Abstract
An estimated 11.3 million people reside in the United States without legal authorization to do so. For those documented activists among us (myself included) who have made reforming the country’s current broken immigration system a major focus of our activism, trying to understand how undocumented status is legally constructed and administered is challenging to say the least. The good news is that the task has been made much easier with the recent publication of Professor Aviva Chomsky’s book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.
Chomsky is a historian and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University and the author of They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration. In her latest book, she attempts to build on her previous work by challenging the underlying assumptions that render the socially constructed classification of “undocumentedness” an unassailable fact, that is, that the undocumented are in some meaningful way different from the rest of us and therefore less deserving of basic civil and human rights. As she puts it in her introduction, her goal here is to “unveil the complex, inconsistent, and sometimes perverse nature of US immigration law that make some people illegal” (p. x).
Based on those terms, Chomsky exceeds her goal. She provides us with a cogent and detailed explanation of not only the legal complexities of the classification and its historical evolution but also its central place in the current economy. There is likely no better account of how a largely unregulated system for providing cheap, exploitable, and temporary farm labor from Mexico came to be a federally administered apartheid regime designed to provide a permanent underclass of exploitable workers to a variety of industries and sectors. Her review of the legislation and border enforcement policies that created this underclass, which now includes millions of families with children, is an extremely accessible distillation of a hundred plus years of U.S. immigration history. And the picture she draws of the nonphysical border that circumscribes the lives of the undocumented is sharply and compellingly drawn. This book is ideal for university, union, and community-based educators hoping to explain to their students why a reframing of the current debate around immigration reform is so urgently needed.
If Undocumented has a shortcoming, it is in the chapter titled “Solutions,” where Chomsky thoroughly derides every previous effort to ameliorate the present situation. For the most part, her criticisms are fair assessments of the profound downsides to every effort at reform thus far. But arguably, she goes too far when she states that DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), President Obama’s 2012 executive order providing work authorization and temporary relief from deportation for hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth, “invited even more pernicious racism against those it left out” (p. 190). The same criticism could be applied to President Obama’s most recent executive action expanding DACA and creating a similar measure for the undocumented parents of children with legal status called DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents). Her critique that any type of reform that does not apply to all of the undocumented is intrinsically discriminatory suggests that anything short of amnesty for all and an open border policy is counterproductive. That said, she nonetheless appears to embrace what has come to be called the “cultural strategy,” that is, to continue to pursue measures that offer some degree of relief, like DACA and DAPA, while also challenging the underlying nationalist and racist beliefs perpetuated by even these so-called “pro-immigrant” measures. As she notes, it is the approach that has been embraced by the new generation of undocumented youth (many of them DACA recipients). The rest of us in the movement for immigrant rights might do well to follow their lead, and certainly, Undocumented has armed us with some compelling arguments to carry the strategy out.