After three years of intense anti-immigrant bashing coming from the Trump administration, few of us need to be reminded that the metaphors we use when describing people and events are not neutral or “just words.”
The undocumented-immigrant-as-invader metaphor, for example, clearly invites violence. (What do you with invaders? You don’t give them soup and a blanket. You shoot them.) Progressives are increasingly calling out such loaded language, as the cries of “political correctness gone amok” coming from the other side are slowly losing their oomph.
But there is one related metaphor that so appeals to the Americans’ respect for propriety — and property — that many self-described “moderates” and “liberals” are still hesitant to jettison: the country-as-house metaphor. The refrain goes like this: “Sure, we should welcome immigrants, but only those who come in legally. After all, you don’t welcome uninvited guests into your house, do you?” My answer to that: “No, I don’t. But America is not a house.”
Before I count the ways in which this metaphor fails, I need to point out that this particular column does not discuss the need for more immigration or for the legalization of the status of the 10.7 million undocumented immigrants currently living in America.
What it does do is urge the readers to resist the temptation of thinking about America as its citizens’ home-castle, and of border-crossing as an offense akin to home invasion.
Charge No. 1: Undocumented immigrants are not a threat. Home invaders are. When a stranger enters your house, it’s reasonable for you to think that it’s either a mistake or he doesn’t mean you well.
When an undocumented immigrant enters the U.S., it’s most likely not a mistake, nor does he mean Americans ill. We know this because we know undocumented immigration does not, in fact, come with increased rates of crime.
When a stranger moves into your house, he violates your intimacy and uses your stuff. When an undocumented immigrant comes into the U.S., he doesn’t violate the citizens’ intimacy, and no, he isn’t likely to use their “stuff.”
The only social services that undocumented immigrants can use are emergency health care and schooling for children. According to Professor Gerald Friedman of UMass Amherst, there’s no doubt that the economy gains from the presence of immigrants of all types. “The overall consensus (of economists) is that upper-income workers and skilled labor definitely do benefit from immigrants,” he says. “Even most lower-skilled, less-educated workers benefit. Some may lose, but even (for) those who maybe lose, the losses are very small.”
The Homestead Act of 1862, which granted land in the Western territories to individuals who paid a little money and “improved the land,” would have recognized the majority of today’s undocumented immigrants as worthy of ownership.
A Guatemalan teenager who crosses the border illegally and then goes on to New York where he’ll live with his aunt and work in a restaurant is not the analogue of an intruder who takes up residence on my couch. The threat of harm is a crucial element of the “home invasion” metaphor. Without it, the metaphor fails.
Charge No. 2: Your house is private property and does not have international asylum agreements.
“There are all sorts of people out in the country whom I don’t necessarily want to invite to my home. But I buy sandwiches from people. I use services provided by all sorts of people whom I may not want in my house,” Friedman points out. “When it comes to whom we want in the general public, we have economic interests (and) we have cultural interests.”
And, as far as the law is concerned, having crossed the border illegally does not disqualify one from applying for asylum.
Charge No. 3: Your house does not have millions of owners with millions of priorities and ideologies. America does. And a sizable majority of America’s “owners” favor granting legal status to the undocumented immigrants already here — that is, welcoming them into the “house” with equal rights.
Charge No. 4: Your household doesn’t owe anything to strangers (hopefully). America does.
“If we really want to understand why people are arriving to the southern border, we need to be really aware of U.S. foreign policy for the last 50, 60 years, if not more, ” says Javier Luengo-Garrido, coordinator of ACLU’s Immigrant Protection Project in Massachusetts.
At all stages of their rise, reign and demise, the dictatorships that the U.S. funded and trained in Central and South America swelled the ranks of the dispossessed, many of whom later found themselves on the road to the North.
Extrapolating from the family to the nation, and from the home to the country, may seem like a common-sense move. But it’s a rhetorical effort that guides our thinking in ways that needlessly victimize people who have already suffered too much.
Your country is not a house. Your country is just that — a country. And a country’s rules depend on its history, its economy, its culture, and its laws, which include not only visa regimes and border-crossing procedures, but also asylum and amnesty.
Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of Journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration and incarceration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu.