In the Archives #001: Immigration
"I saw her like a rose in my garden!", Danny Lyon, El Otro Lado, and survival.
We spend a lot of time in the archives. More than almost anything, this research has proven to us that the conversations we are having today (particularly on immigration) haven’t changed that much in the last 50 or so years. No news is new, etc.
In addition to the interviews, paid subscribers will get a shortlist of the coolest stuff we find. Books, films, articles, photos & ephemera – all relating back to the topic at hand.
In the vein of our interview with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, released on Tuesday, here are some of the archives that have influenced our research on immigration.
From El Otro Lado, a documentary that follows a group of men making their way from Mexico to the United States. It is a completely immersive experience with no judgment. Danny Lyon’s lens captures the humor and optimism of these men with ease. Lyon is a photo-journalist, writer, and filmmaker.
“Lyon’s images are simple and direct. These men do what they have to do in order to survive. And they do it with remarkable spirit and optimism. Nowhere is this more evident than when the men are making music. They look strong, proud, and momentarily free.” - Nancy Legge, The Villager
From one of our favorite archive libraries, a local news report from the El Paso border in 1984. Unsurprisingly, many of the perspectives that the El Pasoans share in this 2-minute clip echo current debates.
00:00:55 - “I think the people do what they have to do to survive.”
00:01:49 - “The bottom line is that we're saturated. We have no more room. We can't continue to absorb all these people.”
Our 2019 interview with Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor and Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. He served as UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees from 2010 to 2015). He was also co-chair of the Immigration task force for President Obama’s transition team in 2008. We discuss immigration, migration, and the “crisis” at the U.S. southern border.
From our (unreleased) archival interview with Jennifer Chacon. Our conversation focused on how a series of policies in the 1980s and 1990s made immigration, and migrants themselves, increasingly criminal. In this excerpt, she talks about 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — a law most remembered for providing a pathway to citizenship for 2.7 million undocumented immigrants — and its darker legacy.
“We saw a series of immigration laws that increasingly criminalized migration prior to the nineties. Probably the most notable is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which was the great compromise signed by President Reagan. The idea was that U.S. law would provide a path to citizenship for a pretty large number of people who were present in the country without authorization (ultimately about 3 million), but, at the same time, would try to proactively address the problem of unauthorized migration. The primary tool for this was the criminalization of the hiring of unauthorized workers.
Theoretically, that criminal sanction applies to employers, but in reality, employers are seldom penalized for hiring unauthorized workers. What actually happens is that workers’ lack of work authorization becomes a point of vulnerability that employers now can leverage. Employers continued to recruit from Mexico for workers throughout the 1990s and to use contractors and other means to finesse their own legal paperwork requirements. So you continue to have people who are coming to the United States because jobs were available and they're being recruited for these jobs, but employers can also use the threat of immigration enforcement against these workers to exploit them. The government largely declined to enforce the law against employers, so it was as if the workers’ work had been criminalized. In short, although it's the employers whose actions had been criminalized in 1986, the rhetoric really focused on the people who were coming to work, treating them as if they were the criminal violators.”
President Reagan’s Remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Immigration Reform and Control Act in Roosevelt Room of the White House on November 6, 1986.
SOMETHING TO READ:
Homelands by Alfredo Corchado, a giant in border journalism.
“Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration”