Undocumented Immigrants Quotes

The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them.

I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.

What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.

I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an unjust law as being ‘out of harmony with the moral law.’ And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch.

We're not meant to be, Daniel. I'm an undocumented immigrant. I'm being deported. Today is my last day in America. Tomorrow I'll be gone.

Man-made borders shouldn't matter more than people.

Home is not something I should have to earn.

Countries, sovereignty, citizenship, and laws are all social constructions: abstractions invented by humans.

Humanity is not some box I should have to check.

Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visable in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified.

I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellemce, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go home and get in line.

Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants.

Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called “expats” while people of color are called “immigrants”? Why are some people called “expats” while others are called “immigrants”? What’s the difference between a “settler” and a “refugee”? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move.

This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.

According to one study, “a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers.” In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a subsubcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all, they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government.

Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them. Even if their fate is to be the high-school dropout and the fast-food cashier, so what? That makes them about as human as the average American, and we are not about to deport the average American (are we?).

For one thing, most available jobs for undocumented immigrants are jobs Americans will not do, which takes healthy young migrants and makes them age terribly. At a certain point, manual labor is no longer possible. Aging undocumented people have no safety net. Even though half of undocumented people pay into Social Security, none are eligible for the benefits. They are unable to purchase health insurance. They probably don’t own their own homes. They don’t have 401(k)s or retirement plans of any kind. Meager savings, if any. Elderly people in general are susceptible to unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of them, and the undocumented community draws even more vultures. According to the Migration Policy Institute, around 10 percent of undocumented people are over fifty-five years old. This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.

Lack of relationship is a breeding ground for fear. Fear and anxiety pervade the conversation about immigrants and refugees....fear is escalating isolation, which yields even more insecurity and uncertainty.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

You will not find Jesus in heaven, reclining on a cloud. He isn’t in church on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews. He isn’t locked away in the Vatican or held hostage by a denominational seminary. Rather, Jesus is sitting in the Emergency Room, an uninsured, undocumented immigrant needing healing. He is behind bars, so far from his parole date he can’t think that far into the future. He is homeless, evicted from his apartment, waiting in line at the shelter for a bed and a cup of soup. He is the poor child living in government housing with lice in his hair, the stripes of abuse on his body and a growl in his stomach. He is an old forgotten woman in a roach infested apartment who no one thinks of anymore. He is a refugee in Sudan, living in squalor. He is the abused and molested child who falsely feels responsible for the evil that is perpetrated against her. He is the young woman who hates herself for the decisions she has made, decisions that have imperiled her life, but did the best she could, torn between impossible choices. Jesus is anyone without power, ability or the means to help themselves, and he beckons us to come to him; not on a do-gooding crusade, but in solidarity and embrace.

But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.

Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name?

What [undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children] did qualify for, according to human rights experts, was refugee status -- something President Obama was careful not to give them.

What we're doing - waving a "Keep Out!" flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in - is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don't want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits - all of that serves a purpose.

As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe... I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry, or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.

The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers—red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike. EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.

I hope they have children who can take care of them,” I respond. What I mean to say is: I hope they have a child like me. I hope everyone has a child like me. If I reach every child of immigrants at an early age, I can make sure every child becomes me. And if they don’t, I can be everyone’s child.

undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities. (There had reportedly been a raid at a grocery store the week before the news broke.) When President Obama declared a state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint, making undocumented people even less likely to open the door, since this time the canvassers were in uniform. Some undocumented Flint residents learned of the lead in their water only when family members from Mexico called them on the phone to ask about it. They had seen reports of the poisoned water on Univision.

Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history.

Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children who become orphans in foster care. One study found that family income dropped around 70 percent after a deportation. Another study found that American-citizen children born to immigrant parents who were detained or deported suffered greater rates of PTSD than their peers.

You cannot change the politics of immigration until you change the culture in which immigrants are seen.

But I know for a fact that he never would have said that to me in a million years if I were a man.

Listening to quiet, miserable voices is in his job description.

It’s difficult to overstate the role the Fox News Channel has played in framing, disseminating, and cementing the anti-immigrant narrative that was central in electing Trump.

he was there representing not himself but people who weren’t allowed to be part of the conversation,

My brother went to Harvard seven years after arriving in the States with no English. I won the Pulitzer Prize. We could be put on a poster touting how refugees make America great. And we do. But it shouldn’t take this kind of success to be welcomed. Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them.

Why there’s suddenly this surge of hatred for immigrants is sort of a mystery. Why Donald Trump, who’s probably never even interacted with an undocumented immigrant in a non-commercial capacity, in particular should care so much about this issue is even more obscure. (Did he trip over an immigrant on his way to the Cincinnati housing development his father gave him as a young man?) Most

The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.

In the words of John Fonte, “The new, transformed civic morality of the progressive narrative . . . divides Americans between dominant or ‘oppressor’ groups—whites, males, native-born, Christians, heterosexuals—and victim or ‘oppressed’ groups—racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; women; LGBT individuals, and ‘undocumented’ immigrants. Progressive politics doesn’t seek the national interest or the common good. Its purpose is to promote ‘marginalized’ or ‘oppressed’ groups against ‘dominant’ or ‘oppressor’ groups.”5 It is the old Marxist wine in new bottles, and the results are bound to be similar. Progressives

I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure Communities program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State, as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

If we are going to talk about how undocumented immigrants impact our society, we ought to first address how our national policies have disrupted their lives. Above all, solidarity with the immigrant poor should seek to know them not as statistics, but as human beings who endure extraordinary hardship and trauma in their struggle just to survive—especially since the structural causes of their impoverishment lie on our side of the border.

Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human--wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: "If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?') In politically correct times, "illegal alien" was deemed gauche, so "undocumented worker" came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is "undocumented entrant." As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant. Maye it is.

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellence, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go home and get in line.

Getting bodies,” in Border Patrol lingo, didn’t necessarily mean collecting corpses. Bodies were living people. “Bodies” was one of the many names for them. Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called “wets” by agents. “Five wets” might have slipped out. “Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.

That's a thing I do sometimes-hold fundraisers among people I know for migrants I love who are in need. It's the same people who donate every time, older white hippes and children of immigrants, not my former Harvard classmates who post pictures of themselves at rooftop happy hours every day

As long as that statue [of Liberty] stands, the tradition of immigrant hospitality and justice it symbolises will continue to haunt us. Will we whose ancestors respected no boundaries seek to erect impermeable borders? Will the descendants of Ellis Island bar the 'golden door', even as our economic and military policies around the globe continue to create 'tempest-tossed' populations? Or will we listen…to the voice of Christ speaking through the immigrant poor: 'Listen! I stand at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and we will share communion' (Rev. 3:20).

I am an undocumented transfer student to UCLA. This university has always been my dream, but being here has been on of the hardest experiences of my life. I do not receive financial aid, and I do not meet any of the requirements to receive any kind of scholarship because I do not have a Social Securty number.

I'm opposed to the notion of official ideology--not just fascism, Communism, Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like 'multiculturalism' and 'climate change' and 'marriage equality.' Because the more topics you rule out of discussion--immigration, Islam, 'gender fluidity'--the more you delegitimize the political system.

A 2014 article published in Politico found that the U.S. government spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Marshals.

It was ironic, really, that the only reason I became eligible to adjust my status was because I married a U.S. citizen. I laugh when I think about the many times my mom told me, 'You have to be independent. You have to make your own money. Don't depend on a man!' I did. I made my own money. But I still needed a man to save me from my illegality.

Anything you do that’s traditional wolf territory could be challenged by some zealot, and you could wind up before the tribunal. I’ve been studying their decisions, and they tend to be led by their pragmatism. Our world is gray, and rapidly gray-ing, and the tribunal navigates it by sticking to a determinedly black-and-white approach. They rule by the book and can’t be swayed by emotion. If you don’t fit the exact letter of the law, they see you as going against it.” “So what do I do?” “You can’t break a law that doesn’t apply to you.” “Meaning?” “If you’re undocumented, you’re unwritten. Embrace that.” “You’re saying if no one’s told my story before ... I get to tell it the way I want?” “Exactly.

One of Giuliani’s favorite claims was the charge that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia. In fact, investigations would show that it was exactly two. Similarly in Georgia, he variously claimed that 800 or 6,000 or 10,515 dead people voted. There, as well, it would eventually be determined that at most it was just four. But that did not deter Giuliani. He also asserted that 65,000 or 165,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when, in fact, the number was zero. In Arizona, he said at different points that “way more than 10,000” or “32,000” or “probably about 250,000” or “a few hundred thousand” undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the state, but investigators found no evidence that any had.[22] Not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, not any.

Have to keep those lawns as green as possible, even when there was a drought, you know. Or my smile and nod when Mrs. Snodgrass went on and on about a racy book that everyone was talking about but no one would admit to reading, when in fact I know every woman there had read it. I even smiled and nodded when Mr. Peterson lectured us about illegal immigration, when I knew for a fact that his nanny was undocumented.

As Mayor Giuliani began his cleanup of the Times Square area, nobody in power gave any thought to the thousands of “support” people whose survival would be affected when the economic driver of sex was removed from the scene. And the optimistic view that these workers would be forced toward more legitimate work turned out to be puritanical hypocrisy—it was crime itself that gave these men an entrée into the straight world. In time, Santosh began selling laptops of dubious origin, Rajesh started offering small short-term loans, and Azad operated an increasingly successful sideline as a job referral service for undocumented immigrants. Whenever otherwise legitimate employers found themselves in need of some quick off-the-books labor—and they often did, even the hedge fund titans and investment banks down on Wall Street—Azad made it happen for them with one phone call.

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer. I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

What’s your status now?” the legislator asked them. “I’m undocumented,” one Brazilian student answered, bewildered. “Why don’t you start the process to become a citizen?” he continued. “I can’t,” she explained. “Why not?” he asked, revealing his profound ignorance of immigration law. Just as the law forbids most residents of the Third World to travel here—by requiring visas, but refusing to grant them—it also forbids virtually all people who are undocumented to regularize their status.

[I]f we objected to any blanket statements that would portray Black people in a certain way, or statements that insinuate that any Muslim is potentially violent or a terrorist, or that queer people are pedophiles, why aren’t we using the same basic critical tool to reject the assumption that being white necessarily makes one privileged or racist? Why are we not using another basic critical tool by asking yet another important question: what percentage of white people is extremely wealthy and privileged, and how/why it is problematic to put all whites in one basket as it would be if we do to any other group of people? Anyone who has traveled through the poor parts of white America, places like West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and many others that I have personally visited and observed, will know that there is a big percentage of white people who are, in some cases, as poor as newly arrived undocumented immigrants. [From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]

In 'United States v. Brignoni-Ponce,' the Court concluded that it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for the police to use race as a factor in making decisions about which motorists to stop and search. In that case, the Court concluded that the police could take a person's Mexican appearance into account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain undocumented immigrants. The Court said that "the likelihood that any person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor." Some commentators have argued that 'Brignoni-Ponce' may be limited to the immigration context; the Court might not apply the same principle to drug-law enforcement. It is not obvious what the rational basis would be for limiting overt race discrimination by police to immigration. The likelihood that a person of Mexican ancestry is an "alien" could not be significantly higher than the likelihood that any black person is a drug criminal.

There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin. Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses.

The Immigration Reform Act wiped out that option. Used to be, if undocumented parents could prove their deportation would put a U.S. citizen—in this case, you, AJ—at risk, the judge could let them stay. But the act made deportation automatic.” She showed them a document she’d printed out. “In the mid-’90s, there were around forty thousand deportations a year. Nowadays, there are around three hundred thousand a year. The INS and ICE will tell you they’re getting rid of a criminal element, but that’s not always the case. Plenty of working people—even war veterans—get swept up in raids.

I wanted to tell Donna that it wasn’t her business what that family bought or ate or wore and that I hated when cashiers at the supermarket said, “On your EBT?” loud enough for people in line behind me to hear. I wanted to tell her that undocumented people couldn’t receive food benefits or tax refunds, even though they paid taxes. They couldn’t receive any government benefits at all. Those were available only for people who were born here or who had obtained the documents to stay. So those children, whose parents had risked so much to give them a good life, were citizens who deserved every bit as much government help as my daughter did. I knew this because I’d sat beside them in countless government offices. I overheard their conversations with caseworkers sitting behind glass, failing to communicate through a language barrier. But these attitudes that immigrants came here to steal our resources were spreading, and the stigmas resembled those facing anyone who relied on government assistance to survive. Anyone who used food stamps didn’t work hard enough or made bad decisions to put them in that lower-class place. It was like people thought it was on purpose and that we cheated the system, stealing the money they paid toward taxes to rob the government of funds. More than ever, it seemed, taxpayers—including my client—thought their money subsidized food for lazy poor people.

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen.

Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches. So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?

In a newly conservative country, immigration now stood at the center of American politics. By the 1990s, the debate over immigration had grown as intense as the one that had raged in the 1910s and 1920s. The undocumented Mexican immigrant population of the United States rose from about one million in 1988 to more than six and a half million in 2008. The U.S.-Mexico border became more militarized, and more dangerous, with Operation Blockade in Texas in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in California in 1994. In 1997, the chair of a congressional Commission on Immigration Reform said that immigration “is about who and what we are as a Nation,” a common refrain. Few had answers. But immigration became, increasingly, the issue on which American politics turned. Between 2005 and 2013, at least one person a day on average died trying to cross into the United States from Mexico.

When a federal court upholds a law that literally makes it a crime to give a child a cup of water in the desert; when Immigrants and Customs Enforcement abducts a child at an airport in order to force the (undocumented) parents to turn themselves in; when Border Patrol shoots people at the Mexican border with tear gas; that's the reactionary response to a warming world. It is a much simpler and more satisfying response than regulating energy companies or taxing carbon. It only has two problems. It is evil, and it will result in, if nothing else, the end of this country. People who want to live in such a world are already too querulous to make a society, even with each other, even if they get everything they want. Picture them trying to manage a baking earth, an evaporating Lake Superior riddled with Asian carp, a countryside full of feral bacteria and reeking of CAFOs that produce less food every year. It won't work. A fully achieved Fortress America would just be the Donner Party a day or two before the cannibalism starts.

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

Among them were Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Muslim women ever elected to the House. Rashida’s and Ilhan’s victories were more than symbolic for me, as I counted both women as dear friends. Not only had I witnessed their trials and watched them triumph, but the fact that Ilhan wore a hijab while Rashida did not was, for me, a beautiful expression of the independence and diversity of Muslim women. African American women, Latina women, and Native American women also won big on election night, most of them running on progressive platforms calling for health care for all, tuition-free college education, environmental protections, gun law reforms, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and refugees.

We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States,’ Obama said in 2005. ‘But those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law, and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.’ He added: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.’ A few years later, in a 2013 State of the Union address, Obama promised to put illegal immigrants ‘to the back of the line.’ He even once told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: ‘Our direct message to families is ‘do not send your children to the border.’ If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. But they may not make it [at all].’ Yes, that’s progressive hero, Mr. Hope and Change himself, Barack Obama, sounding an awful lot like evil, racist Republican Donald Trump, wouldn’t you say?

DREAM Act, which stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. There

As I’m sitting here writing this book, all these years later, it still has not passed.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.

Democrats are viewed as being more welcoming to immigrants, but the Obama administration had sharply ramped up deportations

What works: Stories about undocumented immigrants killing Americans Stories about citizens standing up to the government bureaucracy Stories about college students disrespecting the flag Stories about hate crime hoaxes Stories about liberal media outlets suppressing the truth And, whenever possible, stories involving attractive women (They could be the hero or the villain, it didn’t matter, but they had to be attractive.) “Job one is to titillate the audience,” the former producer said. “For celebrity stories, I had to pick the sexiest photos. And then I’d still hear, ‘Can you find hotter photos of her?’ Sigh. Okay, we’ll spend another thousand bucks on three photos from Getty.” It got to the point where the producer knew, without being told, which specific photos of Angelina Jolie the execs would expect to see. This sexualized approach spilled over to other parts of the show. If it was a quiet news day and the producers needed to fill a spare block, “we would look and see, what are the locals doing?” Fox tapped into its network of stations in big cities all across the country. “Then we would Google around to find the hottest reporter.” Workers striking in Detroit or rush hour flooding in Houston? Sometimes that’s how the editorial call was made.

my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Every American carries with them the story of an immigrant— undocumented and visionary.

Before visiting Staten Island, I'd never met a day laborer. To me, a city girl who knew undocumented men mostly as restaurant workers, day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of brown men huddled at the crack of dawn on street corners next to truck rental lots and hardware superstores and lumberyards. Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown men and women on one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic dreamers.

I'm attending a monthly meeting at Colectiva Por Fin on my first night on Staten Island. The room is small but as more men come in, it seems to double and triple in size. On the wall, migrants are celebrated through art that strikes me as deeply annoying, mostly the word "migrant" reconfigured as butterflies. I fucking hate thinking of migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can't fuck a bitch up.

The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later, during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever.

After spending the day in a school vaccination clinic, a colleague of mine quipped: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”6 Applications for government benefits might be completed under similarly chaotic circumstances. Users who have a lot else going on in their lives need to be able to apply for the service without an undue burden of time, technology, and cognitive overhead. If they’re asked for documentation, the documents need to be ones they have access to. If they need to correspond with the program, there has to be a way for them to do so even if they lack a stable mailing address. If they have family who are undocumented immigrants, they may need reassurance that applying for a program won’t get them or their relatives in trouble.

The first hour of the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but overall it's super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness, because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry, but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I'm not going to be the person who is ruining faithful migrants' experience of community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer.

The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them. That’s what makes caring for our elderly different from Americans caring for their elderly.

This was clear less than thirty minutes into the speech, when—as I debunked the phony claim that the bill would insure undocumented immigrants—a relatively obscure five-term Republican congressman from South Carolina named Joe Wilson leaned forward in his seat, pointed in my direction, and shouted, his face flushed with fury, “You lie!” For the briefest second, a stunned silence fell over the chamber. I turned to look for the heckler (as did Speaker Pelosi and Joe Biden, Nancy aghast and Joe shaking his head). I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head. Instead, I simply responded by saying “It’s not true” and then carried on with my speech as Democrats hurled boos in Wilson’s direction. As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before a joint session address—at least not in modern times. Congressional criticism was swift and bipartisan, and by the next morning Wilson had apologized publicly for the breach of decorum, calling Rahm and asking that his regrets get passed on to me as well. I downplayed the matter, telling a reporter that I appreciated the apology and was a big believer that we all make mistakes. And yet I couldn’t help noticing the news reports saying that online contributions to Wilson’s reelection campaign spiked sharply in the week following his outburst. Apparently, for a lot of Republican voters out there, he was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the healthcare bill. They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican officeholders: When it came to opposing my administration, the old rules no longer applied. —

And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever.

2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life. Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly.

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d

And two former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency. All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.

What works: Stories about undocumented immigrants killing Americans Stories about citizens standing up to the government bureaucracy Stories about college students disrespecting the flag

However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on construction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.

I thought I could write something better, something that rang true. And I thought that I was the best person to do it. I was just crazy enough. Because if you're going to write a book about undocumented immigrants in America, the story, the full story, you have to be a little bit crazy. And you certainly can't be enamored by America, not still. That disqualifies you.

If you ask my mother where she’s from, she’s 100 percent going to say she’s from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say that she’s from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the international stage—magical realism basically skipped over it, as did the military dictatorship craze of the 1970s and 1980s, plus there are no world-famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London (the president) and Christina Aguilera’s father, who was a domestic abuser. If you ask my father where he is from, he will definitely say Ecuador because he is sentimental about the country for reasons he’s working out in therapy. But if you push them, I mean really push them, they’re both going to say they’re from New York. If you ask them if they feel American because you’re a little narc who wants to prove your blood runs red, white, and blue, they’re going to say No, we feel like New Yorkers. We really do, too.

He’s totally down with that other Don, the one who sits in much grander digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He especially agrees with the other Don when it comes to the issue of immigration (“Don’t want to see America painted brown,” he says), even though a large part of Growing Concern’s workforce consists of undocumented aliens who don’t speak English (“Although they do speak food stamps,” he says).

TO A BLOSSOMING SAGUARO You have kin in Mexico. Shooting you is called “cactus plugging.” Humidity & wind speed shape the path of a bullet. Your shadow will outlive my father. That’s kind of comforting. Ghost-faced bats pollinate your dog-eared flowers which smell like wet rope, melon. The sky is a century with no windows. I say things like that. Sorry. You have more rights than the undocumented: I need a permit to uproot you. Ofelia believes only rain can touch all of you. My mother is my favorite immigrant. After her? The sonnet.

Eve knew the area. A lot of undocumented immigrants lived in the many cheap motels and low-end apartments that lined that end of Sepulveda. It was also a hot spot for drugs and prostitution.

I made it. I almost didn’t survive all the challenges I had faced at home, at school, and with my immigration status, but I had been really strong and fought for my dreams. Here I was, a student at one of the best universities in the country. My mom had been right all along. Someone like me could make it in America.

Finally, thank you to the millions of immigrants who have come before me, risked their lives, lost their lives, and left their families and land behind to come to America. Thank you. Because without you, America would not exist.

It was the first time I understood that for undocumented immigrants, every single decision has potentially life-altering consequences. Nothing is ever simple. There would always be more consequences to face. I did the right thing by calling the police, but I had also done a terrible thing, and the fallout would be earth- shattering. My dad was in jail for one night. When he came back home, he apologized. Under normal circumstances, our relationship might have improved after that night. The threat of going to prison, an arrest record, and the shame of going to jail might have been what my dad needed to turn his life around. But our situation was anything but normal. What I didn’t know when I called the police was that he would be deported. He had a valid visa, but for legal reasons I didn’t understand, he was forced to leave the country for six months.

The politicians who wring their hands about “the border crisis” know full well that the undocumented population peaked over fifteen years ago, in 2007. Yet employers have not responded to a shrinking undocumented workforce by hiring native-born workers at competitive wages. Instead, they have responded by automating their jobs (using machines instead), hiring other immigrants, like those on H-2A visas (Americans don’t exactly queue up for immigrant jobs), or simply closing up shop.[28] Regardless of their impact