When the topic of immigration comes up, practical factors are always raised: what will happen to our economy, what's our birth rate like, where will we go from here. "What will happen to us?" is always at the forefront of the mind.
While politics has always used statistics in order to justify one action or another, immigration policy, ever since our country was founded, has always manipulated statistics with emotions. The reasons we give for the actions we make has always been more than meets the eye.
Think piece after think piece will ask if we "need" immigrants, undermining the core of the issue: that immigrants are people and whether or not we "need" them is irrelevant.
Those who immigrate here are held up to outrageous standards: we argue they can be life-saving doctors, they can invent society-changing devices, they can change the world. They can. But that shouldn't be a prerequisite for coming to this country.
On the flip side, Americans will complain and call that jobs are being lost, that their own shortcomings are due to the foreign other. Immigrants are simultaneously lazy and stealing jobs, too smart and infiltrating our country, too dumb to understand English. Never enough for the American standard.
More than immigration itself, the "foreign other" is a race issue - xenophobic European-centric ideals affects more than the first generation; it trickles down to family after family, both in the attackers and the attackees. When you are not seen as belonging to the majority, you become a target, regardless of other factors.
We test those incoming on how much America they know so we can prep them to fit in: how many amendments, what are the branches of government, what do you do if you're accosted by a police officer.
What do you do if your boss harasses you enough that you're forced to quit? What do you do when you are put under a spotlight the minute you are seen? When pre-conceived notions always come to mind and a slur has had more historical power than the reparations and apologies given for how you were treated in the past?
I wish I knew.
