When I began my
work with the Feerick Center for Social Justice, for the Unaccompanied
Immigrant Children Project, the phenomenon of children arriving into the United
States to reunite with their families was simply an increasing trend that evaded direct media attention. However, two weeks into my internship, a wave of
news relating to the Unaccompanied Immigrant Children project started to come
in as a rising amount of children coming to the United States unaccompanied increased
significantly. Over time, the most recent unaccompanied immigrant children
migration began to take on a name in the media – it was being called “the
surge” and there was a news article, op-ed piece, and short interview about it
from media outlets daily. With that began a battle to represent reality, with
the truth somewhat hidden within a sea of water puns in which I find myself
participating. Characterization in some way creates the character itself,
somewhat similar but significantly different from the real thing. Words formed
the core of the reality that was being portrayed. As an advocate and student, I
feel compelled to caution readers and remind myself about the power of words.
Any keen
observer could probably tell you that humans have limitations. We cannot be
everywhere at once and cannot see everything at once. We have multiple senses
but we tend to neglect them save for the one or two that our brains favor. In
light of these physical limitations, we have built artificial tools to try and extend
our grasp over reality. Words are probably one of the oldest of the artificial
tools that continues to be so prominent. Their functionality comes from an
assumed but unfounded understanding between people that when a word or
utterance is used to convey an idea, then the use of the same word or utterance
should convey the same or similar idea when used at some other time. Of course,
it should not take anyone a semester’s worth of Contract Law to realize that
the assumed understanding of which I speak is far from the reality (but maybe
it does! And it took decades for contract law and formalists to even slightly
admit that such bright-line rules as the “four corners” rule may be somewhat
unhelpful). Words are not necessarily just benign mediums for communication and
the conveyance of ideas. They can be more like cannonballs fired from one
populace to another in an effort to beat down a certain type of reality into a
targeted populace and wipe out other points of view in the process.
Furthermore,
any student of social science could probably tell you that the most frequent
losers of any cultural shift and war on words are the weakest groups. In a
battle where Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, or Pro- and
Anti- Interests Groups are drawing lines, it is quite likely that the group who
has to suffer through the imposition of such pseudo-realities and descriptions is
the migrants themselves. Their stories are filtered through interviews, their
lives documented and narrated through snippets and the lenses of other people,
their motivations are described by people who have more control over the
expression of their own motivations. Yet again, I am reminded of the centrality
of participation in a framework that respects humans as having universal, unassailable,
and inalienable rights owed to them regardless of their age, nationality, or
migration status.
Yet, as
dangerous as the use of words have the potential to be, their functionality
endures because we have not yet found an equally creative solution to the
problem of communication. Without words and language, and some form of
standardization of them, then this blog post would make even less sense to you
and to me. I wuold be iroinaclly craeting pcitogarphs deiovd of maineng foryuor veiiwng dsiplaeusre.
Language and
words are so central to the work that the Feerick Center does. My current
assignment is to write a legal framework memo. As I plowed through dozens of
cases in New York regarding Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, I became
“familiar” with the stories of several children from China, India, Honduras,
Ecuador, and Guatemala, simply because I could imagine that a set of images on
my screen could represent certain ideas weaved into a story about someone
else’s life. The dissemination of stories through written media is also
important in human rights advocacy. In the Bringing Human Rights Home Network
conference, the group discussed submitting shadow reports to the United
Nations. Shadow reports are reports submitted by civil society instead of
government on behalf of the country. They are often submitted in the context of
reviews for human rights treaties to which a particular country is a signatory –
the United States is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, and the
Convention against Torture. Because the reviewers do not get to experience
firsthand the experiences of people from a particular country, the data in the
shadow reports and the testimony of affected people themselves becomes the
basis from which they understand that part of the world. Additionally,
advocates in the United States use these same reports and the review process to
be able to affect better human rights policy in the context of the review. In
the practice of advocacy, the written word often becomes the world view by
which decisions are made, because it is otherwise impossible to experience
firsthand.
In the context of human rights advocacy, labels could serve to dehumanize
a particular group, and make it less sensible that they should have universal
and inalienable rights. The terms “illegal” or “illegal alien” are
dehumanizing. Generally, talk of aliens is about imaginary beings from the sky,
yet we preserve such terminology for humans like us simply because of their
birth or origin outside of our arbitrarily defined borders. The word “illegal”
attempts to connote the same notion of inhumanity. A human being cannot be
illegal. We can commit acts outside the provision of the law, which may be
illegal. Even if we did, we are guaranteed rights to protect us from abusive
process. The term illegal seems superfluous upon inspection, and unhelpful as a
description of reality. Thus, advocates often use the words “undocumented” or
“irregular” immigrants to be more accurate.
The term “undocumented” is not just a replacement for the word
“illegal” but it is an attempt to increase accuracy. The use of the term
“undocumented” or “irregular” immigrant is only accurate in a way that highlights
the responsibility of our governments to uphold the rights of all people. An
irregular migrant could be a person who found farm work in the United States,
yet that person could end up completely undefended by the laws as soon as a
farm owner decides to fire them. In this example, the person did nothing “alien”
or “illegal” at all, yet such labels might allow us to presume without further
inquiry. The point is also not to replace one label with another but to make
the story as accurate as possible. The terms “undocumented” and “irregular” are
equally criticized. The word “undocumented” presumes that only some forms of
documentation are valid. Most migrants carry passports and other documents from
their country of origin, and may even have driver’s licenses and other equally
valid documents in the country of residence, but the veracity of such a
situation may be invalidated by the use of a single word. Similarly, though
irregularities in residence occur because of uneven migration policies from
state sovereigns, this does not make the migrant “irregular.”
Stories of undocumented immigrants assume often that they are a
surge of people coming in to take a slice out of the “American pie.” What tends
to be obfuscated is that the family unit is central to the life of a person,
and that the American system does not have a proper way to reunify families. We
accept the support of our immigrants and yet we are currently refusing to
recognize their contributions by restricting their status, and consequently
their ability to achieve more for themselves. Furthermore, we have restricted
their ability to see their children. Our government can justify placing
restrictions on access by the happenstance of how a person comes to be part of
the United States because the modern nation-state system presumes a model of a
person that is somehow more deserving of rights than others – the citizens.
Yet, regardless of our national origin or migration status, we
are still humans and children that possess inalienable and universal rights.
