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Catch-All/Student Discussion Questions

De Nadie Reflection

Over the summer I was an intern at the Camden Center for Law and Social Justice, a non-profit law firm that does domestic violence and immigration work. I spent a lot of my time doing country condition research on the factors that drive immigration and translating client interviews. The film hit very close to home with me because these were situations I was familiar with. I have met dozens of people who made that same crossing and suffered through the same struggles.

My time at the Camden Center left me highly familiar with the violence and poverty that causes people to flee their homes. Much of my research focused on the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, the gangs responsible for terrorizing migrants on the way up to the border. Since most of our clients were interested in claiming asylum, I encountered a lot of stories about the havoc these gangs would wreak in the central American countries where their presence was strongest. 

The story Maria told of a girl getting raped, shot, and having her breasts cut off was not uncommon at all. I had clients who were familiar with a gang in their home town murdering two parents who could not pay their extortion fees and leaving their infant child lying in his parent’s blood. 

I had a client whose sister was tortured and murdered by a gang who threatened to do the same to her whole family. These gangs are responsible for massive amounts of child rape, extortion, murder, torture, femicide and any other violent crime one could possibly think of. One thing the film taught me was just how much this abuse continues as people travel up to the border. 

I have my doubts that immigration is a net positive for the countries receiving and for the countries people are leaving. I don’t know if helping people to get out of Honduras makes Honduras better, or even if helping people leave Denmark makes Denmark better. But my experiences have taught me something that the film really reinforced for me. The major point that economic or nationalistic arguments about immigration frequently miss is that immigrating to the U.S is by far the best option for the immigrants themselves in almost all cases. Whether that creates a moral burden for our country to accept them or not is debatable, but what is undeniable is that every one of my clients and all of the people from the movie would have marginally better lives if they lived in the United States. 

Every political party and ideology has a way to respond to this notion, but I would encourage especially those on the right to keep this in mind. I’m not saying that they should change their policy preferences after recognizing this fact. (I may agree with most if not all of their positions) I simply believe that any analysis of immigration as an issue, especially an analysis of immigration from countries where organized crime, judicial ineffectiveness, corruption, lack of security, poverty, and so on make living there hell for the average citizen should include a consideration of the realities on the ground for those who desire to immigrate. 

Categories
Catch-All/Student Discussion Questions

Insight into Lenon’s Utopia

Over the summer I interned at a law firm that handing immigration law. The firm was pro-bono, so we did not see any of the business executives or highly educated immigrant’s visas. A considerable amount of our cases were with uneducated people who had been poor in their home country and are now poor in our country. Many times they were completely undocumented and had scheduled consultations to see if there was any provision in the law that could get them ‘papers.’

I am semi-fluent in Spanish so I spent a lot of time translating first-time client consultations. It was through this experience that I truly saw the way the bureaucracy we were discussing in class today affects immigrants coming from developing “southern” countries. There were many times we had clients who did not understand the concept of what a court was. We had clients who had thrown away the paperwork given to them by ICE officers with their trial date because they did not think they were that important. Many of them had come from poor rural areas of central or South America and had a level of inexperience with bureaucracy that I think as modern-day Americans we struggle to comprehend. There was even a consultation I translated for in which a client thought our office was the immigration court. 

Even in Lenon’s utopia, there would need to be at least some sort of government bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on, and even that would be an impediment to migrants with extreme inexperience with bureaucracy. My summer experience gives credence to the idea that the “trillion-dollar bills” on the sidewalk can not just be picked up for free. The costs to not only get low educated migrants from the south through our bureaucracy and then integrate them to work within our domestic bureaucracy would be astronomical, regardless of whether the government or private citizens spearheaded the effort.