On immigration hope

We will not be too dismissive of Sid Kani’s veiled assault on Rabby Syed’s actuations (flawed and lying is the charge plus the almost libelous aside that Rabby lives off his movement moneys for plane tickets) to the ST Letters to the Editor (May 22) with a side Doromal kick and assume that Sid sees something Rabby doesn’t. Kani’s main subject is the status of CNMI contract workers organized as the United Workers Movement and how they are being made to hope for something they could not possibly achieve.

Wendy and Rabby are grown up folks who need not respond in kind to Sid’s diatribe. We will, however, grant Kani’s perspective, albeit receiving it more as one taken from a looking thought a peephole, rather than from a normal regular lens.

The historical perspective on the immigration laws of the United States is, at best, checkered. After the 13 colonies told King George to stuff his “taxation without representation,” the Atlantic seaboard practiced an open-door policy for anyone who booked the transatlantic passage, even allowing West Africans to be brought in, though chained as commodity to be traded as slave labor in the plantations. Meanwhile, the new immigrants decided to redefine their native hosts’ welcome by turning the tables around, treating the residents as the aliens rather than the indigenes.

When eastern European Jews and Mediterranean Europe, along with the poor, famished and Roman Catholic Irish, started showing up, the issue of controlling immigration came to the fore. Meanwhile, Pacific coast labor depended on guys being shanghaied but barring their female counterpart from migrating, culminating in the odious Seclusion Act of 1882 targeting Chinese from further legal entry into the sovereign domain.

As late as World War II, the country incarcerated the Japanese but kept the Germans relatively unhampered. Earl Warren help pen the laws versus the Japanese; on the other side of remorse, he would make the Warren court receptive to the Civil Rights Act.

It took another century from 1776 for the West African folks enslaved in the farms to bring out of the confines of their patronized we-shall-overcome groups their human and civil rights, already enshrined but ignored in the nation’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This increased the underground rail traffic of West African descendants from South to North. It will take another century before the legal structures provide juridical redress on those rights.

We will not belabor the fact that U.S. citizenship to the CNMI is rooted on the need of the islands’ military strategic location. Immigration laws in the United States were not meant to define the character of the country’s population as to exclude certain races.

Meanwhile, with the rapid globalization of the economy, the exodus of investments into cheap labor locations, or where it is cheaper to bring in the migrant workers to do menial labor in the industrialized countries, immigration takes in a different coloration. Contract labor is an entry category with the unspoken assumption that those peons of labor will only enjoy wage-earning rights, but are not be treated their full humanity!

America’s aerospace enterprises brought us the unifying and liberating image of the earthrise, the new mythological symbol that announced the coming of a new era. Many might have seen this coming, and JFK certainly made it his mandate to enable the United States to be at the cutting edge of the exploration of outer space, but it was the picture of the “blue planet” from the Apollo efforts, fragile and singular without traces of the imaginary political boundaries we drew on its geography that capture the imagination of some of us.

If we live in a new global village, what does immigration across imaginary borders (separation of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia was occasioned by the conflict between Spain, the Brits and the Dutch) mean? It is a live issue not just in the United States but every locality across the world.

I have been a U.S. citizen longer than the majority of those in the CNMI but I had been told more often than I care to remember to return to the country where I came from. In fact, the sole advice given to me prior to traveling to Saipan was not to wear any attire indicating native Philippine dress!

At a time when the processes of supporting life (economic), organizing decision-making structures (political), and appropriating the enabling symbols that affirms our common humanity (culture), have become a universal process rather than just the parochial task of some countries, then immigration is indeed more than just a legal conundrum. I thank the Chinese opportunists who tried to sneak into Guam so the law can be made clear that going there from Saipan does not traverse international waters! We need more efforts to keep clarifying sacred laws!

I do not know Sid Kani but I have had many occasions to sweat out a stride with Rabby Syed, and if hope is what is being received from his indefatigable efforts, then let there be more. To be sure, the legal strictures are not to be ignored nor taken for granted, but immigration is no longer just a political issue. It has become a human rights issue.

Can’t buy Syed his walking shoes but on his movemental efforts, I will fling hard and with firm support shoemaker Nike’s slogan: Just do it! Come what may, the Force is with you!