entered the fabric of traditionally white-middle class Maple Grove and its surrounding areas.

Doug Dorpath supports parts of the Arizona law SB1070 and parts of the Dream Act, but fears that passing the latter would provide incentives for more illegal immigration to the United States.  “When it comes to immigration I know we have to act with compassion,” he said, “but at the same time I know we have to do something about illegal immigration.”

Take a look at the words that came up repeatedly in the conversation that Dorpath attended:  “illegal immigrants, hard working, compassion, government spending, government mismanagement, immigrants founded this country, social security card, social security, Christian, and solution.”

Contrast these concerns with those of immigrants themselves. To be sure, many immigrants shared concerns about the successful integration of immigrant communities, as well as concerns about illegal immigration, but many of the immigrants who participated in our conversations also expressed this priority: Make the system more humane.

Now that’s something that rarely comes up in the immigration debate, at least couched in those terms or framed with that language. (The word humane came up more among immigrants at our conversations than among any other group.) So what does that mean?

First, it means training immigration officials across many agencies and parts of the system to treat immigrants better along the process—especially those with little money who shared far more frequent stories of abuse at the hands of immigration officers than upper class immigrants.

Nezha Harrison, an immigrant from Morroco who originally came to New York for medical treatment, talked about how she felt mistreated by immigration officials, how she had been spoken to harshly, and made to feel like a criminal.

“I am not a criminal!” she said as she gestured.

Pam Elliot is a volunteer at the Minnesota Literacy Council and has been teaching English to immigrants there for eight years. She’s heard a lot of stories over the years from students who have tried to get a visa, applied for green cards or social security, taken the citizenship test, or tried to bring relatives over to the United States.

“What I hear a lot from students is that the system is so mean,” Elliott said. “There is a harshness to it, and I don’t think it has to be that way.”

Other immigrants were concerned with the trickle down effects of Arizona SB1070 on Minnesota culture. Javier Alfaro is originally from Mexico and has been putting his architecture degree to work in several contracting companies across the country. He says he likes how Minnesota is open to immigrants and sees a higher degree of integration of immigrants here, primarily due to the quality of its social services.

“But the other day I went to a bar downtown,” said Alfaro, who is documented, “and this guy came up to me and asked me if I was an illegal immigrant and asked me for my papers…and he was just some guy!”

Alfaro worries that the culture of tolerance and integration in Minnesota is already being affected by a national anti-immigration mood.

“If we pass laws like Arizona’s, people will feel it’s going to be okay for anyone to ask anyone for papers, and it’s like, hey, we’re all human here.”

Lisa Peterson-de la Cueva

Lisa Peterson-de la Cueva (lisa@tcdailyplanet.net) is the project manager for the New Normal project at the Twin Cities Daily Planet.