Poorly Adjusted
Anthropologist Josiah Heyman on the Inadequate Framework of Our Immigration Laws
Our second interview for the Border Issue features an interview with anthropologist Josiah Heyman. This interview was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the border, obviously, and particularly how you write about the border. You talk about it as a myth that we tell ourselves or a fantasy of what we hope it might be or might accomplish. What do you think the effectiveness of the myth is?
I think it has proven to be a very powerful myth. The myth of the border serves to motivate and rationalize the anti-immigrant positions – it might be the anti-immigrant positions of a minority, but it is a substantial minority. But at the same time, the border is a very complicated lived reality, and, you know, lived realities don't fit very well into myths.
You wrote about how the narrative, the myth, has a way of separating the United States as an active participant in what occurs at the border, what do you mean by that?
Yeah, I think that's very important actually. There's this notion that everything arriving at the border is solely from the 'outside.' It’s as if the US economy and society have no part in the movements across the border. We erase our economic and cultural interests. It simplifies the border as a place where external factors, for which the US supposedly bears no responsibility, seemingly materialize at our doorstep.
And what’s closer to the truth?
Well, it is a place of exchange — of highly unequal exchange, but a place of exchange with the wider world, nonetheless. The reality is that there are a lot of relationships and a lot of interchanges, that are not equal. The results of them are oftentimes problematic and could be improved, but there are just innumerable amounts of human exchange — families, cultures, language, music — and economic exchange. I mean, Mexico is now the largest trading partner of the United States.
How do you tell people about what your day-to-day is like at the border? I find the physical component of it so fascinating. I think it's such an easy image to distort.
I think that clearly, the best way to try to understand the complexity, the vastness, and the importance of the border is to go to one of the places where people legally cross the border — what's called a port of entry — where literally a million people a day go from Mexico into the United States. These are connecting passageways across the continent.
The image of the border that is usually out there is a wall that is blocking things, but the number of people who have crossed outside the port of entry has gone down year over year, and the number of people who are arriving at ports of entry and putting in asylum requests has increased.
The image and the portrayal of the wall as a barrier against everything pouring in from outside has, like all stereotypes, an element of truth. Many individuals do indeed attempt to enter the United States without inspection. However, the truth of the matter is that crossings back and forth of all kinds —especially with US citizens coming back to the US – are much more extensive and more important than what the wall purportedly aims to block. Whether this approach works, or whether this is a good choice is another question.
We know a lot about what has failed at the border — be it deterrence or militarization. Pick a president we can pick a failure. But why do you feel it’s so gridlocked, administration to administration, on this particular issue?
I think there are two layers to answering that question. There's the immediate, which is to say rewriting the laws. We haven't adjusted the number of people who can immigrate legally since 1965; there were little adjustments in 1973 for the Western Hemisphere. There was another set of adjustments in 1990. When we talk about legal migration numbers, these things are not newer than 30 years old. People should know that the legal migration number is poorly adjusted to the reality of the world. It is poorly adjusted to the number of people who would like to migrate. It's poorly adjusted to the number of employers in the United States who want to hire them. It's poorly adjusted to the communities that would like to have people inside of them. And it's poorly adjusted to the families that would like to reunify.
Our legal immigration system, the actual framework of the laws is not up to its task. We really, really need to work on the legal immigration system. We're in a period of fear of the outsider, of fear of new people. We alternate between accepted movements of people and waves of fear, which come from the difficulty in accepting and adapting to change. This seems to be a repeated process in American history and in prosperous countries globally. And there's a deeper question here about how willing people in prosperous places are to embrace change and welcome new members into their local and national communities.
I don't think we can discount the force of racism in that; racism is a powerful way of separating the people who are welcome and the people who are unwelcome. We’re stuck in this situation of increasing reaction. I think we're in a period of desperate attempts to go backward, trying to reverse 58 years of new people filling in US society and becoming part of US society. I think that's a huge mistake.
Why do we have a wall? It's a wall against change. It's a wall against new people in communities. It's a gigantic, iron structure, a huge physical wall, meant entirely as a symbol of blocking the reality of 58 years of change.
You’ve lived in El Paso a long time and seen many versions of the border. Is there a vision you have of a successful border?
There are instances where places like El Paso have been relatively welcoming to passing migrants, like those I mentioned earlier—individuals traveling long distances, perhaps from Venezuela through Mexico, seeking asylum upon reaching the United States. El Paso, despite being a city with limited resources, continues to give generously. Every day, there's a significant connectedness being fostered between both sides of the border. The university where I teach has the highest number of Mexican students out of any US university. In my classes, I instruct an incredibly diverse mix of American, Mexican, and dual-citizen students.
The border gives us a vision of interconnectedness — with various challenges, tensions, conflicts, and resource shortages. It's not a flawless, magical situation, but we find success in coexisting here. I think there are many really difficult policy issues. How do you create an effective asylum policy for places facing criminalization and economic collapse, such as Venezuela? How can we run a more effective US bureaucracy so that we move people through the US government's Citizenship and Immigration Services faster so that they are not waiting for permission to work? How can we move people through immigration courts faster? How do we make the courts more generous towards people coming in? Not just asylum, or court-based immigration, but legal immigration. All of these things are challenging, but we know what the issues are and we know we can do a lot better.
So we've got two problems. We've got the problem of the powerful fearful image, the image of the border, and the practical problem of how can we adjust the everyday process of increasing the number of legal migrants and legalizing people who are already here.
I also read something about this idea of commons — a more out-of-pocket way of thinking about it. How concerning is limited imagination to you in terms of the border?
That's terrific that you brought this up. This has been something that I have written about and that I care very much about. I published an essay on this in the Journal of Borderland Studies about rethinking borders. Basically, it had to do with the fact that we share common challenges and we share common goods across conventional separations, across conventional borders, and across conventional boundaries. For more than a decade, I've worked on shared water along the US-Mexico border, and that's kind of a precedent for thinking about what it is that we share. We share a large economy, public health issues, and a huge number of human relationships. I mean, millions of people go to Mexico for medical and dental care. So I suggested that maybe governing all these commons exclusively inside a border is not most beneficial or effective way to proceed.
I think we need to think about what it really means to share a continent and what it really means to share a hemisphere with other people. And instead of being afraid that somebody's going to come in and take things away, we need to think more widely of an ethos of the common good of sharing.
The feeling of surveillance and militarization extends so deep in both directions, in all directions. How does that feel?
Yeah. We have helicopters going over us all the time, sort of like a war zone, to the point that we begin to forget about it if we're not the ones who are directly subjected to enforcement actions. That is the privilege of being legal.
We can think of El Paso and Juarez and other places along the border as living communities that are very, very intimately connected, and, at the same time, as objects of enforcement that are powerfully imposed from the outside. Now, those enforcers live here, they operate out of here… you know, they operate out of Fort Bliss, they operate out of the various border patrol stations. I was praising ports of entry before, but the ports of entry are enforcement stations, they are really inspection stations for people going back and forth.
These are two communities that live together but in a very complicated way. And, at the same time, it has this massive, almost warlike apparatus of low-intensity conflict imposed on it from the wider world, from the wider country, the most obvious symbol of that being a wall that keeps us away from our river, from our shared river.
The local community suffers and participates in an argument that for most people isn’t literal.
You know, this is a poor community. This is a poor and heavily Mexican-origin community. It is 85% Hispanic, almost all of which is Mexican origin. And you know, the average household income here is only about two-thirds of the average household income of the United States, and yet El Paso is notably pro-immigrant. I mean, we are talking about a million people in the metropolitan area of El Paso and Southern New Mexico, so there are a million opinions, but the pro-immigrant stance has been the pattern here. The places that are afraid of the border and are afraid of immigrants are typically in the interior of the United States.
I was thinking about this the other day. I was at a friend’s 60th birthday party, a barbecue out in a little town called Anthony, Texas. This is just sort of a humble, working class and farming community. And we're having a great time. And it's a mix of Mexican origin people, and, what we call white people down here, Anglos …we're Anglos, my wife and I. And I thought, you know, El Paso is such a special place. I wish people in the United States could know it better. It's like this Mexican-American paradise.
It is, you know, people who have gotten out of a country that has a very authoritarian regime and a long history of cynical politics and corruption and insecurity, living in the United States, oftentimes with low incomes, oftentimes under circumstances that most would not consider to be such a wonderful thing, but in the community, people are positive and optimistic, and, as I said before, impressively welcoming of immigrants. El Paso has an amazingly low crime rate, especially if you don't count racist, mass murderers coming from the outside.
El Paso is just a great example of what a good America can be. It's an exceptionally stereotyped place, that in reality has a lot to offer by way of an example of living together and doing it under circumstances where people can live decent lives and be secure and safe. I think that there's a lesson there.