Need for a New Narrative on Immigration (even if you are not particularly interested on this issue)

(Part II of my three-part series on how to make immigration reform possible and expel the far right from electoral politics at the same time)

Need for a New Narrative on Immigration (even if you are not particularly interested on this issue)

The culture gives context to the concepts (for instance, immigration) we manage everyday. And context gives them additional meaning, deters or makes rationalization easier when a situation involving the concept clashes with our values. When immigration is the main motivation for a far right still in command of one of the two largest political parties (as gerrymandering and closed primaries is the source of their power), even if you are not particularly interested on this issue, the immigration narrative should be important for you.

If you see Trump’s job approval(1) since mid-2017 (until June 1st, 2020, when the trend is broken after Trump’s expelled pacific racial-justice protesters to make a photo op in Lafayette Square, D.C.), you can see that not even the scandal of children in cages, more widely visible since mid-2018, an act of cruelty comparable only to the massive deportations during the Eisenhower and Hoover administrations, made a dent on that trend. This means that, no matter how reprehensible these policies were, Americans found a way to rationalizing them in a way they could not rationalize the photo op in Lafayette Square. This also means that the immigration narrative is so bad that it couldn’t do that job, not even among Latinos.

Take into account that immigration, as Naleo polls have shown for years, has never been at the top of Latinos’ priorities but, as Romney learned the hard way in 2012, a candidate adopting anti-immigrant postures moved Latinos to vote against that candidate(2). That changed in 2016 with Trump though and, in case you think that that was just an anomaly, that happened again in 2020. And yes, Biden neglected operations on the ground directed to Latino voters and addressing the economy, which was much more important for this demographic than the pandemic. And yes, there are structural variables affecting the attitudes towards immigration. But the matter of the fact is that the immigration narrative failed to at least cause guilt among Trump-supporter Latinos. Worse, don’t be surprised if many Democrats, trying to get something done with an obstructive Republican Party still led by Trump, are tempted to use immigration as a bargaining chip. This would be a huge mistake as the experience of moderates and liberals in Europe trying to cut deals with their far right has shown because that would give them an additional reason to stay in electoral politics. Before Trump the far right was cynical about the system. With Trump, it realized it could win.

And yet, the immigration narrative has not been taken seriously by liberal activists. Recently only one organization has been very active on this issue, Define American, and they are even presenting the problem the right way ('How do we create a culture in which we see immigrants as people deserving of dignity?' These policies don't make sense if we don't see immigrants as people.")(3), but they are extracting the wrong conclusions from the data and this article aims at starting a constructive conversation with Mr. Vargas.

I myself have many times invoked the gay-rights experience as one we have to learn from. Movies like Philadelphia(4) and sitcoms like Will and Grace or Modern Family(5)(6) did in a few years what decades of gay pride parades could not. And what they did is to present gay people not as different but proud but as people like you and me. The concept of empathy and compassion in psychology(7) requires this element. And yet, cultural products don’t seem to have incorporated that lesson when it comes to immigration. Either movies like A Day Without a Mexican trivialized the issue presenting undocumented status as something funny or movies like El Norte (and I like the movie as art) presented the protagonist as an ethnic stereotype, glad with merely surviving in the limbo of his legal status and escaping from immigration officers. In other words, they presented immigrants as different and the more different, the better, what make please multiculturalism but makes empathy more difficult. That same need to prioritize empathy should also take precedence over presenting immigration in a more diversified way (Jose Antonio Vargas, on Latinos being over-represented on productions with respect to Asian and African undocumented migrants, “correcting imbalances like these is something Define American tries to do in its work. We need different stories, so that we can get to a point where the narrative has been created that this is an issue that impacts all races and ethnicities.”) Again, it’s always easier to rationalize the pain of somebody seen as different.

How to do this? By presenting a person who happens to be an immigrant, not a person with immigrant thoughts and immigrant feelings; a person as we see ourselves and as we wish we were ourselves. For instance, in “Superstore,” the writers could present Mateo (undocumented, gay character) making excuses to go on vacation with his coworkers to a location that requires taking a plane because he can’t take a plane with his ID and then present Mateo and his coworkers enjoying vacations together in a closer location after they realize why Mateo is making those excuses and change plans to vacation at a local site; or it can present episodes about how we aspire to see ourselves, where the employees are watching the news in their break and see the clip about the African man who saved a toddler who might have fallen from a balcony in France and was awarded citizenship by Macron or about Lance Corporal Gutierrez, the undocumented immigrant who died in Iraq, triggering a discussion about what an undocumented immigrant could be if given a chance.

And what about humor? Fine, as far as we don’t trivialize the issue (For instance, an episode of the second season shows Mateo inviting his coworkers to assault him to get a visa for crime victims, making the unjust immigration law look as a laugh matter), especially because the many misconceptions about this issue in American culture have led to tragic results. Trivialization should not be acceptable. Would we trivialize the phenomenon of suicide rates among gay people when presenting a gay character? And yet, the most hilarious segment of Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who is America” is about immigration(8), only there he gets the laughs at the expense of xenophobes’ prejudices colliding with reality, not at the expense of immigrants.

But we should not be afraid of showing tragedy where it is justified (Jose Antonio Vargas, on presenting immigration tragedy: "The images we see in media are often immigrants crying, immigrants sad, immigrants tragic, as if we have this veil of tragedy all around us, when in reality, the study showed, when you actually present an immigrant in a three-dimensional way as a person, people are moved to action, to tell another friend, to post something on social media.") And again, this doesn’t have to collide with the need of presenting three-dimensional characters. (This should not make us forget either that sitcoms are centered in the evolution of the characters while series are centered in the evolution of the story.) Otherwise, how would you present Joaquin Luna’s(9) or the children in cages story without a tragic tone at least at the end?

The other, much more important role of a new immigration narrative, should be to question misconceptions on this issue. On September 24 the New York Times presented a survey showing that 3/5 of respondents found convincing a message condemning illegal immigration from countries with gang and drugs problems(10): Trump’s message on asylum. This rationalization (blaming the victims for the evil they are trying to escape) is made easier by the same culture that made easier the rationalization of Trump 2016 message (that he was going only after the ‘bad hombres’(11)) because the contextualized concepts themselves are distorted (distortion made easier by the unnecessary complexity of the immigration law(12)). Consider the episodes of The Simpsons(13) and Family Guy(14) dealing with undocumented immigrants: both present their illegal status as a result of they failing a test (misrepresenting the citizenship test, which actually exists but which you can’t take unless you are first a legal resident. What brings to mind another widespread misrepresentation: the line). If I said that undocumented immigrants are those who “jumped” the line, don’t pay taxes and don’t speak English, too many would agree even though none of these assertions is true. Worse, they imply that their illegal status is the result of moral or intellectual flaws when, in reality, the determinant factors are country of origin/family of the applicant and legal status of the sponsor. Definitely, it’s more difficult to rationalize xenophobia if I know that their legal status is the result of having been born in the wrong country or family. On the other hand, he have Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton(15), which makes a case for the hard-working, talented low-born immigrant. (Ron Chernow(16), whose Hamilton biography was the basis for the musical, describes how, born poor in the Caribbean, Hamilton comes to America thanks to gifts from his former employer to study but with the intention of staying here. If the current law would have applied, Hamilton, our most important immigrant, would have been unable to come legally. That’s why 12 years ago I proposed him as a symbol of Deserved Residency and Immigration Reform.(17)) The problem is that we don’t have that many Hamiltons to counter the before mentioned distortions. Now, this is not the result of anti-immigrant sentiments among writers or producers(18) but of widespread misconceptions that, in the wrong cultural context, end up in rationalizing a vote for xenophobes.

This brings me to my work, Gatito Inmeegrante (Links available to read it for free at https://www.facebook.com/GatitoInmeegrante/). Gatito Inmeegrante is the most American of stories: an underdog fighting the system for what is right, an undocumented activist fighting against impossible odds to change the unjust law that has condemned him and his friends to live hopeless lives while an authoritarian leader is rising to power scapegoating immigrants (And I know what you are thinking but I wrote it 8 years ago and have the copyright to prove it); determined to not just merely survive but to live, love and dream like everybody else with his character as only one weapon. Gatito Inmeegrante is entertaining (otherwise nobody would see it and, therefore, would not be able to change anything), is non partisan and honest (with heroes and foes among both conservatives and liberals, as in real life), breaks with the ethnic stereotypes that prevent empathy (what makes it different), and presents immigration in a wider context with which the average American can correlate. It’s for all these reasons that it deserves a chance in this conversation.

Art must be honest as it approaches issues not by deduction or induction but by intuition. And though it should not be required to present solutions, it should make you feel what is wrong even if your eyes can’t see it yet and so it should challenge your mind and heart.

Would you help me have that conversation with Define American (https://www.defineamerican.com/contact) or with the other three organizations interested in a new immigration narrative: https://www.fwd.us/contact/, https://americasvoice.org/contact/ and https://latinovictory.us/contact/?

Gatito Inmeegrante

Sources (Optional)

(1) https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html

(2) Identity Crisis, John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck; Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 184. As ANES polls show, Hispanics for whom a Hispanic identity are important, are more receptive to a pro-immigrant message. Also, Haney Lopez, Ian ‘Trump exploited status anxiety among Latino voters,’ Washington Post 11/08/2020(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-exploited-status-anxiety-within-the-latino-community/2020/11/06/3164e77c-1f9f-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html). Also, Hernandez, Arelis R., 'why Texas's overwhelmingly Latino Rio Grande Valley turned toward Trump (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/texas-latino-republicans/2020/11/09/17a15422-1f92-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html).

(3) https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_(film)

(5) https://www.mediavillage.com/article/will-grace-the-tv-series-that-changed-gay-rights-in-america/

(6) Vargas correctly mentions that “Superstore” character Mateo has a positive impact as viewers who felt who sense of friendship with Mateo, even if they had little or no real-life contact with immigrants, were more likely to support an increase in immigrants coming to the U.S. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29

(7) Hidden Brain, The Empathy Gym, NPR, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/744195502.

(8) Episode 103, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_America%3F

(9) https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/us/joaquin-luna-jrs-suicide-touches-off-immigration-debate.html

(10) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/opinion/joe-biden-donald-trump-2020.html

(11) Haney Lopez, Ian ‘Trump exploited status anxiety among Latino voters’ Washington Post 11/08/2020 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-exploited-status-anxiety-within-the-latino-community/2020/11/06/3164e77c-1f9f-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html ).

(12) John Oliver on immigration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXqnRMU1fTs&t=9s) and asylum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtdU5RPDZqI). Also, see Aviva Chomsky’s works.

(13) The Simpsons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing#:~:text=%22Much%20Apu%20About%20Nothing%22%20is,in%20Springfield%20to%20be%20deported.

(14) Family Guy, episode 6, 6th season: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy_(season_6)#Episodes

(15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_(musical)

(16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_(book)

(17) “Obama vs. Firm, the Most Stupid Fight of Our Times” (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/12/10/671565/-Obama-vs-FIRM-the-most-stupid-fight-of-our-times) and “Betraying Hector Perez Garcia” (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/12/8/670801/-Betraying-Hector-Perez-Garcia-or-the-FIRM-rsquo-s-extraordinary-service-to-the-xenophobic-Right)

(18) "I wouldn't want to tell a story where say, Mateo does find this funny way that totally works and makes him a citizen. And none of that is true. I don't think it's good for society that we're spreading a wrong message" (Justin Spitzer, creator and executive producer of the Superstore). https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29