US illegals in limbo

At the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, the following verse is inscribed: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Rousing sentiments indeed, and represented the renewed enthusiasm for the ideal of America being “the land of the free” after the abolition of slavery in 1865. The Statue itself was a gift from the French to the Americans just a 100 years after their 18th century Revolutions that redefined the meaning of “freedom”.

But while the US is unquestionably a “nation of immigrants” (forget about the native Americans), it appears that after the first flush of enthusiasm, the country was quite selective as to which “huddled masses” it would have “lift (its) lamp”.

Following massive immigration from Europe in the 19th century and into the early years of the 20th as labour was sought to “man” the burgeoning factories that would soon catapult the US to the top of the industrial heap, the “golden door” was slammed shut to those from “non-White” nations.

At the same time, the US was extracting raw materials from those same non-White nations in massively exploitative fashion, throwing most into grinding poverty even as they were exposed to its wealthy lifestyle through its media.

Following World War (WW) II, illegal immigration from these countries became a growing phenomenon, as those peoples sought the “good life” in “America”. When by the mid-1960s, the US started issuing a fixed number of visas to those countries, this merely acted to increase the number of “tired and poor” overcoming all sorts of barriers to enter “the land of the brave”.

Small as it was in population, Guyana punched above its weight in sending both legal and illegal immigrants to the US.

By the 1980s, reacting to nativist pressures, the American authorities discovered an “illegal immigrant” problem. By definition this meant that sentiments were aroused in the populace that America was to “be protected” from these immigrants. That these latter folks were shown by every study to be contributing far more to American society that they took was swept under the carpet.

The racist premises of American nativism are not to be ignored, even though disguised.

Since that time, every American President has proposed the creation of a new immigration regime to deal with the issue in a structured manner. The approaches offered diverged precisely according to the Democratic-Republican schism in American politics, with the latter party more sympathetic to nativist sentiments.

After three decades of proposals which were never able to get through the Congress because of the split, President Barack Obama, issued an Executive Order on Immigration last week to break the logjam.

As its name suggests, the Order is totally the President’s initiative and has been immediately challenged by the Republicans as exceeding his constitutionally defined powers. Almost every Guyanese family has an illegal immigrant relative or friend in the US and Obama’s action has understandably stirred great interest.

Its most noteworthy feature is that those illegal immigrants who have been at least five years in the country and have children born there, will not be subjected to the dreaded “deportation orders”.

This does not mean that they will be given the much coveted “green card” signalling “permanent residence” status, or even that they will even be given the much talked about health care access that Obama has introduced: they will be in a limbo from where they still would not be able to visit their native country.

To sell the idea to a sceptical Republican Party and Conservative Democrats, it has been suggested that this move might just boost the depressed housing market. The theoretically stateless individuals would now be able to have homes but not “residence”.