Define American: "It's time to have a real conversation about immigration in our country" (Jose Antonio Vargas)

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-- from Emma Lazrus's "The New Colossus,"
the inscription on the Statue of Liberty

by Ken

A lot of people I know online are talking about the piece by former Washington Post and Huffington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas in last Sunday's NYT Magazine in which he "came out" -- after living a life of terror of discovery of his secret -- as an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines. (The piece is now also posted on Antonio's Define American website.)

"I'm done running," Jose explains toward the end of the piece. "I'm exhausted. I don't want that life anymore."

So I've decided to come forward, own up to what I've done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I've reached out to former bosses­ and employers and apologized for misleading them -- a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I've also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don't know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

Antonio was sent to the U.S. 18 years ago, at age 12, by his mother, and had no idea that his green card was fake until he tried to apply for a learner's permit at a California DMV office. He discovered that the phony papers had been arranged by his grandparents, who had emigrated legally, once it became clear that Antonio's mother wouldn't be able to do so because she was married.

Without proper paperwork he couldn't leave the country if he had hope of returning, and so he hasn't seen his mother since. The half-sister he last saw when she was two is now 20. He has a 14-year-old half-brother he's never seen. In his 18 years in this country, he has worked hard to master the language and train himself as a journalist, winning the respect of a series of influential people who did what they could to help him personally and professionally when he finally took the huge risk of letting them in on his secret.

The viral xenophobia now raging on the hard-core Hoodlum Right is likely to produce a common reaction that whatever happens to the sonofabitch is only what he deserves, and it won't matter to them that he had nothing to do with the fraud that brought him to this country. After all, there came a time, once he found out about his true status, when he became an active participant in his own immigration fraud.

Do I have to spell out that this is not the reaction of all those people I know who've been mesmerized by Antonio's story, not to mention his courage in finally coming clean? Like them, I'm filled with admiration for the life and career he has made for himself under these unrelentingly terrifying conditions? As if his immigration status wasn't enough to cause him to live in constant fear of discovery and deportation, he had to cope with his realization that he's gay.

The crux of the story for the kind of readers I know is the exemplary "American dream" life Antonio has led these last 18 years. Everywhere he's worked, he seems to have worked his way to outstanding success. His personal life has necessarily been restricted by the danger of allowing himself to become too close to someone he may not have been able to trust with his story.

IMMIGRATION SPLITS THE "GREED & SELFISHNESS"
RIGHT AND THE "TERROR & HATRED" RIGHT

As we know, immigration is not only an especially toxic political issue at the moment but an unusual one in that it divides the traditional Greed and Selfishness Right from the now-dominant Terror and Hatred Right. The Old Guard understands quite well how dependent Americans are in every facet of our way of life on undocumented immigrants. The idea that they're "taking away jobs" from hard-working Americans is foolishness; by and large they're doing jobs that Americans can't or won't do at the price the greedy and selfish economic elites -- and by extension those of us who take advantage of their labor "bargains" -- are willing to pay. Unfortunately thee Terror and Hatred right-wingers, who live in a world of paranoid delusion in which the only measure of reality is the ignorance and hatred that has rotted their decimated brains, are incapable of grasping this.

And so we begin to get stories like this, as reported last week by Jay Bookman on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog:

Ga.’s farm-labor crisis going exactly as planned

Gov. Nathan Deal signs a tough illegal-immigration bill on May 13, with House Speaker David Ralston, left, and bill sponsor Rep. Matt Ramsey, right, looking on.


After enactment of House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal was forced to order a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

“The agriculture industry is the number one economic engine in Georgia and it is my sincere hope to find viable and law-abiding solutions to the current problem our farmers face,” Deal said in announcing the findings. In the meantime, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia.

Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party. . . .

"It might almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad." Yes.

On rare occasions when far-right-wingers are forced to confront the gap between their delusional version of reality and the actual thing, they normally respond by flat-out lying -- to themselves as well as anyone who is so tactless as to point out the "discrepancy" to them. So it's hardly surprising to learn that Georgia's agriculture commissioner has spread tales of $12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” in reality 6300 of the more than 11,000 unfillable jobs pay on average $8 an hour, and another 3200 pay $9-11 an hour, and naturally hardly any of these jobs include benefits.

Jay Bookman writes:

Given all that, Deal’s pledge to find “viable and law-abiding solutions” to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again, if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and in fact intended.

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.

In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

SO WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS?

The answer appears to be that we just don't know. Remember, according to the law, in order to apply for any kind of legal immigration status that might be open to him, he's supposed to have to leave the country and not be able to apply for that status for ten years.

One school of thought says that Jose's visibility makes him an unlikely candidate for deportation. But that may be misjudging the tenor of the Obama administration, which seems to get much the same kind of sexual (or perhaps instead-of-sexual) pleasure out of deportations that our previous chief executive got from executions. And as much as one may be moved by Jose's personal situation, he is the first to stress on the "Define American" website that the issue isn't his personal status.

The split on the Right, with the ascendancy of the Hating Crazies, which as in so many areas of our political life has been shadowed by a corresponding split in the political Center, with scared-doodyless Democrats doing a pretty decent impression of Hating Crazies, has made rational discussion of immigration impossible for the foreseeable future.

Surely other people see the irony of a nation of immigrants, the "wretched refuse" of other lands' "teeming shores," slamming the golden door shut on other "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

EDUCATION, NOT DEPORTATION

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