Immigration isn’t just fences and fruit fields

Hearing GOP candidates talk about immigration, they paint an unending scourge of disreputable characters eager to take jobs from hard-working (white) Americans. Illegal is illegal, there is black and there is white and there is nothing in-between, and we “need to secure our borders.”

American immigration being simplified into an economic issue or merely a domestic one is a damn shame. It ignores the reasons many flee their homelands for these borders, the unrest and turmoil and outright danger they face back “home.” Such as the case of Fernando Quinteros-Mendoza.

From The New Republic:

In El Salvador, in the spring of 2004, Fernando Quinteros-Mendoza was dating a woman who lived in a rough neighborhood riddled with gang violence. When Fernando started passing through the gang’s territory, its members noticed. Within a short time, the gang made Fernando’s life unbearable, and later that year Fernando fled to the United States. Today, he is trying to prevent a forced return, and a new Obama administration policy encourages immigration authorities to allow him to stay. But uneven and lax implementation of that policy means that Fernando could be headed back to El Salvador—and, perhaps, the gang that was targeting him—in a matter of months.

The attacks on Fernando became regular—three to five times per week, with gang members attempting to extort money from him each time. Eventually, the intimidation spread beyond his girlfriend’s neighborhood. On one occasion, according to Mendoza’s aunt, Iris Argueta, gang members “even put a knife to his head on the bus.” They accosted him outside his church, threatening (as records from a 2008 court hearing describe it) to hurt him if he continued to attend. Finally, Iris says, they told him they would “burn down his house and kill his father unless he gave them money.” Fernando was getting desperate. “There was no peace,” Iris told me. “He was always afraid.”

Fernando’s case is not isolated by circumstances or nationality. Fleeing circumstances of life or death is a reality for many immigrants, even if it is not as extreme or obvious as his case. Yet we cheer on little people with huge ambition that pound podiums and demand the guns be turned on men, women, and children fleeing from human rights violations, economic strife, and socio-political turmoil. It’s a sickening lack of empathy, context, and hindsight considering the creation and growth of our nation throughout its history.

In 1900, the island of Manhattan had 47% more residents than it does right now in 2011. Most of that is due to the vast influx of immigrants at the turn of the century. Of course, times are different now. We’re not on the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Technology and social mores have evolved. And a famine isn’t enough anymore.