A Failure to Recognize Their Shared Humanity

By Isabella Kim / Fall 2019

Immigration is what makes America the country it is today. Without the influx of people from around the globe, the US would not be the diverse and multifaceted nation it now is. It would not have been made rich through varied perspectives and ideas. Without immigration, the great experiment that is America, a unique exercise in democracy, would have failed long ago. Throughout American history, however, immigration has been met with resistance from those who wish to create homogeneity and subscribe to flawed ideologies about racial and cultural purity. The most recent group to be targeted by nativists and white supremacists are immigrants from Latin America. They are people who come to this country with nothing more than a desire to be part of something great and create better lives for themselves and those they love. They have faced hatred and intolerance from people who fail to recognize their shared humanity.

Immigration is something about which all Americans should care. The vast majority of us, that is, all of us who are not indigenous, are descendants of immigrants, people who came to the US in the past for the very same reasons the people coming here today are. But we should not just care about people with whom we have something in common. Just because someone is not like us does not mean we cannot treat them with compassion. We need to be able to take a critical look at the way our society functions, and work to eliminate any affront to our shared humanity that we identify. We need to know that people are people-- mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons-- first, and immigrants second. When we meet these people with hostility, we create and perpetuate a world in which we regularly turn a blind eye to injustice, justify to ourselves why people who are suffering are not our problem, and reject the very things that makes us human: love and empathy. That is not the kind of world in which I want to live, and I think there are many more people out there who feel exactly the same way as I do. We cannot continue to allow our differences to define us, and if we are to change that, we must work to find what binds us together to make a better, kinder world. The first step in doing so is to open our eyes to the ills of the world, but when we do, we must be steadfast in our belief that we can and will make things better. It is easy to become overwhelmed by all of the bad, but when rely on one another and support each other, we can effect real change.

We tend to put on blinders when we get caught up in the madness of our everyday lives. We selectively lose our situational awareness, and in doing so, relinquish our power and agency. Suddenly, it seems, egregious human rights abuses are taking place and the problem has become so great that it seems irreparable. We are at a point like that right now with immigration, although in many cases it feels far-removed from our personal lives. We get glimpses on the news, or see traces of lives we know nothing about. The first step in catalyzing action is to recognize the very real human cost of our policies and cultural attitudes. One instance in which this happened for me, where I was brought to an awareness outside of just my own, was while watching the news. I heard that children were being locked up in cages, being treated with little to no dignity. Being denied everything that a child deserves: love, warmth, comfort, safety. The newscaster spoke of babies and toddlers without so much as a set of clean clothes to wear. Having been torn from their moms, dads, aunts, grandpas, or any other guardians, older children, some as young as fourth-graders, were left to care for the little ones. I thought of the baby my mom was fostering at the time, Addy. In a flash of my active imagination, I saw her in a soiled onesie, caked in snot, her skin chapped from tears. Addy, in reality, was safe with us. But what about the hundreds of children who were actually in the situation I had envisioned-- the stuff of nightmares? To be a parent forced by a cruel system into a situation like that is almost unimaginable. Their babies are babies just like Addy, and they are people born into an impossibly difficult situation that any one of us could have been born into. I cannot think of anything remotely as painful as the helplessness they must feel; to sit there through the wailing and have no resources to quell their discomfort must eat away at you. Our border policies, created without regard for the sanctity of human life, have resulted in a large swath of children and parents who are now traumatized and will never recover from the abuses and crimes we have committed against them. We finally looked up from the routine of our everyday lives, and now we are left to wonder how we got here. The answer is made up of things that seem so normal and natural to us that it is difficult to recognize.

Once we identify the systems with which we have been complicit, we must take a hard look at what got us to where we are today. Hegemonic ideologies like nativism, nationalism, and neoliberalism have permeated every facet of our lives to the point that they are barely visible to us anymore. They contribute to the concept of “otherness,” highlighting what little differences we have and exaggerating them to the point that they seem insurmountable. People are coerced by those in power into believing that they are inherently superior or inferior because of any number of things: their race, class, sex, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and language. As a result, we redirect our attention away from the ways our society is structured to create and perpetuate inequality, and instead blame individuals for personal shortcomings. These ideologies manifest in ways that have real consequences for people’s lives, the most severe of which are the imprisonment and dehumanization of innocent children and adults. They are everywhere, from differential access to quality education, to discrimination in job hiring, housing, and medical care, and every area in between. These toxic ways of thinking also reveal themselves in common yet highly contradictory sentiments such as “immigrants are lazy.” People who say things like this are insinuating that immigrants leech off of our scant social welfare programs and sit around all day. How is it possible then, that immigrants are, at the same time, “stealing our jobs”? White supremacy and nationalism have infiltrated Americans’ ways of thinking to the point that even when something is in direct opposition to reality, they are fettered by falsehoods and cannot see that the systems that work against them are the same that work against immigrants, their fellow woman and man.

This devaluation of human life is also evident in the case of immigrant farm laborers. These individuals work in horrendous conditions for long hours, and receive minimal pay in return. The work is strenuous, dangerous, and not steady. Instead of respecting and compensating fairly those who toil to feed our country, we allow them only an illusion of the prospect of the American Dream and deny them the right to build a good life for themselves and their families. To attain that would be impossible; neoliberal thought has contributed to a system in which people are only valued for how much profit they can make for a corporation. Those in power do not care about the myriad issues unique to farm workers, which include immigration and citizenship status, health, housing, and education. The whole person and their needs are not taken into consideration, and once a worker has labored all they can, they are just as swiftly tossed aside and replaced. Here, we see how the system at large cares only for people because of their market value, with complete disregard for the intrinsic value that makes them human.

Yet another contradiction lies in the fact that the US has created a situation in Latin America that has forced people to leave and seek refuge here. Our interference in other governments, driven by the compulsion to exploit those countries for resources, has contributed to instability which has ultimately forced people to flee. Some opponents of immigration say that people come to the US solely for economic reasons, and that those are not sufficient to justify their coming here. While that is sometimes the case, I do not see why being unable to properly feed, clothe, and educate oneself and one’s children is not a good enough reason to seek a better life in the US. Further, American interference in Latin America has created a power vacuum in some cases. This has made way for despotic regimes (some of which are propped up by the US government) and gangs to take hold. The threat of violence becomes tangible, and again, the human cost is very real. I recall one case I heard on the radio in which a woman and her children left their country after her 13 year-old son was recruited by a gang. After refusing to join, they cut off several of the boy’s fingers. I do not see how we can know that people are being tortured and maimed and do nothing about it, especially as citizens of a country in which we regularly espouse freedom as our best attribute. The very least we can do is welcome immigrants with open arms.

In order to reject the dehumanization of immigrants, we must work against the atomization and fragmentation that occurs as a result of white supremacy, nationalism, and neoliberalism. These ideologies have driven us to become a country in which we greet those in need with armed border patrol agents rather than human rights advocates and aid workers. The first step in combating the problem is providing economic aid to those countries whose governments we have helped to destroy. This would allow people to stay where they are if they want to, rather than be forced out of their homes. When people choose to come to the US, we need to recognize that their presence is part of what makes America great, not building a border wall, and surely not locking children up in cages. If we adopt principles of interconnectedness and realize that by helping one another, we tap into the very thing that makes us human, we can create a world in which we treat everyone with the respect and dignity they deserve. The reason the world feels so bad at the moment is because we have lost sight of who we are supposed to be, but we can so simply get back on the right path-- the path of solidarity and love-- if we only look deeper into what our shared human experience is about.