Global Times | By Rong Xiaoqing | 15 July 2010

Reality of racism underlies immigration debate

Billboard for Burson's The Human Race Machine

This at least is the picture generated by New York-based artist Nancy Burson’s human race machine, a computerized device that blends images of hundreds of thousands of people from different racial groups who have been photographed by the machine since it was created in 1999.

But that is only art.

In reality, immigrants are not unified in appearance or language, culture, religion or ideas, and harmony is often wishful thinking. And even in the immigration debate there is often discord.

The newly minted immigration law in Arizona, which allows the police to check the documents of anyone they think might be illegal immigrants and defines illegal immigration as a crime, has exacerbated the issue.

Protests against the law have been building around the country amid fears that it will catch on elsewhere and give a green light to racial profiling.

But surveys show that more than 60 percent of Americans support the Arizona law, and 50 percent of them are against the federal government’s legal action. Around $700,000 has been donated by Americans to help Arizona fight the legal battle.

Among the supporters of the Arizona law, which is labeled as anti-immigrant by liberal human rights activists, are many immigrants themselves. These are people who are consciously aware of one major arbitrary difference between them and those that the law intends to hold accountable – their immigration status.

In fact, there has long been tension between immigrants who have proper visas to live or work in the country and those who don’t.

The former blame the latter for crowded classrooms, backlogged immigration applications and the tarnished image of immigrants. They stand with Arizona, hoping that tougher laws will reduce the number of illegal immigrants and lead to a better future for the legal ones.

These differences within the immigrant community are rarely acknowledged in the mainstream debate.

But sometimes laws that are meant to control immigration can become weapons of a sinister kind.

One example is the employer sanction provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act that the US Congress passed in 1986, which, for the first time, held employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants.

While its success or otherwise in reducing illegal hiring is still in question, it has been found to trigger recruitment discrimination against anyone who has a foreign look or accent, according to a report released by the General Accountability Office in 1990.

My personal experience last week as a minority journalist covering a rally in mid-Manhattan that called for Major League Baseball to boycott Arizona also made me wonder if immigrants should be divided on the question.

Beside the main rally of people opposing the policy in Arizona was a small, mostly-white group of people who supported the state government. A spokeswoman had been enthusiastically explaining its position to mainstream media reporters until I approached to ask her to spell her name for me.

Despite my press badge she warily asked me “why?” And when she learned I was trying to do a balanced story that would quote her for a Chinese newspaper, she said, “Oh, so you are going to translate this into Chinese, right? No thanks!” And when I tried to interview another member of her group, this lady was also not interested. “You support them, don’t you?” She said, pointing to the other side.

This might be a wake-up call for my fellow legal immigrants who are dreaming of a more welcoming America after we get rid of the illegals.

We may think we live in a world of subtlety and nuance but sometimes, whether we like it or not, it really does come down to right against wrong and us against them.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@ hotmail.com

Source: GT