A former Border Patrol chief turned congressman is the architect of today’s failed immigration policies. Silvestre Reyes’s Operation Hold the Line operation led to today’s official immigration strategy of “prevention through deterrence”. It is a strategy that failed then and continues to fail to address the problem of irregular migration. Not only did it fail to deter undocumented migration from entering the United States, but Reyes’ operation was “successful” in one thing only – keeping El Paso’s gardeners, maids and nannies from going to work while doing nothing for keeping undocumented migrants from crossing the border.
The politics of immigration often devolves into extremist arguments over “open borders” and the dangers of the border. The language used is designed to control the narrative for the agenda driving it. Such is the case around the recent debates over whether there is an ongoing border crisis today. Images of children in cages, pods and stories of children separated from their parents is used by both sides to frame the immigration debate. Lost in the narratives is the truth.
The United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, in terms of population. America is constantly told that the Latino vote is rising and yet it bubbles up but never asserts itself. Latinos are present in America, but Latino voices are muted on the national dialog. The reason for this is that Latinos are not one, but several cultural and political identities each pulling in different directions.
One consistent argument about immigration is that immigrants should assimilate. Unfortunately, like everything else having to do with immigration, the assimilation of immigrants is a complex problem because it involves many dynamics. Cultural assimilation is the fusion, or the integration of an ethnic minority into the dominant culture. The argument normally offered is that immigrants are expected to resemble the majority in behavior, values and social mores. Not normally included in the classical definition of sociology is language. However, it is a significant part of the debate about the assimilation of immigrants into America. Ignoring the language factor is, perhaps, because the assimilation of social mores assumes that a common language is part of that requirement. Whether language is part of the sociological definition of assimilation language is central to understanding immigrants in America.
The Luis Posada Carriles arraignment scheduled for June 13, 2005 in El Paso brings international intrigue and public policy issues to the city. What it also brings is the need to look inward towards the idea that the rule of law is paramount to America’s identity. Although the political intrigues lie outside of the purview of local government, El Paso’s judicial actors may set precedent the political agendas override the need to hold terrorists accountable.
