While a student, and at the encouragement of my mother, I recruited my grandmother to help me collect ghost stories from her oldest sister, Julia, the most renowned storyteller and tamale maker in my family. In addition to learning a little bit about linguistics and a lot about transcribing interviews I also heard for the first time the tale of how her family came to Texas from Torreón, Coahuila. In honor of Diez y Seis and with all due respect to the still precarious status of immigrants and refugees in the United States I am retelling it to you today.

Special thanks are due to my mom Janis, Grandma Pauline, and Aunt Julia who guided me to that kitchen in south central Austin, January 1997, where I first heard this tale.  I had to exercise a little poetic license to weave that conversation into a single narrative but its really Julia’s story. Believe me, when its family holding you to account you’re going to do your best to tell the tale right!

SPOILER ALERT I hesitated to put this next paragraph ahead of the narrative, but disliked placing it at the end of the post. Go read the story first and then come back, I’ll wait… Okay… At the climax of the story the captain of the Villistas spontaneously decides to spare Julia’s father’s life announcing that Frank is his guardian angel. There’s some interesting symbolism here that might have been clearer had Julia’s ordering of the events been more linear, but then she was already quite elderly when I recorded the story. First, the soldiers had already rounded up all the men and locked then in a warehouse, although Frank was just a boy he should have been with them but somehow they missed him and he slept through it. Second, he is wrapped in a sheet because he rolled off the bed when the raiders stole the mattress. Thus, not only does he appear out of nowhere but he is literally clothed all in white, hence why he is like an angel.

NB. At the end of the story, after the family has risen from destitution to some degree of stability, Julia describes herself as being in a house where “we felt like we were okay.” Being that she and her friend have easy access to the river that is only a short horse ride away this is probably the Deep Eddy house, which is where the ghost stories begin.

The Castruita Family Flees to Texas to Escape War in Mexico

by Aunt Julia, with a little help from my Grandma and me

When I was little, you see my daddy would live in a big hacienda. I don’t know how they call it (laughs). Hacienda. And do you know it’s all big and round and all the people sleep all the way round, it’s adobe. Las casas. The houses were made of adobe. Adobe, yes. And it was a big, high wall all the way round the hacienda. Like a village. There was just one gate.

And we live there, my daddy was the el gerente. Manager. There was a water tank beside the house. There was a big windmill that pulled out the water. And a vegetable garden. On one side was the produce for the people, the vegetables and stuff. But over here on this other side, the other side of this huge water tower. It’s as high as the house on the other side, is where they had the fodder for the animals. And they plant oats and alfalfa.

See the man that brought my grandfather over here to Texas is the one that owned that big hacienda. He had a restaurant and one of the biggest hotels in Torreón. They had a warehouse where they had all the stuff that they produced from farming.

In the middle of the night. They were all asleep. And remember now they’re little houses, the hacienda is all these little adobe houses. The rooms all connect. That’s where all the help lived. The people who worked the fields. You see it go around like that and all just rooms together. My father is one that managed it all, he oversaw all the help that worked there.

They were asleep. About two in the morning. There was one guy who was the watchman. And he made the rounds. The Villistas came. They forced their way in.

It was the summer. They were sleeping outdoors.

They pointed their rifles. They put a noose around my father’s head. Everybody got up. They wanted my father to go and open all the warehouses, they were going to loot them. They looted the horses and the mules. They had the wine, the beans. Everything. Cheese.

They took all the men and put ‘em all in one room and locked it. It was an empty warehouse. They locked ‘em in there, just the men. They only left my mother and me, and then everybody else, all the families and everything, they were locked. I cry and cry. But daddy gave ‘em a lock that really didn’t lock. He knew that, but he gave it to ‘em. So they locked it.

My mother, they insisted that my mother give ‘em money and they went into the house where my mother lived. And here I am, a little girl grabbing onto my mother’s skirt. And they tear me away from her, from mama. And I’d come back and then they had a gun, a rifle pointed at my mother all the time. They came in. They took all their clothes. All the bed linens, everything. She had an old sewing machine. And her purse with the money. My mother’s purse with money was inside the sewing machine.

“Give us money!”

They never did find the money cause she had it locked, her purse was locked inside. They don’t find the money. And I was crying and screaming! And my mother would hold me. The soldier were trying to take me. He tried to kill me. With the, you know, turn of the gun. Tried to hit me. And my mother’s arm is all bruised where they hit ‘em.

So then he went and take out my daddy. And you know, Frank. He wrapped in one the sheets. They took the mattress, everything. They went out, take out my daddy. They tied him up.

Down the road from the hacienda was where the Chinese lived and they had orchards, okay. They wanted to know where the China-men lived.

So my daddy walk behind there. Tied up with the rope. He was walking behind the horses. They were going to hang my father. Frank, they went behind him. He was nine years old. He follow him. They were going to put the noose around his neck. They were going to hang my daddy.

Frank he ran and grabbed my daddy by his leg, and then the captain said, “That’s this man’s guardian angel.” And so cut down the rope. And they let him come back.

Frank slipped out. He roll in one of the sheets. And they took him (laughs). Yes, because they take the mattress and everything. But he roll to one corner they don’t see him. Cause it was dark.

And do you know, my mother make coffee right away. And they put some alcohol in their cafe. They were drunk when they left there. The soldiers. They insisted that my mother make coffee, and then they just poured this liquor in. It was 100 proof! (laughs)

They had big cans full of well, it looks like curds and whey. Ready to make cheese. The soldiers just reached in there, would eat the cheese. The cheese, what they need to do was to strain it you know. But they would just eat it. It was a big mess, where they had, you know, all stuck their hand and it was dirty.

All right, when they released my daddy and Frank they came back and because he put just a false lock on the door he opened it and released them. All the people from the hacienda, including me and mama (laughs), just night clothes. We don’t have nothing. Next day my daddy had to come to town and buy some clothes for us to use and everything. The soldiers stole them all. Yes, they took everything. They tore down the place.

They did leave after they decided not to kill my daddy. Yes, yes. They went to the Chinese and kill all the Chinese. And took whatever they want. This was very common. And they, cause that men just live on the mountains. They were guerrillas, more or less. But they’d come, it was very common for them to raid whatever little hacienda was close.

Oh yes. And then, and they told my daddy when they come back they find him there they gonna kill ‘em! So we stay about two weeks there and then my grandfather Anacleto, my daddy’s father say, “No you don’t stay here nomore. Go to Estadio Unido.” Go to U.S. Cause they gonna kill him and his whole family gonna be awful. So my daddy left, he had to go to Austin. He know somebody in Austin.

Yeah, the brother of the man, Mr. Lewis’s brother. This one named Carlos? Charley? Carlos. We stay there for six months, then my daddy went back and bring us to here. To Texas. He came here first, alone. And then he established himself, and then he went back in six months. And brought us back. My daddy went on a train. We went on a train, yeah.

Whenever these guerrillas, they took everything. Nobody go out. And no food, nothing. There wasn’t anything left so what we did was to grind corn, dry corn, and from that she made like a porridge. And that’s what we ate. Just little-bitty cups. One each.

On top of the roof of the house they put the machine guns. So nobody go out. They don’t sell nothing. The stores was close and everything. After the guerrillas would go through the government would send train loads of food. But then all the people, you know, didn’t have anything so they all mobbed the train. And they pass out wheat, flour. Each family would get just a little box which was equal to about a quart of flour, beans, rice.

Okay, see, my daddy after this raid, you know, when they cleaned out the hacienda the owner of the hacienda said, “You better go because they’re going to come back.” And in fact they told my daddy that the next time they came, if he was still there they will kill him. So he, that’s when he came to Texas.

My father’s cousin wrote him and said, “You’d better come back for the family cause, see the rations, your family is starving. You better come back.” So that’s when my daddy went back, six months later. And he brought us.

So we come. We stay in Piedras Negras. One week, because my daddy you know he didn’t have no passport. Well they detained ‘em. While the whole family had a passport, my daddy didn’t. He had only a tourist pass and it had run out. We were a week there, in Piedras Negras at the border. Doing the paperwork.

When we came over, it was Augustine. Mother. Maggie. Frank. Me (Julia). Four children and my mother. And we traveled alone, because see my daddy came the other way around. They traveled alone. I remember that picture of my mother, she was so skinny. But we had had hardship for six months. Down there.

When we first got here we lived in this big ol’, this empty store. And it was just one big, you know, hall. And behind there was this big water tower with a metal tank because it was a windmill pump. And it was so cold that year that in the morning there’d be a huge icicle on the side of the tank. We had no bedding.

In the evening, when we went to bed my mother would wash our clothes and hang the clothes to dry inside the building. There was one stove where she did the cooking. Wood stove. And we all slept around it. But because she had to wash the clothes, cause that was all the clothes we brought what was on our back.

And there was a little black woman that lived near there and she gave my mother some old rattly-tattly blankets and we wrapped ourselves in it to sleep. And the kids wake up in the middle of the night, they’d be so cold, they’d be crying. My father would wake up in the middle of the night, add wood to the stove so it would stay warm. He’d kill birds and coons and possums and squirrels. And that’s what we used to eat when we first come to Austin. And next to the house it was a big field of cabbage (laughs), steal the cabbage from the guy next door. It was so sweet to steal cabbage like that (laughs)!

For 25 cents a day the boys were hired to spinach. Turnips, big turnips. Now my father was working in the dairy already, but this man that hired him would give him breakfast which my mother cooked. She would fix for each one of the hired hands, bacon and biscuits. And my daddy would eat one egg and one slice of bacon, and give my mother the other egg and the other bacon and the biscuit and she then took that divided it among the four kids.

See for a whole year we were there with that man. Then after the end of the year this other man hired him and he gave us a house to live. And then we were no longer hungry because we have everything there. There was a lady she would give us eggs and bacon. And my mother had a vegetable garden. Peach orchard. Grapes. You know every weekend they go fishing, perch. The lady had two sons and one daughter, and they’d climb up and cut the grapes. So see we felt like we were okay because they had all this to eat. They put netting around the trees in the orchard. Plums and grapes.

The little girl was my same age and we would get on the horse and go play on the beach near the river. We go on the river and play there.

Okay. We’ll cut it there.

The Racist Gift of Immigration and Citizenship Bans, Again

Catherine Besteman

How can we understand Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Iraq, as well as all refugees? As an act of national security, the ban makes no sense. Rather, I read them as a racist gift to the white Christian alt-right that formed President Trump’s initial core base. The United States has a history of bans and color bars to entry and citizenship, about which we are rightfully embarrassed in hindsight. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to only white immigrants, a law that remained on the books until 1952. Entry to the US remained open to anyone, however, until the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, which imposed the first comprehensive control over immigration. The Act placed a cap on the number of people to be admitted, set national origins quotas based on the 1890 census for entry, and barred anyone ineligible for citizenship from entry. By using the 1890 census, the national origins quotas intentionally favored immigrants from northern Europe and restricted Jewish immigrants because of anti-Semitism and fears of Communist influence.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court declared ineligible for citizenship everyone from Japan to Afghanistan, with the exception of the Philippines, then a US territory, thus creating a new racial category of “Asian” to be universally banned. When comprehensive immigration reform in 1965 removed national origins quotas and bans, it was heralded as a rejection of racist barriers to entry and a victory for American values of justice, human rights, and fairness. A dog whistle to those lusting for white Christian hegemony, the bans are an initial step to return America to a time when Muslims were barred from entry and immigration to the US was controlled by and for whites only.

The Politics of Naked Cruelty

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Since the end of the Cold War, global politics has been animated by “humanitarian reason”—a curious mix of violence and care used by nation-states to pursue their own geopolitical interests while ostensibly acting altruistically to provide aid.

No more.

Donald Trump’s refugee ban signals a dramatically new basis for global politics: a politics of naked cruelty.

Humanitarian reason carefully cloaked even its most violent acts in the treacle of human rights and emergency aid. The occupation of Afghanistan, the “liberation” of Iraq and the targeted bombing of Libya were all presented as military action taken to care for the impoverished, oppressed, or forcibly displaced.

Trump’s refugee ban makes no such pretense. Instead, it pretends it is indifferent to what happens to the millions of people who will be oppressed by their own governments, killed in conflict zones, or left to linger in the eternal limbo of displacement. “We have to take care of our own first,” is the constant refrain.

The politics of naked cruelty turns the humanitarian stereotype of refugees-as-innocent-victims on its head in order to justify state-sponsored mass violence against them. Already, Republicans in Congress have proposed that the US withdraw from the UN—which would mean cutting funding funds for housing and feeding displaced people. The right to turn away from starving refugees is baked right into that policy.

The only upside to the politics of naked cruelty is that it is naked. We no longer have to work to unmask the complex workings of neoliberal biopolitics. Power is now unmasking itself, which makes it fundamentally easier to oppose. That is why whether or not we care about refugees—and there are plenty of liberals willing to accept the sacrifice of refugees as unavoidable collateral damage as they focus on populations they deem more important—it’s worth continuing to fight the ban. It’s an obvious place to contest the underlying principle of the politics of cruelty: the right not to care.

Refuge, Refugees, and the Fears We Share

Tricia Redeker Hepner

What is daily life like under a regime that abuses its own people, disregards the rule of law, targets vulnerable and minority groups, and fails to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses unaccountable? How do reasonable people exist – and resist – in a society where those in power have created a nightmarish alt-reality and convinced others to go along with it? At what point does fear become action, pushing one to wager life itself against intolerable repression? These are precisely the dynamics I have explained – literally hundreds of times – to US immigration officials adjudicating asylum claims filed by people from Eritrea. While some of the fears that drive people to flee are indeed subjective and contextually specific enough to require translation, many are not. Being detained for one’s religious beliefs, beaten to death in prison, or subjected to torture require no culturally specific explanations to establish their moral repugnance or illegality. Rather, in explaining to US immigration officials the subjective fears of an Eritrean, or an Iraqi, a Kurd, a Syrian, or Afghan, what we are really doing is helping to narrate a story not about them but about us.

For “refuge” is really an elaborate ritual in which we affirm the predictability, integrity, tolerance, fairness, and inherent respect for justice and basic human rights we imagine characterizes America. Asylum in theory, if not practice, reiterates how America differs from the authoritarian, human rights-abusing states from whence refugees come. That is, until the day we wake up to realize that the refugee narratives we have helped tell for others, the subjective fears we translated as though alien, are really our own. Battered by xenophobia for decades, the US refugee system endures all-out assault by the very political dynamics it was once designed to subvert. In “Make America Great Again” we hear an echo of the lamentations of untold millions throughout time and space who have fought, died, and fled from dictatorships and wars that too often America helped create. But who will testify for us?

Sacred Grounds and Stolen Land, or, White Supremacists are Immigrants Too

Carole McGranahan

We Are All Immigrants. Make America Immigrate Again. Immigrants Built This Country. Signs such as these are prevalent in ongoing protests against Trump’s executive order banning individuals from seven countries from the US, including legally-approved refugees as well as legal permanent residents of this country. His action took place in the midst of other nefarious actions seemingly built on a platform of hate, lies, and destruction. Many have called his Muslim immigrant ban un-American, claiming this is not who we as Americans are. Others might disagree. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are early precursors to this moment. However, we need to go back further, to the founding of the United States of America and to a different protest sign: #NoBanonStolenLand

Immigrants did build the USA, but they did so through the dispossession and subordination of other people: the millions of sovereign Native American peoples already living here. These were someone else’s lands, someone else’s sacred grounds. Immigrants also “built” the USA through slave labor. We are not all immigrants. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are refugees, fleeing war and political violence. Some of us are descendants of slaves, sold and forced to “migrate” to this country. And some of us are native. Who are immigrants then? Those of us, including me, whose ancestors chose to come to this country. And: white supremacists. White supremacists are immigrants.

In his first days in office, advised by white supremacist Stephen Bannon, Trump has left Jews out of a statement remembering the Holocaust, has instituted a ban on Muslims coming into this country, ordered the Army Corps to expedite approval of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation, and embarrassed just about everyone but himself by not knowing who Frederick Douglass was in his “speech” marking Black History Month. He followed this with the suggestion that the governmental Countering Violent Extremism program would no longer have a focus on white supremacist groups who have carried out violence in the USA, but will instead focus solely on Islamic communities.

I regularly testify as an expert witness for asylum applicants from Nepal and Tibet. Some of these are individuals who have escaped unimaginable political violence. They are looking for a safe haven, a place where they will not live in fear, a home for their children. This country is not perfect. Our history—past and present—is one that includes trauma and unjust war. Acknowledging injustice is a key step in working for justice now. One refugee here in the US told me that as his plane was descending into JFK, as he entered the fabled America for the first time, he looked out the window expecting the streets to be made of gold. He laughed as he told me this, at how as a young boy then man, he had taken this to be literal truth. Our streets are not paved with gold. Our myths obscure the often-painful realities of hierarchy and difference and violence in this country. We cannot let white supremacists and those who live in gold towers dishonor these sacred grounds or all of us for whom they are sacred.

Signs, Accusations, Fates

Nomi Stone

The morning after the Trump’s Immigration Ban went into effect, an Iraqi friend of mine, who now lives in America, sent me a picture of two trees that had just fallen in his yard: a prone cactus, spines pointing upward, and a larger trunk, a cracked triangle of earth around it. “It is a sign,” he said: “It is not safe here.” He, like many of the Iraqis I interviewed for recent fieldwork, had worked with American military personnel as a contractor and translator during the 2003 Iraq War, dreaming of a more just post-Saddam Iraq. Yet as Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation grew, many Iraqis I interviewed described how they increasingly faced accusations of being informants to the U.S. military. Returning to Iraq terrified many of my interlocutors. As the news of the Ban sank in, people wondered what might be next. One friend with a Green Card said: “As long as they don’t kick us out. We finally got here.” And another told me anxiously: “I think he [Trump] will eventually send all Iraqis back, even if they have Green Cards. Iraqis can’t feel safe anywhere.” In a moment of despair, a friend who had nearly been killed by a militia for working for the U.S. military told me that Iraqis who blamed him for his wartime choices said: “we deserve this, to be treated this way now that we’re here.” As I formulated my thoughts today, I began rereading Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, thinking of the image in one story of a miraculous compass, light as a butterfly in the hand of its bearer, that turns blood-red to signal a turn in the story and the fate of the characters.

More Than a #MuslimBan

Marnie Thomson

Trump has issued a 120-day ban on ALL refugees entering the United States. Supporters of this measure stress that it is 1) only a temporary ban, and 2) it will only last until the vetting system has been improved. But does the ban’s impermanence and stated purpose justify this order? No. Here’s why:
The vetting of refugees is already, to use Trump’s word, extreme. It usually takes two or more years to screen refugees. The screening takes place in their country of refuge, before they ever set foot on U.S. soil. The process includes many rounds of interviews with UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) personnel, an interview with the State Department, multiple background checks and finger print screenings, a review of the case by U.S. Immigration Headquarters, an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security, medical examinations, U.S. cultural orientation, and finally a multi-agency security check prior to departure. For more details, please see this White House infographic and this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) testimony.

Refugee vetting works. Zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil have been perpetrated by refugees. A risk analysis of immigration terrorism conducted by the Cato Institute found that the chance of a refugee murdering an American in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.

Temporary bans have permanent consequences. While Iraqi refugee resettlement slowed in 2011, halting all refugee resettlement is unprecedented. While impossible to know all of the ripple effects, it is certain that the ban will cause further harm to innocent people who have fled violence and languish in the harsh conditions of refugee camps. It will not improve national security. It will increase the burden of refugee hosting on other countries and institutions, and it will cost the U.S. its recognition as a global humanitarian leader.

Republican Senators Rob Portman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham have already pointed to the irony that while refugees already undergo extreme vetting, this executive order clearly did not. Following its own language and logic then, this order should be banned until sufficient changes have been made to ensure that it is consistent with national interest.

AUTHORS

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and most recently, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016).

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Geography at Indiana University. She wrote about refugee protection and resettlement problems in the May 13, 2016 issue of Science. Her book Unsettled: Humanitarianism and Displacement in the Republic of Georgia is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Coflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and co-editor of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights (Ohio University Press, 2015).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her current research is on political refusal and refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora. In May, American Ethnologist will publish her article “The Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage.”

Nomi Stone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her second collection of poems, Kill Class (based on her fieldwork within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America) is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. Her article “Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War” is coming out in Cultural Anthropology this February.

Marnie Thomson recently defended her PhD thesis “Stories of Darkness: Congolese Refugees, Humanitarian Governance, and a Neglected Conflict” at the University of Colorado. In 2012, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published her article “Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees.”

The ostensible reason for the executive order is to keep Americans safe from terrorism by keeping “radical Islamic terrorists” out of the United States. But there is no evidence that the  order will achieve this goal. It would not have protected Americans from the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by people from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Egypt. It would not have stopped the San Bernardino shootings, which were carried out by a US citizen and his Pakistani-born wife. It would not have protected the victims of the Pulse night club shootings from Omar Mateen, an American citizen with parents from Afghanistan. It would not have protected our children in Sandy Hook from Adam Lanza. It would not have protected parishioners in Charleston from Dylan Roof.

This is not the first time that airport security has been driven by a perception of danger rather than a sober assessment of risk. Back in December Kip Hawley, a former administrator of the TSA, posted an Op Ed describing the security vulnerabilities of the TSA Precheck program, and suggested several ways to tighten security in the program. But, as security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, if the PreCheck program has been in place for over a decade and no terrorist has used it for a terrorist attack, shouldn’t we conclude that there are relatively few terrorists, and we’d be fine with less security, not more — or, at the very least, cheaper, smarter, and less burdensome security?

Clearly, Trump’s executive order does not make Americans safer. In fact, it may make us less safe. The Washington Posts reports that Jihadists groups are celebrating Trump’s order because it will throw moderate Muslims into the arms of extremists. But — and this is the thing — it makes some of us feel safer. Consider Renn (sp?) Brewster, quoted in a recent report from the BBC:

“This rule that President Trump passed, he did this to protect American citizens. The source of this is all the killing and the terrorist attacks on our countries that are causing these bans. We don’t seem to hear any thing about why we are doing this. We didn’t just decide to do these bans on travel for these seven nations that have a history of sending terrorists to different Western countries. There’s a reason why we’re doing this. Let’s stop the killing. Let’s stop the terror attacks. Then people can travel freely like we used to.”

There’s little in Brewster’s statement I can agree with. Trump’s executive order does not halt immigration to other Western countries, and will not make them safer. There is no extensive history of Iraq or Iran or any of the other five countries on Trump’s list sending terrorists to the United States. Why, then, do people like Renn Brewster believe this?

In fairness, it could be because they know something I don’t — I’m not omnipotent and could be wrong. I’m willing to be convinced I’ve got it wrong. But until that happens, it seems more likely to me that Trump supporters simply have the facts wrong. Remember, this is a country where many people couldn’t tell the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic when two Chechens bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. Clearly, we need more and better social science in school — and probably to read the news that shows up in our social media feeds a little more carefully.

But people believe that Trump’s order makes them safe not only because they lack a few key facts, but because of the coherent ‘webs of belief’ (as Geertz once put it) that connects all of the facts together. Culture is not an isolated bunch of facts. It’s a coherent and consistent pattern, structure, assemblage, or what have you. People who support Trump are not irrational. They have a cultural rationality. I personally think it is inaccurate.  The point is that changing minds requires engagement with real people and the entirety of their belief system, not scorn or derision or simple fact checking. Educating people about the dangers facing this country means altering the entire world view which people operate with, of which isolated facts are only a part. It also means realizing that we ourselves come from a culture with its own beliefs, and to recognize that there may be times when we could get it wrong ourselves.

Finally, it also requires understanding the emotional stakes people have in beliefs about terrorism. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas and Simon Harrison have pointed out that fear of strangers are rooted in concerns that the body politic might be polluted by external sources of danger. Anthropologists used to have a little cottage industry explicating the cultural logic of these beliefs and their emotional power. Today, however, we have been put out of work by ‘alt white’ white supremacists, whose racist ideology makes explicit the logic of purity and boundedness that was once unconscious.

There is a lot more to say about Trump’s executive order — that it was poorly executed, cynically designed for political gain, and cultivates a public atmosphere of ignorance and fear in order to make our democracy more pliable and subject to tyranny. American anthropologists can and should push back against the order, which is opposed to both our interests and our values. But most of all, we need to use the findings and methods of anthropology to understand the difference between what must be done and what will make us feel good. Only then will we have the ability to make hard decisions well, and be able to engage with our fellow citizens to convince them that we have far less to fear than Donald Trump wants us to think.

RA: And so, while Obama’s latest action does have some positive aspects, the underlying problems persist, right? This seems to be a long-running theme in US immigration policy: we end up with one partial solution after another, but the underlying problems are still there. Meanwhile, we have all of these migrants stuck in various liminal states — whether legal, social, political, or cultural. Sometimes this means prison. Sometimes it means they live the “shadowed lives” that Leo Chavez detailed years ago. Often it means many of these people live in incredibly marginalized conditions. Every election cycle, politicians on both sides often talk about the need to “fix” the immigration system, but that never seems to happen. It’s almost as if it’s this massive, unsolvable problem. What’s your take on this? Why are these problems with immigration so persistent? And, coming from this as an anthropologist — as opposed to an economist or political scientist — what can be done to move things forward?

RGM: The first thing to note is that immigration is not a “problem” for everyone. In fact, many people benefit not only from migration but also from the massive enforcement apparatus that has been built up around it. Employers benefit from having a disempowered work force; U.S. consumers benefit from low prices on food, goods, and services made possible by underpaid migrant labor; the U.S. government benefits from billions of tax dollars that flow into Social Security and Medicaid coffers that are paid, but cannot be claimed, by non-legal workers; enforcement agencies, government contractors, and prison private corporations benefit from massive expenditures on detention, militarization, and enforcement; finally, politicians on both sides of the political “aisle” benefit from fanning the flames of immigration passions to win votes from constituents, as well as from campaign donations made by the companies that profit from immigrant detention. In fact, the private corporations that hold immigration contracts spend tens of millions of dollars on political lobbying and have been major campaign contributors to immigration hard-liners. In return, congress has mandated that 34,000 people be kept in immigrant detention, including children, every day.

In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that political winds seem to blow in favor of stagnation on immigration reform or toward policies that only reproduce the flaws of a “broken” system. But it is not clear to me that immigration policies alone are actually capable of preventing unauthorized migration, even if politicians were inclined to try. The build-up of bigger, badder national borders will never stem migration; only addressing the global inequalities that foster mass migrations in the first place can do that.

Anthropologists are working everyday with immigrant communities to push back against the enforcement juggernaut. I could never do justice to the scope of that work here, but anthropologists help craft policy, offer legal counsel and moral support to detained and deported immigrants, do advocacy work with community organizations, and provide nuanced and complex analyses of migration in our classrooms. Anthropology is especially well suited to help students develop a contextualized and “long view” analysis of migration and the forces that shape and define it in specific ways. This is a significant endeavor given the broader dehumanizing and decontextualized rhetoric that tends to accompany immigration discourse in the United States.

RA: Your latest research follows mixed status couples as they attempt to move through the process of legalization. What does the process of legalization look like from an ethnographic vantage point? Where is your most recent work leading you?

RGM: In the beginning, I envisioned my latest project as a sort of sequel to Labor and Legality that would explore what happened to undocumented workers when they became “legal.” Would constraints on workers’ upward mobility be largely removed, as many workers in Labor and Legality believe, or would workers continue to face restricted opportunities and limited financial security as newly legal immigrants? That is, I was mostly interested in the degree to which legalization transforms workers’ lives. I did not anticipate that the journey would be a story unto itself.

The first thing I learned is that almost none of the undocumented people who I know can change their immigration status — even those who have lived in the U.S. for many years and have U.S. citizen relatives. I ended up focusing on mixed status couples because marriage to a U.S. citizen is one of the few relationships that can put some undocumented people on a path to legal status. But even eligible spouses of U.S. citizens face a gauntlet of onerous criteria, complicated forms, expensive fees, and, in some cases, indefinite separation to reach — if their luck holds — lawful permanent residency at the end. Only half of the couples who I profiled made it to lawful residency by the end of my 3-year field season. The others live separately or have relocated together outside of the United States.

I also found that the process of legalization largely diverges according to mode of entry into the United States. Undocumented visa-overstayers with U.S. citizen spouses can typically change their status at an immigration office within the United States. People who enter unlawfully, on the other hand, must leave the U.S. to be processed at a U.S. consulate in their country of origin. All but a few trigger a 10-year bar on their return. Because undocumented Latinos are more likely to be border-crossers than undocumented people from elsewhere, they are also more likely to face these higher hurdles to legalization.

Not only does this process require families that are already together to split apart, it also places U.S. citizens at the center of immigration petitions. This is because the 10-year bar can only be waived if the U.S. citizen would suffer “extreme hardship” in the event of a ten-year separation from his or her spouse. The pain and loss of family separation is considered regular hardship, not extreme, and U.S. citizens must be able to articulate their suffering in mostly medical and/or financial terms. In the process, they learn that their citizenship offers little protection from stigmatization, bureaucratic indifference, and vulnerability to prolonged family separation. Thus, immigration policies simultaneously uphold the value of U.S. citizenship and degrade U.S. citizens — a contradiction, I argue, that inevitably results when legal exclusion and lived inclusion collide.

I am writing about this process now; ongoing data analysis and writing will likely keep me busy for a few more years. In the meantime, I will be working with a legal clinic to process DAPA applications and using that time to think about the implications of this expanded tier of temporary status for the organization of inequality in the United States.

Ryan Anderson: Earlier you made reference to the historically race-based nature of the U.S. immigration system. Race is an issue that many tend to avoid here in the U.S. — and this is definitely the case when it comes to immigration. Immigration debates often focus on crime, economics, competition over jobs, pressure on social services, taxes, and, of course, upholding the rule of law. It’s almost as if many people bend over backwards to deny that race has anything to do with our current policies. What’s this avoidance and denial all about?

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz: I think that many people are unaware of the central role that race has played in shaping the U.S. immigration system. For example, the very first major citizenship policy in the U.S. limited citizenship to “free white men of good moral character,” while the first immigration policy, 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibited immigration of Chinese nationals. The first comprehensive immigration bill, passed in 1924, was designed to curb immigration of “filthy” and “unassimilable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Asians were deemed ineligible for lawful immigration and U.S. citizenship until 1952. It was not until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that overt racial biases in U.S. immigration policy were eliminated.

After the 1965 Act, explicit mention of race has all but disappeared from immigration policy debates, and “illegal immigration” has become the chief target of punitive policy. As with previous periods, this targeting is conceptually and administratively tied to concerns about criminality, lack of assimilation, and “retaining” America’s heritage, but now these map onto an immigration classification, “illegal alien,” that is ostensibly divorced from ethnoracial associations.

There are two questions raised by this shift: 1. Are current U.S. immigration policies and practices actually race-neutral? 2. Is immigration status a better basis for discrimination and exclusion than race?

As to the first question, as Golash Boza and Hondagneu Sotelo (2013) show, U.S. immigration enforcement is permeated with racial, class, and gendered bias that especially targets Latino men. While immigrants from Latin America make up about 75 percent of the total undocumented population, they have accounted for over 90 percent of deportees since 2000. This disparity is partly due to the concentration of immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border, and partly due to racial profiling of Latinos by local police who cooperate with immigration agencies; in fact, in 2011, 93 percent of people deported via local/federal cooperation were Latino. And the overwhelming majority of deportees are men.

But racialized enforcement is not the work of rogue officers alone — U.S. policies target and criminalize undocumented people differently. For example, unlawful presence in the United States is a civil violation, and undocumented people who enter the U.S. with a temporary visa and overstay it have not committed any federal crime. But unauthorized entry and reentry are aggressively prosecuted as federal crimes. A 2014 Pew Hispanic Center study found that unlawful reentry, which is a felony, made up 26 percent of all federally sentenced cases in 2012. Nearly all of these migrants are sentenced to jail time — in 2012, prison sentences for unlawful reentry averaged 23 months prior to deportation. Further, three-quarters of prosecutions for unlawful reentry occurred in just five districts — all of which share a border with Mexico. The criminalization of unauthorized reentry and the concentration of criminal prosecutions on the U.S.-Mexico border overwhelmingly ensnare Latin American migrants, and the share of Latinos among federally sentenced offenders rose from 23 percent in 1992 to 48 percent in 2012.

Together, this (and other) evidence shows that “illegal” is not “illegal” in the same way for everyone. Instead, undocumented Latinos are more likely than other undocumented people to be targeted by U.S. immigration enforcement measures and subjected to incarceration, detention, and deportation.

The second question — Is immigration status a better basis for discrimination and exclusion than race? — is more complex. Certainly, many scholars and activists have challenged the idea that non-citizens should be denied rights, advocating for non-state or human rights-based approaches to citizenship. I would just add that, like racial categories, immigration categories are cultural inventions that have been (as racial categories were) codified in law. But legal codification does not make a practice morally legitimate, much less socially just. U.S. policies violate national borders and state sovereignty all the time, so why should migrants be punished for doing it?

I recently read a book foreword in which the author asserted that, “There can be no question about the right of every country to determine who is admitted, when, and how. This is the law, whose present necessity no one could reasonably dispute.” I completely disagree. I believe our responsibility is exactly that: to question how rights, borders, and laws are established and controlled and why nationalist tropes of security and freedom sanction some “unauthorized” border crossings and criminalize others.

RA: Speaking of the laws and policies that shape border crossings, what’s your take on Obama’s recent executive order on immigration?

RGM: On November 20th 2014, Obama announced that his administration would implement a program called Deferred Action for Parental Accountability, or DAPA, to shield certain undocumented people from deportation. In a nutshell, undocumented parents of U.S. citizen and lawfully resident children will be eligible for a 3-year work permit and deferral of deportation as long as they have no “serious” criminal record and can prove that they have not left the United States since January 1, 2010.

Like most people I know, I have mixed feelings about the executive order. On the one hand, DAPA will provide much-needed relief from deportation for millions of people and their family members. Further, those who are eligible will be able to work legally and qualify for tax credits. These are real and meaningful benefits.

On the other hand, DAPA is severely limited in scope, scale, and duration. The majority of undocumented people in the U.S. — some 6 to 7 million — will not qualify for DAPA. Among them are people who are childless (including many LGBTQ people), parents whose children are also undocumented or DACA-eligible, anyone with a “serious” criminal record (likely including convictions for unlawful reentry), and anyone who cannot prove continuous residence since 2010. This last criterion is especially onerous for cyclical migrants and people who work in the informal economy (such as off-the-books domestic work) and may especially burden immigrant women.

The benefits provided by the program, its scale, are also limited. DAPA eligibility does not guarantee protection from deportation, but rather a promise to use prosecutorial discretion in a deportation case — a big difference. And even with work eligibility, program participants will not qualify for most public benefits, including health care under the Affordable Care Act, SSI, Medicaid (except for emergency care), TANF, or SNAP, though workers pay into those programs with their tax dollars. Finally, DAPA is neither lawful permanent residency nor a path to lawful permanent residency — it is merely a promise not to pursue deportation at this time. The economic and political vulnerabilities of DAPA participants may be reduced, but they will persist.

Finally, the duration of the program is limited — eligibility is only good for 3 years. At the end of that period, participants may be able to reapply if the program is still available; but executive action is not legislation, and it can be ended at any time. In the meantime, program participants will be subject to routine and prolonged state surveillance — kind of like parole. Those who remain eligible will be held in a state of permanent legal precarity, or, as Cecilia Menjívar puts it, liminal legality, which confers on them some legal recognition without any long-term security.

Part III of the interview is here.

Ryan Anderson: For decades many of the debates about immigration in the US focus on legality. Politicians and pundits often speak in terms of following — and breaking — the law. But in your work you talk about the “illegalization” of migrant workers. What do you mean by this?

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz: Migration is only “illegal” when laws prevent mobility. Historically, U.S. immigration policies have encouraged migration of workers deemed essential to the U.S. economy, a long-standing practice of labor importation punctuated by deportation and restrictionist campaigns in times of economic downturn. For example, Mexican migrant workers were imported to the United States by the millions in the mid-20th century to help fill labor shortages brought about by World War II and an expanding U.S. economy. Laws were created, negotiated, and adjusted to allow U.S. employers access to these workers; a contract worker program was instituted, and Mexicans and other Latin Americans were exempted from the quotas that limited immigration from elsewhere in the world at the time.

In the 1960s, the laws changed. An explicitly race-based U.S. immigration system was altered to prioritize family reunification, and Mexican workers became subject to numerical restriction for the first time ever. Over the next four decades, widespread demand for Mexican migrant labor persisted, while free trade policies undermined the ability of millions of Mexican farmers and workers to make a living in Mexico. Not surprisingly, numerical restrictions did not ultimately curb the migration of Mexicans to the U.S., but they did make it far more difficult for Mexicans and other Latin Americans to migrate legally. In this context, barriers to lawful immigration have produced unauthorized migration by “illegalizing” long-standing patterns of migration at a time when workers needed them most.

Politicians and pundits who attribute unauthorized migration to migrants’ “law-breaking” alone disconnect migration decisions from the complex social, economic, and political processes in which those decisions take place. This reduction is not merely overly simplistic, it also distorts the relations of power that shape a person’s status in society, renders law invisible and unassailable, and legitimizes inequality by dismissing “lawbreakers’” claims to resources and rights.

An attention to processes that “illegalize” migration, as Nicholas De Genova (2002, 2005) argues, illuminates the role of immigration policy in creating both legality and illegality. Rather than assuming “the law” as a given, then, we can explore policy-making as a dynamic cultural process that is deeply embedded in broader sociopolitical and economic contexts.

RA: At the end of your book Labor and Legality, you explain that undocumented labor isn’t sought after because it’s cheap, but instead because of its “inherent powerlessness”. What does this tell us about the realities of immigration here in the US? Why isn’t this issue of powerlessness a more dominant theme in the ongoing national immigration debate?

RGM: The undocumented busboys who I profile in Labor and Legality are not particularly low-paid relative to other working-class men in the neighborhood, a fact that intrigued me when I did the research. They are also not unique in this respect: A 2002 study by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) found that, while undocumented workers in Chicago earn less than their documented counterparts, most earn above the minimum wage and some even earn middle-class incomes. This appears to contradict the truism that employers favor undocumented workers for certain jobs because they can pay them less than lawful residents or U.S. citizens, and it begs the question: why do employers hire, and even prefer, undocumented workers when there are U.S. citizens who will do the work?

The short answer is that the price of labor is not determined by wages alone. Undocumented workers are more likely than documented workers to be victims of wage theft, denied workman’s compensation claims, and to work in jobs that are seasonal, socially degraded, or otherwise insecure. Lack of documents truncates their occupational mobility, while ineligibility for programs like FAFSA, unemployment benefits, welfare assistance, Medicare, and social security makes them especially dependent upon work. Together, these constraints combine to funnel and keep undocumented people in jobs that U.S. citizens are likely to refuse if they have better options. Of course, most U.S. citizens do not have unfettered access to resources or opportunities, and probationers, parolees, welfare-to-work program participants, guest workers, and lawful immigrants, among others, share some of the vulnerabilities that plague undocumented workers.

Not coincidentally, wages and workplace protections increase for undocumented workers who are members of labor unions. This is an important point, because undocumented workers are often portrayed as “unorganizable,” or powerless to the point that they are either unable or unwilling to join workers’ collectives. This portrayal is belied by the participation of undocumented workers in labor struggles in Chicago, L.A., and elsewhere. Indeed, if I were writing Labor and Legality today, I would not describe undocumented workers as “powerless,” but rather “disempowered,” an important distinction that leaves room for the capacity of people, documented and not, to influence the conditions under which they live and work.

Part II of the interview is here.