Commentary: Who is really protecting America, anyway?
Is it the President with his Attorney General, whose minds are entangled beyond deliverance in nativist myths about history, economics, and human worth?
Or might it be someone like Alonso Guillen, who lived and died like an upstanding citizen? Guillen saved several people from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey before his boat capsized and he died. He was what we call “undocumented.” So are the several hundred children of undocumented immigrants who serve this country in uniform, and many thousands more who work and contribute to local communities.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions protected somebody’s “America” by announcing the phase-out of Deferred Action for the Children of Arrivals (DACA). This 2012 policy allows undocumented immigrants brought here as minors to apply for a two-year deferral of vulnerability to deportation. DACA recipients are also able to obtain permission to work. They must pass background checks, enroll in school or work, and demonstrate they are safe and law-abiding neighbors. The late Mr. Guillen, who died saving lives in Texas, was a DACA recipient.
DACA provides qualifying individuals, in a legal mess not of their making, a temporary legal presence while allowing government assets to focus on actual risks to national security. Yet this measure of prosecutorial discretion is presented as lawlessness by some of our “protectors.”
The Attorney General seems to believe ending DACA is about protecting America. He stated falsely that DACA “contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.” This is wrong. The increase of children attempting to cross the border predates DACA and follows surging poverty, gangs, political oppression, lack of schooling and jobs in Central and South America. That crisis did not come into being because of DACA, nor is the pressure on our border exacerbated by DACA in any measure that has been offered. The economic and political crises in South and Central America could, however, be the starting point for a strategy that views our neighbors’ security and prosperity as part of our own.
Does it protect America to assert without data that DACA has “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans?” No, because this key administration official, like our President, holds to an erroneous “fixed pie” view of labor markets wherein if an immigrant has a job, there is necessarily one less job for a native-born worker – who by birthright “should” have that job. These men also do not understand that immigrants also participate in the economy, buying and renting goods and services, and paying taxes.
Men such as these, who will say and believe anything to affirm their equation of national identity with whiteness, simply cannot defend an America that is ethnically and culturally diverse. America is an idea too big for such constricted minds and arid hearts. They cannot grasp it.
America is protected every day by those who participate in it. That includes the nearly 800,000 human beings (including thousands of New Mexicans) living, going to school, working, being good neighbors, and even serving in the armed forces, who qualified for DACA status while they figure out what to do about their pieces of paper.
Men like our Attorney General and President do as good a job protecting America as the pathetic young men marching with tiki torches in Virginia shouting “Blood and soil.” The idea of America I uphold is not an ethnic myth; and I hope one day to be as good an American as Alonso Guillen.
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Algernon D’Ammassa writes the Desert Sage column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Share your thoughts atadammassa@demingheadlight.com.