Reply #45: Don't waste your time or energy on this [View All]

You have a nice, pious sense and experience of American citizenship and the idea that the laws are just and rightly enforced. And built on social bedrock.

I'm a second generation immigrant myself. I held similar notions for a long time. But that changed as I got a strong sense of integration into the social and spiritual history and dilemmas, the crimes and bad compromises, the whole edifice of laws is built upon. The writing, interpretation, and enforcement of the laws are smaller than the historical trends and pressures that the society...but for the Constitution, which is itself aching and straining these days.

You think that Latinos should be held to the same standard as you and yours are by the present government. But in that stance is a subscription to the assumptions implicit in the present laws, which are that the value of immigrants lies largely in their economic value and that certain kinds of wealth and education and cultural conformity are desirable above the rest.

It's easy to see why you find those criteria desirable, since you fit them nicely and they seem universal and 'objective' enough. One can't really write laws in other ways give the present conventions and American sense of identity at the moment, sense of what is equitable and affordable. But these criteria are not actually universal, not adequate to our larger social and historical situation if you look in a frame of, say two generations or three.

Latinos and American Indians simply have special status relative to all other groups, that is a fact of American life historically not accommodated or suppressed in the laws and vociferously, hatefully, denied...and in the vehemence of the denial, admitted to be a deep historical truth. The society as a whole is constructed on the injustice of the Settlement and the artifice of racial castes. Despite all the clever evasions, intellectual rationalizations, excuses, and insiduous or psychotic selfdelusions, the American Indian looms in the non-Native American imagination as something authentic beyond themselves and the key to a spiritually true relationship to the land and the American project. It's a moral and spiritual truth. Without the American Indian as reference point and secret center of the whole, non-Native people in this land are always adrift culturally and anxious, sense they are spiritually adrift. For a first generation immigrant his/her true sense of identity always remains in the land abroad, and this does not appear to be a true problem. For second and third and later generations, it is the central problem. You see the materialism, the zipping between silly obsessions, or the endless nostalgias, that all amount to evasion and inability to come to terms with the central problem, I'm sure.

In the American Indian and the form of him that is Latinos lies the solution to the American racial caste problem. Those are the people who will intermarry all racial groups. They are the people whose chosen practical/pragmatic basic approach to the world means disbelief in Eurocentrism, the faux and weak cultural center that still dominates the society, and means the end of most of the silly ideologies and ideological fashions and bizarre theories that are the root of misgovernment this country.

That is what I believe the undercurrents are in this debate about 'illegal immigrants'. 11 million people amount to 3-4% of the national population, there's no true economic pain in accommodating them. The real question is on one level honesty about American society as it is, about admitting that we invited them in, that arbitrary lines in desert sands are not reality or destiny, and that we know this faux quasi-European society we still have now is transient, has served its particular historical purposes and is passing. The question as I see it is whether Americans are absolutely loyal to race and the colonial past, on the one hand, or the ideal/experiment described in the Constitution is in true earnest, something which we as a collective truly live our lives for and die in sincere belief of.

And these are hard questions to deal with here and now. We live in times in which the loyalty to our ideals and loyalties to our pasts are in the greatest possible genuine tension, in which the commitments emanating out of our individual pasts are full of concrete particulars and those of the future are abstractions slowly becoming concrete particulars. In a generation or two we may feel them to be the other way around, the commitments emanating out of the past becoming ever more abstract to us and the future of little but very concrete structure.

So, you are technically correct in your average citizen in the here and now frame of the issue. But in larger frame, the issue of what these laws and conventions exist for as a purpose, rigid enforcement of them is a disservice and hampers the evolution of the society to what it is destined to become.