Who is this America?

At least one positive thing about the recent immigration reform bill in Congress is that it has really generated some serious soul-searching and debate on the question of the place of immigrants in current American society. Supporters of immigrant rights have been forced to articulate their point of view. However, this soul-searching does not go deep enough, and important assumptions about national identity, if there even is such a thing (which I doubt), remain unquestioned.

Of course, many supporters of immigrant rights are quick to invoke the "nation of immigrants," how welcoming the huddled masses within are borders is part of the very foundation of America. And they bring up important points. Thus Paul Krugman, in the New York Times yesterday (May 25th, "Immigrants and Politics"):

Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien, and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

This fact, while well documented (see, for example, Michael Frye Jacobson's excellent 1998. book "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race"), really does bear repeating because it vividly illustrates that what we think of as "America" is neither timeless nor unchanging. There is, then, no simple essence of "America" for immigrants to destroy, even if they could.

But the point I want to make here is even more basic. Consider another passage from a New York Times article yesterday, about a poll on American attitudes towards immigration (May 25th, "Immigration Bill Provisions Gain Wide Support in Poll"):

The poll showed that Americans are uncertain about the benefits of the most recent wave of immigration, and divided over how many immigrants should come in the future.

The question that pops into my head after reading this sentence is: "should?". Or, spelled out more clearly, why is it that we believe we have a right to dictate the fate of these people, that we think we can (and should) allow or deny them entrance here? Is that really a choice that we can make and impose on others? Underlying the whole thing is the assumption that there is an unproblematic and unitary nation, and that we control it. I take issue with that assumption.

Think for a moment about this thing we call globalization. Clearly it means a lot of things, but one undeniable component is the intertwining of national economies, a meshing that is now inextricable and means that changes in agricultural policy in the US can lead to food riots in Mexico. But Mexicans have no say in who makes policy in the US. Why would they? They're not US citizens.

The point here is that while we talk about discrete political entities, in fact no nation is an island (metaphorically speaking, of course). The global economic order and the global political order are not in sync: one ignores borders, while for the other they are of paramount importance. And this leads to many problems (and, frankly, leads me to wonder if the nation-state, in its current incarnation, is not becoming obsolete (and in fact, phenomena such as the growth of the EU seem to validate this opinion). But let's leave that can of worms aside for now). Those who migrate to the US usually do so for economic reasons, like the Mexicans who (let's be honest) are really at the ones who are being talked about in this debate. As an editorial in The Nation put it ("Raw Deal on Immigration", posted May 24th):

By wrenching open the domestic Mexican market to subsidized US exports, trade deals like NAFTA have put poor Mexican farmers out of business while driving up the domestic price of staples like corn. Unable to make ends meet in Mexico, people make the rational calculation to go to the United States, where jobs pay more and are more plentiful, so they can send money home to support their families.

Simple, right? And yet, when US-engineered trade deals are pushing immigrants across the border, why do we think we can tell them whether they're welcome or not? Who is this America guarding the nation, and why does it think it has a right to do so?