Immigrant Crossing: Intersecting Race and Gender

Next week, I am releasing a novel about an immigrant who is accused of murder. The book is a thrilling and creative exploration of what it means to be an American, and who gets to make that decision. We glorify the immigrants who crossed the country in covered wagons, and the immigrants who first landed at Plymouth Rock, while militarizing the southern border and deifying new immigrants as gangs of thugs. The reasons for these seemingly complicated conflicting feelings are rooted in the same old triumvirate of dickishness; subjectification, the warrior/thug complex, and the consolation prize.

OH MY GOD! THE HORDES!

In 2011, I wrote about how Tom Tancredo and his masculinity clones were attempting to highlight the MS-13 gang as an example of how immigrants from Latin America were thugs. We pick a group with whom we identify, and label outside groups as thugs. This is the Warrior/Thug Complex. With immigration, it's easy. Immigrants come from other cultures,

Yeah! A wall. It worked so great for the Chinese!

they often speak other languages, and usually speak it with a funny accent (like those darn Canadians). Best yet for deciding who is not a proper warrior, immigrants from lower latitudes are usually brownish. It's like a storm trooper's uniform except they can't take it off.

In a society that suffers remarkably little violent crime, masculinity will not survive unless males can be convinced that they are at risk of imminent violence at any moment. Thugs must be identified in order to allow men to be warriors, otherwise advocates of irrational violence just seem like tinfoil hats (thanks to Eric Schultz for that phrase). Immigration provides masculinity in the new world and increasingly in Europe with hordes of thugs needed to make men believe they must continue to glorify violence or suffer the consequences.

ESL- English as a Second cLass Marker

Americans of a certain educational class get goose pimples every time they spot errors in how people use English. We cite old wives' tales as grammar rules, and try to pretend that language is static. This is ridiculous considering just how rapidly language evolves, and is ever-evolving. Just consider that the word selfie is now in every major American dictionary.

Sorry to those looking for solid rules. Language doesn't fit into neat categories,
and when it does it is still evolving and changing.
1- Ever heard of sarcasm? e.g. "I could care less by completely ignoring you."
2- Except in a plural acronym e.g. M.D.'s.
3- Just because 'literally' is the antonym of 'figuratively' does not mean it cannot be used figuratively. If that were true, it would be bad grammar to write the word 'large' in a small or medium-sized font.
8- Except when 'effect' is a transitive verb.
10- Just because it's nonstandard, doesn't mean it's not a word.
Addendum i- Prepositions are fine to end sentences with. Please stop spreading this old wives' tale. To quote Churchill, "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put."
Addendum ii- I find it ironic when people claim there is only one narrow definition of  'irony.'
Conclusion- Grammar is a nefarious tool to discover those who don't belong.
Feel free to use proper grammar, but don't think less of those who don't!

The reality is that grammar is now what it has always been, a way of telling the unwashed masses from the educated elite. When a grammar sheriff of Nottingham tells Robin Hood that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, he is reflecting the belief of extreme elitists from the 17th Century who designed a grammar which reflected Latin in order to better determine which of their peers had been to a proper Latin college (i.e.- not Shakespeare).

Today, we mostly use grammar and "proper English" to determine who has been middle class or above for long enough to be considered properly American, and therefore a properly subjectified man (or privileged woman). Better yet, by pointing out "errors" in grammar, we can objectify others instead of considering the substance of their ideas, arguments, and legitimate claims at liberation. By focusing on how an Asian immigrant speaks funny, or on how black men don't speak "white," we can lump these people into groups less deserving of the consolation prize.

Overseers Over Seeing

And our consolation prize is the same as it was in the antebellum south. We are White (Straight) Men. This fact may alienate us from our children, other men, even our wives and lovers, but at least we are at the top of the heap, the head of the pack. Even within the group of white men, we may not be the CEO in charge of Georgia Pacific Paper Company (The Koch Brothers), or even a small-business owner. But at least we are not brownish. Seeing the welfare state erode before us, knowing that starvation and ostracism awaits us if we fail to succeed as proper men, we are rightfully terrified that we could fail even if we are hard working and relatively competent. Most men don't realize that it's just a Cracker Jack prize. We have little individual control over our economic situations, even if we are white, but we have a little more than those brownish guys do.

Give us your sick, tired, and poor
so that we can laugh at them as
we point out how they are not real men.

Immigration is the great story of the new world. If America is exceptional, it is not exceptional like a souffle. It is exceptional like a potager, a mix of all the vegetables in the garden in one tremendous stew. It seems like blindness that leads so many Americans to fight each wave of immigration, or complete disregard for history. I assure you it is not. The reason that Sheriff Joe is elected to office repeatedly in Arizona isn't that people don't know how important immigration is to our success, but because immigration provides too great a foil for American masculinity. Hating immigrants is one of the costs of masculinity.

On its own, masculinity is a great weight on men. We would not carry that burden unless there were carrots and sticks. Xenophobia provides both. It is another part of masculinity that we must dismantle before we can be free.

Illegal Immigrants Are Not Criminals

It seems that there are many people out there who misunderstand the difference between illegal and criminal. The chief evidence that I have for that is the sheer number of bloggers that claim that being an "illegal immigrant" means that one is a criminal. That's like saying that driving 5mph over the speed limit is the same as being a drunk driver.

I can let you know this right now. If you have ever gone 5mph over the speed limit, your are an illegal driver. That's right. You. If you've gone 10mph over the speed limit, I'd say you're probably a very illegal driver. But speeding is not criminal. Drunk driving is criminal. When you drive drunk, you can go to jail and get probation, when you go 5mph over the speed limit, you can only be fined. It is purely an accident of history that the police arrest criminals and hand out speeding tickets. Just like a grocery store that has a pharmacy, you can get your oysters and your Viagra in the same place, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a prescription to get oysters.

Similarly, with the IRS, if Capone misunderstood which moving costs were legitimate tax credits and which moving costs were not, he would get zinged in an audit because what Capone did was illegal. However, Capone was not a criminal for misunderstanding the IRS code. If that were the case, we would all be criminals because the IRS code is about as coherent as a one legged aardvark doing the electric slide. Al Capone was a criminal because he purposefully hid income from the police. That is Tax Fraud, and that is a crime.

Many people have latched on to the word illegal in the description of people's immigration status and equated that with criminal, but they are simply wrong (or hateful, or ignorant, or stupid). They are annoyed about the fact that police can't deport people who are illegal immigrants when they are pulled over for speeding, but of course there must be restrictions on what the police can do. We can't allow police to enforce codes that are not criminal. If we did that, the next time a police officer pulled you over, he could run an audit of your taxes and demand back payment before you were allowed to leave. That same officer could hold business owners until they brought their businesses up to code. That same officer could then interrogate you on whether or not you had committed any labor violations, and then use that information to make sure that your grass is short enough in front of your house, that you don't have any cracks in any of your windows at home, and that you have cleaned up all the dog poop in your backyard. A world where illegal means criminal is called a police state. If people want to create one of those here, they are going to have to go through me first.

There are a significant amount of studies that have proved that people who are in violation of immigration laws are far less likely to commit crimes. That is probably because if you or I steal a Snickers bar, we would probably get probation, maybe serve 90 days, but if an illegal immigrant drives without his seat belt (which is a crime, not a traffic code violation in most states), he could be deported. Most of the other Nationalist Purificationist's claims are also bogus. Illegal immigrants are less likely than the general population to default on a mortgage, are more likely to be actively working, practically never collect unemployment benefits or social security, and seldom use public medical services.

Overall, as has always been the case, illegal immigrants are some of our best citizens. The hated Chinese immigrant population of San Fransisco in the 1850's (nicknamed the yellow tide) developed the powerful California economy, while the despised Japanese immigrant population of the 1940's never once committed any act of sabotage on U.S. shores and the famous Japanese battalion on the Pacific front suffered the greatest percentage of wounded and killed soldiers of any battalion in the U.S. Army. Other immigrant populations that were the objects of scorn include the English, the German, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. Oh and lets not forget about the Africans. They were legal immigrants by American standards. The greatest irony of our nations recent anti-immigrant fervor is their theme song "God Bless America" which was written by an immigrant Jew while our borders were still so open with Russia that there were no visas or passports. In those days, the illegal immigrants were mostly from China and Japan because the U.S. put quotas on the number of immigrants that we could accept from those countries. Those illegal immigrants were the ones who brought us such American fare as fried chicken, canned salmon (and tuna) and used irrigation techniques that managed to turn the barren California landscape into what is now a huge agricultural industry.

Perhaps it is the failure of the progressive wing of this country that instead of explaining to people what illegal actually means, we chose to PC-the-whole-thing-up with the term "undocumented worker." First of all, the term is false because they are usually documented somehow. Also, the term inherently restricts those people from getting services that may put them into the documentation status. As long as they are "undocumented" workers, we are limited in arguing that they should be able to receive the same protections as documented workers, because those protections naturally require documentation. Also, the term leaves the word "illegal" in the irresponsible hands of the Nationalist Purificationist crowd that wants to criminalize those who are not. It is time to use our privilege to reclaim the word illegal. We should all refer to ourselves as illegal drivers, illegal home owners, and illegal employees. The baffled questions that follow will form the groundwork for putting illegality and criminality into proper context, because if we tell the truth, and they continue to lie, we will always be the more believable.