Immigrants

It was 1993. He was barely 12 when Jose Antonio Vargas’ mother took him to the Manila International Airport, handed him to an “uncle” that he was meeting for the first time, gave him a jacket for the cold, an envelope of spurious travel documents, and bid him farewell to the San Francisco Bay area to live with Lolo and Lola (grannies).

Vargas, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and celebrated author, in a June 22 NY Times’ article this past week published his “confession” in My Life as an undocumented immigrant.

However we spin historical facts, U.S. immigration was designed to regulate non-Caucasian entry from Europe, particularly against the Semitic and Greco-Roman folk, as well as the poor (the Irish, for example). It became its current legal form vis-a-vis the feared Chinese “Yellow Fever” of the 1900s, and later, honed by prejudices against the Koreans, Japanese, and Filipinos recruited to work the sugarcane farms. Now it targets the Latinos from Centro and Sud America, and not surprisingly, ardent Filipinos who felt disenfranchised when the former U.S. Commonwealth limped into independence in the aftermath of WWII devastation.

The boldness of Vargas and the alleged undocumented immigrants in the U.S., 40 percent allegedly of Philippine descent second only to central Americans, points to attempts by many to hang on to Uncle Sam’s coat after its fateful imperial adventures in Spain’s western islands, the Panama canal, and incursions into the affairs of Indochina, and select states in Central America and the Caribbean (Guatemala and Haiti comes to mind).

We recall our own journey as a documented immigrant. Married to a citizen of German-Anglo-Gaelic descent, I briefly sojourned from the U.S. mainland to Pea Eye in ’70 and returned to a third-degree welcome in Seattle. It was deemed unusual for someone married to an American for more than a year to not avail of the immigrant status. I kept a student visa.

I brought my bride to settle in the Philippines two years later in the time for Marcos to change the governance’s legal base. Having been in the parliament of the streets in the U.S. during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War era, we took exception to central government muzzling popular dissent, so we found ourselves back in midwest USA.

In a trip to Brownsville, Texas, I prevailed on my colleagues to cross into Matamoros for some tacos and tamales. In a business suit, it took me six hours to traverse 20 meters of the border on our return. I fitted the profile of a Filipino trying to sneak into the country from Mexico.

The final straw came in Honolulu when my family bearing two U.S., one Canadian, and a Philippine passport strolled through INS. I was accused of bringing an unidentified alien (my 2-year-old Canadien) into the country, and was told to appear for a federal hearing in Chicago where my wife and I were headed. Mom and Pop lived in Hawaii so they got the grandkids for the summer.

“You evidently have a very low regard for U.S. federal laws,” the Chicago officer intoned when I showed up sans alleged illegal infant, and I do not know what my USCIS record looks like but a few years later in Honolulu, I was detained longer than usual. For eight years, I qualified to be a citizen but didn’t avail of the privilege and that earned a close scrutiny of my papers. Serendipitously, the Manila U.S. Peace Corps engaged my training services and revealed that I would get better pay if I carried the coveted blue book. In four weeks, I raised my hand in Guam, a good three years before Reagan granted blanket citizenship to residents of the Northern Marianas Islands.

I do not wish to belabor the streak of racism that accompanied my travail but with erstwhile MHS history teacher Franklin Keiper living in immigration-challenged Arizona recently calling the Portuguese and Spaniards “brown” makes one wonder whether we might question his competency to teach history to our young. Magellan’s entourage is too pale-faced to meld with the tanned North African Semites that to call them brown insults the Indo-Malay race! Race is not an inconsiderable factor in immigration cases; so does economic class.

Anyway, our personal journey is a walk in the park compared to Vargas’ almost 20 years undercover from INS/USCIS’ eyes, but today’s question is no longer about national boundaries. A Jolo friend once said that his family traded with cousins in Sandakan for centuries before European contact and the only reason Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are separate was that the British, Dutch and Spaniards kept them that way.

A Ghanaian student asked in Social Economy class why the world still insists on visas when national economies are evidently no longer functional, are more illusion in spite of separate currencies, and keeping watch of national boundaries a waste of resource since the colonial bounds are artificial anyway. “Who owns the Earth anyway?” she asks. Nkrumah is gone and he is here! Europe’s empires are gone, the American one is rapidly disintegrating. Time to redefine the nature of the global village. We’ll include enormous defense budgets for consideration, too. But we’ll take one step at a time.

France worries about Gypsies, Germany, Turks. The Thais and Khmers volley lead, and Pinoys and wetbacks bedevil border guards. China just extended social security coverage to its green card holders. The world yins and yangs. There’s gotta be progress in there somewhere, isn’t there?

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