"Think about what it takes to go from a rural village in Honduras or El Salvador, leave your family behind, and start something new," immigration attorney Michael Maggio told an audience last night in Braker Hall.
"What has made this country is people with creative ideas, people who are risk takers. That is the hallmark of capitalism." Many of these innovative people, he said, are immigrants.
Maggio, along with immigration activists Maria Elena Letona and Carlos Saavedra, spoke as part of an immigration panel hosted by the Association of Latin American Students, Students Acting for Immigrant Rights at Tufts, and the Latino Center. It was held in celebration of Latino Heritage Month.
Maggio, a renowned specialist in immigration law working in Washington, D.C., began the event by tracing the roots of discrimination in American society to a time when Thomas Jefferson was considered by many to be a traitor because of his support for French ideas.
Moving forward into the 19th century, he highlighted the discrimination that many Chinese railroad employees faced, specifically in the form of a law that required them to prove their citizenship with testimony from a white witness.
"The Supreme Court said it makes sense for Congress to require one white witness because the Chinese are a race of liars," he said, capturing the prevalent sentiment at the time.
This discrimination has also applied to Italians and Catholics, among other ethnic groups and religions.
"Italians, in case you didn't know, [are] lazy, smelly, oversexed, and will never integrate with society," he said, referencing the findings of a Congressional commission in the early 20th century.
He went on to compare the plight that Muslims face today to the situation that many Catholics faced in America.
"They believed that Catholics were taking orders from the Pope and there was going to be a Catholic takeover," he said. This discrimination, he said, has become "part of the fabric of our society."
Maria Elena Letona, the Executive Director of the Centro Presente, a Cambridge-based advocacy group for immigrant rights, expanded on the implications of this discrimination.
Most of the hardships that immigrants face, she said, come from laws placing restrictions on citizenship and advancement opportunities. "The treatment that our community is being subjected to ... is horrendous, but it's legal," she said.
She said that these laws have their base in misperceptions of the role that immigrants play in the American economy.
Although most people think that globalization is a phenomenon that has only affected other countries, it is also carrying on with great force inside the United States, she said.
The effects of globalization, especially an increased demand for cheap labor, have hurt the American economy. "It is not as comfortable as it was back in the sixties," she said.
When people attribute these problems to immigrants, they are misdirecting their blame, Letona said.
Still, she said that globalization has important implications for immigration law, requiring the United States to take a more global perspective even for its domestic laws.
"We can't think only about the U.S. and a legalization program alone because the United States doesn't operate as a vacuum anymore. It's part of the world," she said.
In this global economy, and in every other economy that has existed, people have to relocate. "We have to understand that moving in search of survival, it's a very normal human behavior," she said.
The final speaker, Carlos Saavedra, a community organizer in East Boston and the state-wide Student Immigrant Movement, addressed the affects that immigration laws have on students.
He said that the distinction between legal and illegal, and the very use of the term illegal to describe a person, are both incredibly difficult for children to accept. "How do you tell a kid that he's illegal?" he asked.
Many children, he said, didn't even have a choice when it came to coming to the United States. In his case, he said his parents made the decision. "They told me it was a vacation," Saavedra said. "I'm still on vacation."
Many of these children have almost no access to higher education. "The best and brightest students in the Commonwealth are not going to college because they're being discriminated [against], and they're being segregated," he said.
The solution, he said, is to provide in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants, something that the Development, Relief and Education Act for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and the Massachusetts In-State Tuition Bill, neither of which have been passed, would accomplish.
These bills were not the only pieces of legislation addressed last night. The panelists had a mixed, although mostly negative, view of the legislation proposed by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, which calls for a path to citizenship for a portion of undocumented immigrants.
Those wishing to obtain citizenship will have to have lived in the country for a set period and will have to meet various monetary and civic commitments.
"The problem with that is that in a given family...you can have people that are in different tiers," Letona said, referring to the fact that in many cases not all members of a family have been in the United States for the same amount of time.
She said that the Kennedy/McCain legislation, which Maggio called "the best of the bad" proposals, as well as all other attempts at reform, have tried too hard to cater to the Republican party.
Whereas once many activists were proclaiming that no human is illegal, now they are trying to decide how to make illegal immigrants legal, thereby conceding their previous objective.
"I'm hoping that at some point we're just going to find the wherewithal to say that's enough," Letona said.
