"Deportee" and dehumanization

When Woodie Guthrie wrote the poem that eventually became the song "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"), he was referring to a tragic plane crash where, in addition to the pilot and three crew members whose names were listed in the papers, twenty-eight Mexican nationals (27 men and one woman) who were being flown back to Mexico also died. This was during the time of the Bracero Program, a sort of guest worker program which let Mexican agricultural workers (braceros) come to work in the United States during a labor shortage in the U.S. Then as now, there were many workers who came outside the confines of the Bracero Program, usually at the behest of those who were hiring them who would rather have an undocumented workforce than one they had to pay under contractual terms. The song mentions that, "They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border / To pay all their money to wade back again," in reference to the practice of "drying out the wetbacks" (seriously, that's what they called it), where immigration authorities would take undocumented workers to the border, have them place a foot back in Mexican soil, and point them to the Border Patrol to pay to sign back up under the Bracero Program and get them back to work. The plane was taking them to a border town so that they could do just that when it crashed, killing everyone on board.


Woodie Guthrie expressed outrage at the fact that newspapers did not report the names of the undocumented Mexican nationals (he gives them symbolic names in the song). Whether this was due to mere callousness or if the papers really and truly could not obtain information about their identities is not a question for which I can find a straight answer. It is clear, however, that many of the attitudes taken toward the Mexican workers in 1948 carry through today in the debate over Mexico-U.S. migration.


"They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves." The vast majority of undocumented individuals are not criminals, although they sure as heck are treated like it. It's all too easy to think of "illegal aliens" as amorphous, faceless beings, and that's exactly why the terminology is problematic. I'm going to copy and paste from an earlier entry because I can't be arsed to re-word this argument:


The question of calling people who enter the United States without authorization or overstay their visas "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants" or simply "illegals" versus "undocumented immigrants" is not just an issue of semantics or trying to be PC. Undocumented and unauthorized are not perfect terms, but they at least acknowledge that the nature of the imposed status is whether or not they have papers or formal authorization to be in a particular place. The word alien simply means non-citizen, but the connotation of the word is dehumanizing because it conjures up images of something downright otherworldly. Illegal alien is a term used by the INS to describe immigrants who have been convicted of felonies; it is not a blanket term for anyone residing in the country without authorization. Illegal immigrant is a relatively mainstream term, unfortunately, but it still conjures up images of criminality when immigration is a civil, not criminal, issue (although the Arizona law has changed that, which is a problem in and of itself). Of course, when "illegal" modifies the word "immigrant," at least then the main descriptor is immigrant, maintaining some semblance of the personhood of the individual(s) being described. "Illegal" as a noun, by contrast, completely dehumanizes them and implies that the very nature of the person is their "illegality." 


What would happen if we stopped seeing undocumented immigrants – or economic refugees, or unauthorized residents, or whatever you wish to call them – as collectivities and started seeing them first and foremost as human beings? To recognize that their nature is not that of a worker, or an immigrant, or a deportee, but as aperson? To remember that every single one of these people, whether they come from Mexico or Guatemala or Laos or China or Haiti or Ghana or Senegal, is a unique person, with their own story, their own set of loved ones, their own individuality?


Maybe it would be easier to give a damn and to treat them with a little bit more respect.


And maybe once we recognize their humanity, and listen to their stories, putting them in global context, we could begin to recognize that the people who are disparagingly called "illegals" aren't the bad guys in the immigration debate.