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My problem with the food stamp challenge

I’ve been seeing more friends, classmates and organizations talk about doing the “Food Stamp Challenge.” The challenge consists of trying to eat on an average food stamp allocation, which is $4.50 per day for an individual. According to an email sent out by Catholic Charities Walla Walla, and forwarded to the volunteer listserv at Whitman, the reason for doing this is summarized as follows: “Through this experience we can educate ourselves as to what it means to eat on $4.50 a day, raise awareness in the community, and, in the long term, build understanding that could lead to better programs to assist low-income families.”

I want to be clear: I think the intentions of people participating in this challenge are good (otherwise, there would be no point in writing a critique). Presumably, the goal is that people who participate in this challenge will gain some first-hand awareness that eating on $4.50 a day is hard and spread that awareness to friends and family, ultimately leading to better food policy. Given what I’ve seen of the challenge rules and its marketing, though, I think the net result is more likely to be further depriving low-income people of voice and agency in public policy.

First of all, framing something as a “challenge” and encouraging participants to connect via social media and share stories and recipes with each other makes eating on a food stamp budget sound fun. It probably is fun to do for a week if you’re middle or upper class and don’t normally have to pay that much attention to what you eat. But anyone who has been poor for a significant length of time can tell you that rationing food, skipping meals so you can afford rent or forgoing food so your kids can eat is not fun. There’s nothing glamorous about it. There’s no Facebook page, no support network of people swapping recipes. It’s not a “challenge,” in the fun, reality-TV-esque sense of the word. It’s just survival, and you won’t get any recognition from your friends or family for doing something cool and edgy by making your food budget last for the entire month.

Secondly, the rules and set-up of the challenge make it unlikely to be a very accurate simulation of eating as a low-income person. Rule #3 states that, “During the Challenge, eat only food that you purchase for the project. Do not eat food that you already own (this does not include spices and condiments).” The thing is, spices and condiments are a huge part of what makes food palatable and versatile. They’re cheap in a per-serving sense, but having the capital required to buy a decent set of basic spices is not a luxury that a lot of folks have. It’s way easier to cook healthy, nutritious and diverse foods if you have access to flavorings. Aside from this, lack of money is only one of many reasons why low-income folks often aren’t able to eat healthy food. Time is another huge constraint.

Eating on $4.50 a day is actually pretty easy if you have the knowledge, education and time to cook dried beans from stratch, as my friend Josh discovered. And cooking like that becomes hard, if not impossible, when you’re working multiple jobs, have to provide childcare, are chronically ill or have any number of other life circumstances that many low-income people do. At best, this means the experiences of people trying this challenge won’t be representative of a typical person on food stamps. At worse, this will mean people who try this or hear about others trying it will conclude that it’s not actually that hard to live on food stamps at all.

Finally, and most importantly, I’m sick of the notion that privileged people have to try something themselves in order to see how bad it is. Thousands of people who are actually low-income can and have addressed the fact that our social safety net is insufficient, that food stamps don’t provide enough for people to buy healthy foods, and that there are dozens of other factors which play into food security and access to healthy foods besides income. Everything I’ve written on this post has been said before by people who know far better than I do what it’s actually like to be poor. And too often, the lived experiences of people are ignored in favor of gimmicky “challenges” like this, where people who have never gone hungry a day in their lives suddenly become experts on food policy and the problems with food stamps. Last I checked, which was a few years ago, almost 1 in 8 Americans were on food stamps. There are enough people who have actually dealt with this system to speak to how it works. We don’t need more people to try food stamps before we can take action or make policy about hunger or poverty in this country.

I understand the impulse to try something firsthand to learn more about it. But if you’re going to do the food stamp challenge, don’t act like your experience is a meaningful indication of what a person in poverty actually experiences when trying to eat. And if you’re really determined to solve the issue of hunger in America, pay attention to the next Farm Bill negotiations and call your representatives to tell them not to cut funding for food stamps. Challenge the rhetoric that people relying on food stamps are parasitic, lazy and good-for-nothing. Object to the fact that proposed immigration reform bills won’t allow undocumented immigrants waiting in line for legalization access to social services. Pay attention to the policy and rhetoric that actually shapes the food options that poor people in the U.S. have, and do more than just spending a week eating bulk beans and granola.

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Back from hiatus, pondering the ethics of thesis research in Tucson

Hey everyone. The blog has sort of been on temporary hiatus since this summer, both due to general busy-ness and the fact that a lot of my writing energy has been channeled into other (better-paid) places. So I apologize for the long dry spell. But, I’m back in Tucson, Arizona now to finish up the field research portion of my thesis. Since it’s likely I’ll be writing while I’m down here, I thought this would be a good time to write something explaining my thesis in a way which (hopefully) makes sense to non-politics majors.

Basically, and super-broadly, my thesis involves interviewing people who consider themselves “environmentalists” who have also engaged with migrant aid work on the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrant aid means something like putting water out in the desert, often with an established group like No Mas Muertes/No More Deaths, the Samaritans or Fronteras Compasivas/Humane Borders.

I don’t want to explain my research goals in too much detail right now, just because some potential research subjects might see this and I don’t want perceptions of goals to influence what people tell me. But I’m hoping to get an idea of how people who’ve engaged with migrant issues talk about nature and the desert. The thesis itself is going to be a fun theoretical mix of critical race scholarship and American wilderness and environmental history.

Partially, I arrived at this topic as part of my personal journey over the last year or so. I’ve gone from being an ardent, save-the-polar-bears-and-rainforests environmentalist to focusing much more on human issues–social justice, environmental justice, and the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration policy in particular. While these two types of issues aren’t always opposed with each other (and often seem like they should be well-linked), there’s less crossover between humanitarian/social justice issues and environmental issues than it seems like there could or should be. I’ve found over the past year or so that a lot of that has to do with the environmental movement’s long, and often bloody, history of racial exclusion, from the removal, massacre and genocide of indigenous and non-white people which paved the way for “untouched” American wilderness, to the forced relocation and/or criminalization of traditional foresters and hunters in areas designated as critical habitat by American NGOs in the Global South. Looking at this history, it’s been hard for me to retain faith in the mainstream environmental movement, which remains overwhelmingly composed of middle and upper class white people, at least in the U.S., and remains willfully blind to much of its own history. And my doubts are especially strong when the issues in question relate to wilderness or other forms of land preservation.

So this thesis, as much as anything else, is an attempt for me to see how other people who care about the same issues I do view their place in the world, and in the two often contradictory movements they’re part of. It’s also an attempt for me to write about a subject I’m really interested in, and do work on the border, without contributing to the academicization (not a word, I know) of people’s lives and struggles. (I say attempt because it’s completely not up to me to decide if I’m successful in this endeavor.)

There’s a tendency in academia to research marginalized groups of people (undocumented migrants, for instance, or homeless queer youth) and publish things about their lives. The resulting papers get treated as insightful, and people read them and say, “Oh look, we didn’t know anything about these people, and now we do!” Often when this happens, the same group of people have been writing about their own lives and experiences for a while, and fighting for rights, recognition, etc., just not in a way which was visible, intelligible or meant for the consumption of academics. So then academics who aren’t part of said group get credit for studying them, and most likely, essentializing or inaccurately portraying or simplifying their lived experience. And those academics become noted and get to talk over the people they claim to be representing.

I’m not saying there can’t be benefits to this type of research: some researchers focus on advocacy or solidarity/reciprocity work as part of their research, and awareness, as well as tangible benefits, do come through this. (Whitman’s State of the State for Washington Latinos project strikes me as an example of this type of project done well, with ongoing connections to established groups, research needs dictated by community groups and half of the class time dedicated to advocacy/publicity). But tons and tons of white college students and white professors (and some non-white folks as well) have studied the border and immigration and undocumented migrants ad nauseum, and the benefits back to those groups and populations are often small if not zero when a college senior comes and visits for a few weeks to do a project and then leaves again with no further contact. I hope, that by studying individuals, rather than advocacy groups specifically, and by focusing on how a largely white population talks about environmental and immigration issues, I can at least do a thesis where I’m not trying to summarize the lived experiences of marginalized people. And I’m going to keep this issue in mind in my future career as a journalist, where I think those lines get even stickier and easier to cross in ways that can end up hurting people.

While I’m terrified about the prospect of getting all the legwork done in the next week and a half, I’m looking forward to chatting with some cool people while I’m in town. I’ve managed to drag Spencer (my boyfriend) down here with me, and he’s graciously agreed to hang out with me and drive me around town while I do interviews.

Stay tuned for more research updates, and also fun things that sound more exciting than “research updates.”

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Welcome to my new and improved website!

Hi everyone! You’re looking at the brand spankin’ new rachelwalexander.com. I decided it was time to get a site with a bit more functionality that would allow me to create pages and brag about my journalistic experience while keeping a blog on the side. After a couple of weeks playing around in WordPress, I finally felt that this guy was ready to be unveiled, and after a totally unproductive phone call with GoDaddy’s obnoxious support staff, I have now redirected my WordPress domain to here and unlinked my Blogger account.

What this means for you, dear readers, is very little. Any bookmarks you have of my posts and such should remain the same, and all of them have been transferred to WordPress with comments intact. I still need to go back through my old posts and delete some extraneous code that got added in, but aside from some wonky paragraph breaks, everything is more or less the same. I also need to double-check that my internal links are functioning properly.

You might have noticed my new Pages menu to the left. Here, I have static content I can update, including a portfolio of my best journalism and an about me page. I hope to someday get a photography portfolio up there, as well as my resume.

There’s also a Categories menu on the left, which allows you to just look at specific posts. Right now, I’ve done life (personal stuff), Ecuador, Semester in the West and news commentary/reporting, which I’m still working on categorizing.

My ability to customize the template I’m working with is somewhat limited right now. I may make minor changes in the near future, and I’m considering buying some more options which allow me to play with CSS, upload more content and make a few other changes.

If you’re hungry for my old BRIGHT GREEN AND VEGETABLES OMG layout, you can still see the old blog here, though I won’t be updating it any more.

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House of Representatives to environment: Screw you, secure the borders.

The House of Representatives just passed HR 2578, an omnibus piece of legislation including HR 1505, the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act. The final vote was 232-188, with most Democrats opposed and most Republicans in favor. The roll call vote tally is here.

This sneakily named bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security authority to manage federal lands within 100 miles of both the U.S.-Canada border and the U.S.-Mexico border. This power is an expansion of Section 102 of the Real ID Act, passed in 2005, which gives the DHS Secretary authority to waive any federal laws during the construction of border enforcement structures, including the border wall. Because of that act, all major pieces of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (which mandates review of all environmental projects) and the Endangered Species Act have been waived during border wall construction and other border enforcement activities. Perhaps most insidiously, the law explicitly states that DHS waivers cannot be subjected to judicial review.

HR 2578 would extend essentially the same powers to all federal lands within 100 miles of either U.S. land border. It prohibits the Secretary of the Interior (responsible for National Parks and Bureau of Land Management Land) and the Secretary of Agriculture (National Forests) from interfering with Customs and Border Protection activities within this 100-mile area.

Let me say that again, really clearly. This law gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive all environmental legislation within 100 miles of U.S. land borders.

Apparently, it’s not good enough that our border enforcement is killing hundreds of people every year. We also have to make sure that things like preserving wilderness areas don’t interfere with catching and deporting people trying to make it to the U.S. And lest you think this is about border security–the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol have stated that this law is unnecessary for border security. The current system of interagency land management is working just fine for them.

The Senate still has to vote on this (it’s S.803, introduced by Arizona Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain). You can read up on the bill here, get the Sky Island Alliance’s talking points here (PDF), and go hereto take action and contact your Representatives and Senators.

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Immigration reform and invisible costs

Friday’s immigration announcement by President Obama was a great moment in a lot of ways. Seeing the reactions to his announcement that the Department of Homeland Security is stopping the deportation of DREAM Act eligible students was a good reminder of the spectrum of opinions that the U.S. population holds on immigration issues. Many people were celebrating, knowing that they might have an opportunity to work or continue their studies. Others were decrying the fact that this was done via executive action rather than Congressional legislation, claiming that this was nothing more than a political decision to appeal to Latin@ voters.

All of this has put me in a reflective mood about border and immigration policy, especially in the context of the massive wall that I cross at least twice a day now. One of the rallying points behind No More Deaths is that these issues shouldn’t be political—they’re human rights issues. I firmly believe that thousands of bodies piling up in southern Arizona’s deserts are a human rights issue. And in March, when I was here doing work in the desert, it was easy to see immigration in only those terms. The people I interacted with on a daily basis weren’t policymakers or strategists. They were people like me, except that they needed work and had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of the line.

Perhaps the clearest part of being out in the desert was how visibly wrong and ineffective our border enforcement was. It seemed clear that people weren’t being deterred by the militarization or the wall itself. Crossing numbers are certainly down in recent years, but there’s no real way to tell if this is because of the U.S.’s poor economy, increased border enforcement, or both. What is clear is that plenty are still choosing to cross—it’s just that more of them were dying in the process. A week out there convinced me that our currently policies couldn’t continue for much longer, because they were inherently unsustainable. I figured that they would collapse under the weight of their own inhumanity, that reform could happen if enough people knew what was going on and called for change.

Now, I’m in an urban area, talking to tons of different people on a daily basis and hearing dozens of stories from migrants. A lot of them have left desperately poor town in central and southern Mexico, where a good wage is $30 a week. Some of them are my age, except instead of attending a liberal arts college and blogging about politics, they have a three-year old child at home who they need to support. Most of them aren’t coming to the U.S. to pursue higher education. Many of them don’t want to live there permanently or assimilate into U.S. culture. The majority are simply looking for work, having run out of options at home.

I was speaking to a group of women in the Migrant Resource Center where I’ve spent the past week working. They were discussing the poor wages in their home states that had led them to try to cross the border, while I chimed in occasionally with questions.

One of them turned to me and asked, “If you were in my position, if you couldn’t find any work at home and had four children to support, would you try to cross into the U.S.?”

I looked at her and froze for a moment, unable to answer because the circumstances of my life had never forced me to consider something like this. Eventually, I said, “I don’t know. But maybe. Probably.”

She nodded, looking satisfied. “Until you’ve been in this position, you don’t know what you would do,” she said.

In the desert, I heard stories like this and wished people safe passage. On the Mexican side of the line, though, these stories carry an entirely different meaning. The people who tell me these things have just been deported, and, with very few exceptions, most of them are headed back to the towns they came from in Mexico’s interior. Having seen the reality of the desert or the brutality of the Border Patrol (nobody I’ve spoken to who was in custody overnight was fed more than one meal, and most of them were housed in detention facilities where sitting down was impossible because of crowding), most of them are giving up and heading home.

From a political perspective, this is a win. Comprehensive immigration reform has been discussed for a long time in U.S. politics. All of the strategies I’ve heard rely on essentially three actions—providing a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already here, changing our visa system to grant temporary work visas and possibly increase quotas for nations like Mexico with high demand, and increasing enforcement on the border to prevent unauthorized crossings. No matter how people feel about Mexicans or what to do with the undocumented folks once they get here, everybody seems to agree that preventing migrants from crossing illegally is a good thing. Policy, as much as it could aim to provide better jobs for Mexico or legalize those who’ve already made it here, is going to favor border militarization.

Out in the desert, it seemed like this couldn’t go on forever. The degree of suffering was so great, the injustices so stark, that I knew a better world couldn’t be too far off. From the city, though, abuse becomes mundane. The people I talk to everyday who come in dehydrated, forced into the back of vehicles which look like they’re designed to carry animals, crying because they can’t find work at home and don’t know what to do—all of them fade together, human casualties in a policy system which doesn’t care about their suffering. Which isn’t going to care about their suffering.

In the midst of all this, it’s good to know that the undocumented migrants who have already made it to el norte, who have lived there for years and built lives there, might be able to stay. But immigration reform which only tweaks our visa system isn’t going to solve the issue. Reagan’s 1986 comprehensive immigration reform—the last large-scale legalization we’ve had in the U.S.—was supposed to provide enough border enforcement to make sure people stopped crossing. And we all know how that worked out.

As long as there are people who are desperate to find work, I have to believe our border wall won’t make a difference. If we build a twelve foot wall, they’ll find a thirteen foot ladder, or so the saying goes. But being here makes me afraid that our awful policies are working in some twisted way, that the suffering I’ve seen this week is simply supposed to be another form of collateral damage.

The physical border is a space often forgotten in political discussions. We talk about who ICE chooses to deport in the U.S. and what it’s like to live life undocumented, always afraid that one misstep could get you sent back to a country you don’t remember leaving. We don’t talk about the border militarization in real terms, what it means for the people who live on either side of the line, who conduct their day-to-day lives perpetually in the shadow of that fence. We say we’re adding enforcement and agents, and people see it as a good or accept it as a necessary compromise to push for reforms in the system. We’re sold a specter of drug cartels and devious migrants sneaking across our borders, and we don’t often pause to consider what that added enforcement will mean or how many more bodies will pile up in the Arizona desert because of it.

I want comprehensive immigration reform, and I’m so happy to learn that many of the people I know won’t have to live with the specter of deportation hanging over their heads, at least for the next two years. I hope, though, that we can bring these spaces into our national dialogue too, that in our push for legalization of those already here, we don’t forget about those who would still come. I want us to see the human rights side even as we acknowledge its political dimensions. I don’t want the suffering in the desert, the costs on the Mexican side of the line, to forever remain invisible.

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In which I respond to the people commenting on the NYT article about Obama’s executive order on immigration

So this morning, President Obama announced that undocumented students who would be covered under the DREAM Act will no longer be deported. This policy applies to people who are under 30, arrived in the U.S. before they turned 16, have been here for at least five years and have no criminal record. They also must be currently in school, have a high school diploma or served in the military.

Obama is essentially shifting policy through executive action, and while it’s similar to the DREAM Act, it doesn’t provide a path to legal citizenship for undocumented students. Instead, it grants a two-year “deferred action” during which an individual is essentially safe from deportation. People who are granted this deferral may then apply for work permits.

While this isn’t citizenship and doesn’t solve the immigration problem in the long term, it’s an important short-term step towards a more humane immigration policy. I was really excited reading the New York Times’ article about it, and then I decided to look at the comments. Where, naturally, I lost most of my faith in humanity.

Every time immigration comes up, people respond with all kinds of xenophobic, racist and just plain factually inaccurate stuff to justify their opposition to treating people like human beings. And I’m getting pretty sick of it. So, I’m going to pick a few choice comments from the NYT’s article and respond to them here. (Trigger warning: racism)

1) These people are illegals and by definition, criminals. Therefore they should all be deported as soon as possible.

Okay, first of all, “illegal” is an adjective, not a noun. So a person can’t be an “illegal.” But I digress.

U.S. immigration laws are civil, and violating them has historically been a civil offense, not a criminal one. Until very recently, it has been federal policy to apply prosecutorial discretion when criminally prosecuting people for violating immigration laws. This means that, except in rare cases where an undocumented immigrant committed a more serious crime, people are generally deported with only a civil infraction (the equivalent of a parking ticket) rather than a criminal conviction. Most people here illegally have never been convicted of any crime, in violation of immigration laws or otherwise.

This is now changing, as federal initiatives like Operation Streamline seek to criminalize unauthorized immigration to dissuade people from trying to come to the U.S., which brings me to my second point. Pointing out that someone has broken a law has no bearing on whether or not the law itself is just. Nobody is disputing that people who came to the U.S. in violation of its immigration laws have broken those laws. People are arguing that those laws are unfairly applied and have many, many unintended consequences which are bad both for the individuals affected and the nation as a whole. These consequences include familial separation, as well as large numbers of bright, ambitious students who are unable to attend college and contribute to the U.S. because they can’t afford tuition and aren’t eligible for financial aid because of their immigration status.

Which brings me to the they should all be deported line. As for that, I offer only this article. Next?

2) I am naturalized citizen who patiently and painstaking waited on line and went through the whole legal process. This is going to encourage more illegal immigrants crossing the border with children in tow and more anchor babies. This makes me sick to my stomach!

So, you waited in line and got legal residency. Good for you. (Seriously, good for you.)

Here’s the thing, though. U.S. immigration works on a quota system, where each country in the world has the same cap on the number of people who can get immigrant visas each year. In order to apply, you need to have a close relative, generally a sibling, parent or child, who is already a U.S. citizen (this is called an F4 application). If you’re from a country with very few applicants, like Iceland, awesome–you can get a visa pretty quickly. If you’re from a country like Mexico or the Philippines, you’ll be waiting a while. The wait for Mexico is currently somewhere between 15 and 20 years if you already have a close relative in the U.S. Waiting in line simply isn’t an option for many people, least of all those who were brought to the U.S. by their parents and have been living and going to school year for years.

In order to be eligible for Obama’s “deferred action,” someone must have already been living in the U.S. for five years. Trust me, this isn’t going to encourage anyone to cross the border who wasn’t already going to cross. And if you’re really concerned about more people crossing, your best bet would be to advocate for job creation programs in Mexico.

Finally, I’m not sure how some undocumented immigrants gaining legal rights in any way hurts or affects your status as a legal permanent resident.

3) Why don’t we just give them everything ELSE we’ve worked so hard for!
I was adopted from Italy years ago. And my parents had to spend time and money making me something I could be proud of.
And ” American Citizen.” It use to be an Honor to be an American Citizen. You use to have want it so bad you could tastes it.
Nowerdays Just dump the kid on the white houses door step say “I no speaka the english.” And wham! you an American Citizen. No questions asked.. But now They don’t have to work for it.

Nothing in this decision will make anybody an American Citizen. First of all. And many people who come to the U.S. without documents don’t want to be U.S. citizens–they simply want to come and work.

Second of all, there is nobody who came to this country without documents who didn’t work for it. Nobody. I’ve spent the past week in the Migrant Resource Center in Agua Prieta, Sonora. We help people who have just been deported get back home and provide food, water, clothing and basic medical care. I’ve heard dozens of individuals stories, each distinct, but with many common elements. People generally pay thousands of dollars to hire a pollero to bring them to the U.S.–this in a country where making less than $30 a week is common in many central and southern states. People walk for a week or more through the brutal heat of the Arizona desert to come to the U.S., and thousands of them have died in the attempt over the past decade. So don’t tell me people don’t work for this.

I’m going to ignore the racism in the comment about people not speaking English, except to point out that the U.S. doesn’t have an official language. But it is currently the exact opposite of easy to become a U.S. citizen, or to even get legal permanent residency.

Finally, and again, I’m not sure how some people getting more legal rights in any way diminishes or cheapens your citizenship.

4) So Obama is giving 800,000 illegal immigrants work permits. All US citizens who are out of work or have to work part time should figuratively spit in Obama’s face, since he is spitting in yours.

Ah, the jobs argument. First of all, undocumented students who apply for deferred action still have to apply to get a work permit, and I highly doubt all 800,000 of them will qualify.

With regard to the larger jobs issue: this is a pervasive anti-immigration argument, but I think it’s fundamentally flawed. First of all, a work permit isn’t a guarantee of work, so all this would do is give some undocumented students the same chance that U.S. citizens have to apply for the few jobs that are out there. I personally don’t believe that U.S. citizenship should magically confer a person with any more of a right to work than a non-citizen resident would have.

Even if you disagree, though, I would again point to this article. Often, the consequence of undocumented workers being removed is that produce is left to rot in the fields. Many other standard complaints, like that immigrants don’t pay taxes, are patently absurd as well. Immigrants pay sales tax, and those who work under fake social security numbers pay into both Social Security and Medicare, without being able to benefit from either of those programs (effectively subsidizing the rest of us).

There’s been a longstanding argument that immigrants do jobs U.S. citizens aren’t willing to do, and I think that’s often true. But the counterargument to that–that if we enforced immigration laws and cracked down, wages in agricultural labor would rise–seems compelling as well. So what do we do?

I’m not an economist and I don’t have an answer to that. My support of immigration reform and more visas is rooted in human rights, not economic arguments. I believe people have a right to migrate where they want to and to be treated like human beings while doing so. That said, I think it’s worth pointing out what is made visible and what is made invisible when we talk about immigrants “stealing American jobs.” The rise in immigration over the past few decades, specifically to the U.S. from Mexico and other Latin American countries, is largely due to trade liberalization agreements. Agreements like NAFTA and organizations like the WTO have lifted many international barriers to trade in the name of efficiency. One effect of this has been the collapse of the rural Mexican economy for many small farmers, pushing them to migrate north. Another has been the shipping of U.S. jobs overseas, largely to Asia, where labor is cheaper.

Regardless of how you feel about trade liberalization, I think the anti-immigration argument overlooks the structural nature of free trade. It’s telling that those who decry the effect immigrants are supposedly having on the U.S. economy, notably Republican (and many Democratic) policymakers, are much more silent on the free trade agreements which encourage U.S. jobs to be shipped overseas, as well as the factors which push migrants to the U.S. These are all complicated economic questions with room for debate, but a knee-jerk, “They’re taking our jobs!” is not going to lead to sensible policy on this issue.

5) The president does not have the constitutional authority to do this. Congress makes the laws.

There’s a legitimate conversation to be had here about the limits of executive power, and there’s certainly a problematic history of presidents using executive actions and policy shifts to do what they want. However, while Congress does make the laws, it’s the executive branch’s job to enforce them. Part of that means prioritizing certain methods of enforcement over others, which to my mind, is exactly what this is doing. The President has decided that applying U.S. immigration laws to students who have been in the country for years is not the best use of the government’s resources. Given the impossibility of deporting all 12 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S., I’d have to say I agree. (There’s another conversation to be had about the construction of “good” vs. “bad” immigrants as it relates to the DREAM Act, but I’ll save that for later.) In the fact of a Congress which has thus far failed to pass any immigration reform laws, I think this action was both warranted and necessary.

6) What Mr. Obama did is pure politics. What kind of leadership is that?

and

Have we elected President Romney today?

We might have. Everybody is focused on the every growing population of Hispanics and as an article in the Times mentioned this week, they are forgetting that it is 2012 and not 2050.There are still many more non-Hispanic voters than Hispanic voters. A lower percentage of Hispanic people vote than do whites and blacks.

First of all, non-citizens can’t vote in elections. Which means nobody who is directly affected by this policy can vote. As far as the larger Hispanic community goes, of course this is a political act. Because everything the president ever does is a political act. Because he’s a politician. It’s entirely possible that President Obama realized that same-sex couples should be able to get married of his own accord, and that’s awesome. But the decision to announce that at the time he did was a political act. Pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq was a political act, just as George’s Bush’s decision to invade was a political act.

Just because something is a political act doesn’t mean it’s wrong, or corrupt, or immoral, or shallow. Politicians are always going to consider the potential effects on voters when taking stands on issues. I would argue that they probably should consider that, since they’re elected to serve voters. That doesn’t mean that Obama’s action was only about getting votes, and it doesn’t make his action any more or less valid.

Finally, I would like to point out that Hispanic and Latin@ people are not and should not be the only people who care about this issue. There are plenty of people who are concerned about undocumented immigrants who support this action wholeheartedly. As much as I’m critical of Obama, and the entire U.S. political system, I’m happy that we were able to make this small step forward, and I trust that many of my fellow non-Hispanic/Latin@ and white Americans are as well.

There you have it. I think I touched on all the major arguments I saw in the comments, though if I missed any, somebody should let me know. Immigrant rights are human rights, and while stopping the deportation of students isn’t enough to solve the problem, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

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Douglas in photos

I tend to mostly to text-based stuff on here (print journalist, people), but one of my goals for this trip is to get more photos up to accompany the text. With that in mind, I took a walk this morning, with the intention of documenting a bit of what life is like in Douglas and showing you all where I’m actually spending these two weeks. This isn’t really accomplishing my goal, since I’m just doing photos and not text, but I’ll get there eventually.

My bed in the trailer where I live. Hard to see here, but it’s essentially three mattresses stacked on top of each other, and consequently very wobbly.

Trailer kitchen! Thus far, it’s cockroach free, but appears to have at least five other species of relatively large insects crawling around. I get to cook, since Jeff, my Unitarian minister roommate, doesn’t really know how.
Our trailer from the outside. It’s owned by Fronteras de Cristo, which runs the migrant center, hence the giant cross on the screen door.

Trailer park! Many of our neighbors are fond of mariachi music, but sadly none of them have unsecured internet networks for me to mooch off of (I’m typing this at the migrant center, which does have wi-fi).

My daily commute along the Panamerican Highway. It’s about a mile from our trailer park to the Mexican border–we can bike or walk.

5th Avenue, 5 blocks from the border. Almost all the businesses in Douglas are giant chains or  small shops catering to Spanish-speakers. I haven’t seen any local businesses that had signage in English, even on the U.S. side of the border.

A lot of the fast food places have peso exchange rates on the sign, and the Mexican food places I’ve been to in Agua Prieta are all happy to take dollars as well.

Douglas used to have a Safeway, but it closed down. So here are the ruins of Safeway.

A stop sign at the end of 5th Avenue. It says “Chino Road,” which left me wondering if that’s a reference to the area’s mining past (a lot of Chinese immigrants worked in copper mines in Cochise County, chino means Chinese in Spanish) or just a coincidence.

Landscape outside of town looking south. You can just see the border wall in the distance.

An old no trespassing sign. The small print on the bottom says it’s from Phelps Dodge Co., which was the big mining company in Douglas back when it was a copper smelting town.

The official surveyed boundary of the United States, as seen through the border wall.

Douglas’ wastewater treatment plant, out in the desert to the west of town, just a few hundred feet from the border fence.

The wall once again. I got Border Patrol called on me twice for walking too close to it–I set off their cameras, and they had to go check. The agents responding were excessively nice and apologized to me for interrupting my walk. Don’t think it would have gone so well if my skin were a different color.

Wal-Mart is like five blocks from here, but apparently has a shopping cart return right before the border crossing  because so many people cross just to go shopping. Phil, who coordinates the migrant center, said it’s been estimated that 80% of Douglas’ sales tax revenue comes from Mexicans buying stuff.

The migrant resource center where I’m working. It’s literally right after you cross the border, so you can’t miss it.  Can’t decide how I feel about the “may we live always as brothers” text–good aspiration or cruel irony.