It's understandable why all eyes focused on the health insurance reform fight in the House yesterday. It was a major victory and a defining moment in this president's first administration. Progressives will continue fighting for more reform, but some undeniably irreversible steps were made. Pre-existing conditions are no longer a barrier to health insurance. Losing or leaving your job is no longer a prelude to losing your health insurance. Those are historic changes.
However, those who think this changes electoral dynamics in our favor must realize that while this was necessary to shore up support, it is not sufficient to guarantee victory. A very large (and growing) constituency threw its support to Obama in the belief this administration would help them emerge from the shadows. Yesterday, over a hundred thousand people rallied on the Mall in support of these people. They may have picked the wrong day to grab headlines, but that doesn't mean they can be ignored.
Immigration reform is desperately needed in this country.
Everyone across the political spectrum agrees with that statement. The problem is one man's "reform" is another man's "outrage." What is clear is that the current system is an outrage. Joshua Hoyt, a long-time associate of Barack Obama, and widely respected Catholic community organizer in Chicago with deep roots in the immigrant community was painfully clear in his recently (overlooked) editorial when he said:
I have known Barack Obama since 1986, when we were both community organizers. I am still organizing on the streets of Chicago, and what I see in the Latino community makes me fear that the president is oblivious to the pain wrought by our broken immigration system.
Hoyt's clear warning to his former colleague is not based on anecdotes. He is well-aware of the larger context.
Latinos gave 59 percent of their vote to John Kerry in 2004 but gave Obama 67 percent in 2008. The immigrant Latino vote expanded from 52 percent for Kerry to 75 percent for Obama, enough to deliver Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida -- and arguably North Carolina, Indiana and Pennsylvania.
That's 93 electoral votes for those keeping score. That's important because Barack Obama won with 365 Electoral Votes. Without those 93 votes, he would have had only 272 electoral votes. He would have still won, but do you think a razor sharp victory like that would have allowed a victory like yesterday's health care vote? As Hoyt correctly notes:
[In response to Obama's promise] to make immigration reform a priority during his first year in office... the Latino vote surged to 10 million, from 7.8 million in 2004, and swung eight percentage points toward the Democrats.
That's a huge sea change, especially given the inroads Republicans had made among the largely Catholic, pro-life, Latino community under both Bush administrations. Undoing the damage done by Reagan's abusive policies was a real feather in the GOP's cap. They knew that even if they ignored the aspirations of black people, they could still point to their latino supporters as evidence of their "big tent" approach. Obama stripped that away from them. The people who switched allegiances did so with expectations. The people on the Mall yesterday share those expectations.
We need comprehensive immigration reform. We need humane policies that don't destroy families. We need honest policies that don't victimize hard-working decent people while ignoring the coercive and criminal activities of employers who savagely abuse people who live in fear. We cannot expect these people to wait for a better day when they are living day to day. That was the rallying cry of Alan Grayson when he championed health care reform. It needs to be a rallying cry for those interested in restoring basic human dignity to people struggling to make a better life for their children.
During the depths of Reagan's crusade against "illegal immigrants", I remember a story about a young girl who entered this country. She was about 17 years old. She was from Guatemala. She was poor. She was pregnant. She had been caught by Immigration in Texas and deported. What struck me about her story was the fact that this pregnant girl had walked across the entire country of Mexico with one goal in mind. She wanted her baby to be born in El Norte, so her child would have a chance at a better life.
Imagine walking from Florida to Massachussetts while you are in your third trimester. That's fortitude. I remember thinking it was a waste to send her back. This girl came bearing gifts. That's the kind of woman I would gladly have hired. You know that no matter what happens she will deliver. A flat tire won't slow her down. Uncooperative FAX machines won't prevent her from delivering documents on deadline. The network can be on fire, she will still get the bookkeeping records to the accountant. If your kids need to reach you, she will find you even if your cellphone battery is dead.
There are millions of people like her out there. All of them living in the shadows, easy prey to criminals who victimize them because they know they won't go to the police. Changing that is going to be hard. But we can start by refusing to enable those who degrade them. We need to stop letting the teabaggers and the right wingers dehumanize them. We need to stop letting the opponents of civil rights use these people to divide the disenfranchised.
We need to stop calling them illegal aliens. "Illegal immigrant" needs to become the new N-word.
Undocumented workers are not illegal people. They are not from another planet. Their immigration status may be illegal, but undocumented workers is not merely a politically correct euphemism. It's an accurate description. People who work are productive members of society. They pay taxes. They create value. They enrich all of us. No one is going to go to bat for criminals who victimize people across national borders. No one is going to defend people who commit crimes against people or property. But we have to stop treating undocumented workers like criminals. It doesn't make sense to put a woman who cleans houses by day and offices by night in the same category as drug traffickers.
Undocumented workers are human beings struggling to make the world a better place for their children. Calling them "illegal" is as dehumanizing as referring to a patient as "the lymphoma in room 301." Patients are more than their diagnosis. People are more than their legal status. We don't even refer to convicted serial-killers, rapists, or pedophiles as "illegals" in this country. Why should we allow hatemongers to dehumanize otherwise honest people that way? If we don't embrace these people, they will abandon us and we will all be the poorer for that.
UPDATE: For those in the comments arguing this is a legitimate descriptive term, consider this: No other usage is America compares. You can drive illegally if you don't have insurance. You can vote illegally if you are not registered. But no one uses "illegal" as an adjective in any of those cases. It is always used as an adverb. It modifies the action, not the person. When it is used as an adjective, as in "illegal gambling operation", the adjective modifies a thing, not a person. Calling people "illegal immigrants" turns them in to things. That's dehumanizing.