Opinion | What Kind of Immigration Enforcement Is Legitimate?

A simple question: What kind of immigration enforcement is legitimate in your view. That’s a good question. That’s a good question. It’s a pretty tricky question. Let’s not be naïve that the administration has an agenda and has an anti-immigrant agenda. And obviously it’s going to use all the institutions under his power to execute his agenda, to demonstrate to whoever he promised that what’s going to fulfill that promise. So, now, like I said before, this is not the first time that ICE, immigration enforcement, arrests people. It has been happening all the time. What we are seeing right now is heavily armed individuals, masked, as you said, going to places and stopping people based on their appearance. And no civil society should allow that. Assuming that because you are brown-skinned, you are undocumented. So. Or, there are documented cases of going into a Target store, arresting two US citizens. I think it’s actually — just to pause there, because I think it’s a good case study in how, in some of this stuff. You can find video online of the beginning of that arrest, and those — it’s actually a case study in one of the guys, the U.S. citizens, is filming an ICE agent as they enter Target. I’m not sure for exactly what purpose. And then they have a kind of altercation in the doorway that people have been arguing about online. Like who started the altercation. And then both of the men are arrested. They’re not arrested, as far as I can tell, for not being U.S. citizens. They’re arrested for the altercation and then released. So it’s just an example of, again, it’s a kind of Rorschach test of whether you think the person observing the agent went too far, or whether you think the agent went too far, or maybe they both went too far. But I just wanted to stipulate that I guess I’m interested in stabilization. And I say this as someone who I think has a pretty strong understanding of why voters became especially concerned about immigration under the Biden presidency, where you had an unprecedented level of what I would call illegal and you would call undocumented immigration into the United States. But then I, too, recoil from some of the ICE behavior that I see in the videos. I think walking around with masks in an American city the way they’re doing is un-American in some way. And I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a balance that can be struck. If you’re talking to someone — and you must know people who are skeptical of illegal immigration, who, you know, don’t hate Latinos or Hispanics, but thought the Biden policy was a failure. What do you say to people who, you know, who voted for Donald Trump and want a secure border and expect some kind of enforcement. Number one, I will say to everyone, including you: Know your history. Know the history of the United States. Understand the role of the United States around the world, but particularly in Latin America, and how the U.S. policy in Latin America has been playing the role of being a destabilizing force that provokes migration. If the United States has a pretty good memory, they wouldn’t repeat the same thing that they do oftentimes. But we don’t teach enough or good history. We don’t teach how, for instance, just a recent example, the situation in Venezuela. The Venezuelans, regardless of Maduro being a good or bad person, but Venezuela was going through some challenges. The United States participated in creating more chaos in Venezuela. Thousands of Venezuelans left home to different places, including the United States. Venezuelans came to the border. They were put in places to process them. My understanding is that the United States, like many other societies — first-world countries, as they’re called — they have this process where you can ask for political asylum. So some of them were — some or many — were allowed to get into the United States. So the issues of Latin America, the constant migration of Latin Americans, has also a level of connection between U.S. policy. I wouldn’t say 100 percent U.S. is responsible because we have local governments in our countries that are very responsible as well. But there is a link between those two factors. So all these things create instability, and instability creates migrations. And also the receiving economy needs people. And so, we have a broken immigration system that needs people, that needs their labor, but don’t want to see people. People want to eat their tacos but don’t want to see the ones who put them together. People want to see their houses clean or hotels clean, but don’t want to see the labor that produces that. So that’s, I think, is something that the United States, people need to understand that you cannot have the labor without the person.